As a website owner, keeping track of your website’s traffic and search engine rankings is crucial to understand how your website is performing and make informed decisions to improve its online visibility. With so many tools and techniques available, it can be overwhelming to decide which ones to use.
In this article, we have compiled a list of 10 effective ways to track your website’s traffic and search engine rankings. From using Google Analytics and Google Search Console to leveraging social media platforms and conducting competitor analysis, these techniques offer a comprehensive approach to monitor your website’s performance and optimize your online presence. So, let’s explore these 10 ways and learn how to track your website’s traffic and search engine rankings like a pro.
Tracking your rankings in search engines is essential for blogging success.
After all, if you don’t know where you currently are, how will you reach your destination?
These tools will not only help your track your blog visitors, but some of them will also allow you to track what’s going on with your competitor’s rankings and your social network presence.
The SEMRush All-in-one Marketing Toolkit is our favorite tool for checking how much traffic a website gets.
Their Traffic Analytics tool offers some of the best market competitive research on the market, allowing you to get estimations of any website’s traffic.
#1 Google Analytics
OK I shall start with the one TOOL that I hope most of our readers are already familiar with: Google Analytics
There are several reasons why you should use Google Analytics to track your website’s traffic. Firstly, Google Analytics provides you with a comprehensive view of your website’s performance, including the number of visitors, page views, bounce rate, and more. This information can help you to understand how users engage with your website and identify areas where you can improve its performance.
Secondly, Google Analytics offers real-time data, which means you can monitor your website’s performance in real-time and make informed decisions to optimize its performance. You can also set up custom alerts to receive notifications when something important happens on your website, such as a sudden drop in traffic or an increase in bounce rate.
Thirdly, Google Analytics allows you to track your website’s traffic sources, including organic search, paid search, social media, and more. This information can help you to identify which channels are driving traffic to your website and adjust your marketing strategy accordingly.
Lastly, Google Analytics is a free tool, which means you can access its basic features without paying a cent. However, if you need more advanced features, you can upgrade to Google Analytics 360, which offers more comprehensive analytics and insights.
Overall, using Google Analytics to track your website’s traffic is essential for understanding your website’s performance, optimizing your marketing strategy, and making informed decisions to improve your online business.
#2 CrazyEgg – Heatmaps and A/B Testing
Ever wondered how your visitors are using your website?
CrazyEgg is a powerful tool that can help website owners to understand how users interact with their website and make informed decisions to improve its performance. Here are some benefits of using Crazy Egg:
1. Heatmaps: Crazy Egg provides you with heatmaps that show you where users click, how far they scroll, and which areas of your website are getting the most attention. This information can help you to optimize your website’s layout, content, and calls to action.
2. Recording: Crazy Egg’s recording feature allows you to watch how users interact with your website in real-time. This information can help you to understand how users navigate your website and identify areas where you can improve its usability.
3. A/B Testing: Crazy Egg allows you to conduct A/B tests to compare different versions of your website and see which one performs better. This information can help you to optimize your website’s design, content, and calls to action.
4. Insights: Crazy Egg provides you with valuable insights into your website’s performance, including the number of visitors, bounce rate, conversion rate, and more. This information can help you to understand how your website is performing and identify areas where you can improve its performance.
#3 Google Keyword Research Tool
I haven’t been using this tool much till recently when I have been working on SEO. What you do is you type your keyword of your post, for example, Web Hosting and it will give you all the other search terms people will be searching for. Now I take these terms and use them as tags and meta keywords to help me rank high in Google. It also lets me know which term will get the most traffic so that I know which one to use for my post title. Visit Site >>
#4 Bing Webmaster Tools
This tool is great, basically, to rank high in search engines you need lots of great links.
Find someone who is ranking higher than you in your niche, put their URL in the Yahoo Site Explorer and you can see all the sites that link to it.
Now go to these sites and negotiate advertising deals, link exchanges, and guest blog posts. Visit Site >>
#5 Tracker.ly marketing links
Wherever your links go, only Tracker.ly marketing links can brand your websites, plus short or secondary domains, domain redirects, & QR codes, all tracked together, with retargeting.
One thing that is really important as an affiliate, is knowing what converts. This tool shows me where my affiliates are getting clicked, so for example, I promote HostGator website hosting on my site and I want to know which page is converting the highest, this tool will tell me which page is giving me the most clicks.
Also, it will redirect your URL’s so instead of giving a long HostGator affiliate URL, I can have a URL such as IncomeDiary.com/hostgator. Click here for the website.
#6 Alexa
Although not very accurate for their traffic details, it is a very useful tool. For those who don’t know how Alexa works, it basically ranks every website in the world by the number of people who visit a site that are using the Alexa toolbar. Visit Site >>
#7 Quantcast
Great piece of software for those though are buying advertising space, this tool allows you to see who you typically reader is, where they live, how old they are, how much they earn a year, etc. Visit Site >>
#8 Matomo Analytics
Their claim is a bold one:
They claim to be the Google Analytics alternative that protects your data and your customers’ privacy. Matomo is a powerful web analytics platform that gives you 100% data ownership.
We have not used this tool ourselves, but reviews generally are very good. If data ownership is important to you this may be the service to use. Click here for the website
#9 Google Website Optimizer
This is one of the hottest pieces of software I’m using right now to test my site. It allows you to test different aspects of your website, for example, say you’re not sure if your sidebar is converting well, design a second sidebar and use Google Website Optimizer to test which one pulls the most clicks. Visit Site >>
#10 Website Grader
This tool basically allows you to learn everything about your site, how well it’s doing in the search engines, is it getting much traffic, how many social sites are linking to you.. etc. Visit Site >>
Tests You Should Try On Your Website
Increasing Affiliate Box Clicks
Go to your Google Analytics and pick one of your most visited pages, for me it was my Top 30 Earning Blogs post. I had a paragraph in it where I was promoting an affiliate product, I knew it wasn’t making me much money so I decided to run CrazyEgg on this blog post.
Over a couple of days, I saw that the affiliate links didn’t receive any clicks at all, I remember my friend told me using a stop sign really helps draw eyes to things. So using these two bits of information I tested different stop signs and ended up using a green sign to match the site. Adding this sign increased the clicks on affiliate links from 0 to 12 clicks a day. Admittedly not a lot of clicks but a lot more than what I had before, I now have rolled this out so that I use it at the bottom of every blog post because I used these tools and found it worked.
Finding Whats Converting Readers The Most
As an affiliate blogger, I need to know which page is making people take action.
It is essential that I can see which pages are getting the most clicks on affiliate links and then comparing them to other pages, can see what call of action is making the reader take action.
Related: The Best Keyword Research Tools For Ranking Your Blog or Website