How to monitor SEO performance for your Joomla! website

Monitoring SEO allows you to measure metrics that are important to your site’s success. Over time, you can see how changes in your SEO strategy affect your site traffic and gain insight into how you can improve performance. In this article, we’ll show you how to monitor SEO for Joomla.

Working with Google Analytics

This article introduces Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools to monitor the search engine optimization (SEO) performance of your Joomla! website. Google Analytics can gather a massive amount of data about how users interact with your site, and the several tools included make the data easier to understand and use.

Dashboards

A Dashboard harbours your most important reports and metrics in one place. Because you can add many related metrics to a dashboard, you can quickly get an overview of a single topic, such as site performance or visitors by region. In addition, dashboards are simple to read, customize, export, and share.

Segments

A segment is a subset of your site analytics data, such as visitors using a specific web browser or from a particular country. The three types of segments, users, sessions, and hits, allow you to see trends you may not see in a more extensive data set. For example, you may notice that visitors from Europe tend to make more purchases on Monday, and you can then use that information when developing your marketing campaigns. Google Analytics includes predefined segments that you can use as-is or customize by including or excluding metrics. You can also create from scratch, import, and share segments.

The Solutions Gallery is where you can import and share Analytics tools, like dashboards and segments.

Only configuration details are shared in the Solutions Gallery. Your personal information and Analytics data are not shared. When you import tools or reports from the Solutions Gallery, only the template is imported into your account, not the data from the person who created the tool or report.

You can share and import Dashboards, Custom Reports, Segments, Goals, and Custom Attribution Models in the Solutions Gallery.

Custom alerts

Create custom alerts that let you know when there are significant changes in traffic and usage patterns on your site. Alerts are applied to specific reports and can be for specific date ranges and alert conditions.

What to monitor

Choosing which metrics to monitor depends on the type of content you provide and what your goals are. For example, an eCommerce site will want to monitor different things than a movie review site. However, some metrics are helpful for many types of sites.

SEO performance

The SEO Performance Dashboard includes valuable data about how visitors find your site, including landing pages, traffic sources, and search engines used.

Site speed and server health

Site speed is the length of time it takes for a web page to display in a visitor’s web browser. Several factors affect page load times, and many of them, such as visitor location and equipment, are out of the site owner’s control. However, you can use tools like caching and compression to improve load times. Monitoring site speed before and after enabling these tools will let you know how effective they are. In addition, analytics includes a site performance dashboard that you can use and customize or create your own with any of the available performance widgets.

Conversion rate

At its simplest, a conversion is any action completed on your website. For example, submitting a form, buying a product, and reading an article could all be conversions. Analytics uses goals to represent conversions and measure how often users complete specific actions. Well-defined goals are critical for evaluating online businesses and marketing campaigns. Goals can be defined for specific page visits, the length of time a user stays on a page, the number of pages visited in a session, or events such as clicks and form submissions. You can even assign a monetary value to each goal.

Brand mentions

Setting up a Google Alert for your brand will notify you whenever your brand appears in Google Search. It may also be helpful to add alerts for specific product names, business partners, customers, and competitors.

404 Page Not Found errors

A 404 error occurs when a requested web page or URL is not found on the server. This can happen because a page that previously existed has been deleted or renamed or because of a typo in the URL. Google Webmaster Tools includes a helpful URL Errors report that shows how many 404 errors exist on your site and lets you mark them as fixed. Note that not all 404 errors need to be fixed. For example, if the page has been deleted and no replacement page exists, the 404 error is the correct response. However, if a typo causes the error or there is a replacement page on the site, you should correct the URL or create a permanent redirect to the new content.

You can also monitor 404 errors by creating a custom alert in Analytics.

More information

For more information about SEO and Joomla!, check out our article Free tools for managing your Joomla! SEO in the HostPapa knowledge base.

If you need help with your HostPapa account, please open a support ticket from your dashboard.

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