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Great Tools For Analyzing The Impact Of Your WordPress SEO

This is the final part of An Essential Guide To WordPress SEO – we’ve covered a wide range of different areas including how to research great keyphrases, how to get high-quality backlinks, specific tips for optimizing your blog, managing duplicate content, the best SEO plugins to install, and a number of different approaches for promoting your site.

In this final part I want to focus on another important element of SEO – measuring and tracking the effectiveness of the optimization work you’ve carried out. It’s essential that you keep a close eye on this so you can identify what’s getting the best results and what’s having little influence.

Doing this will allow you to refine your SEO focus and make sure that you’re not wasting time on things that aren’t working. There are lots of plugins and tools for WordPress that can help you track the traffic that is coming to your site – in fact, there are so many it can be difficult filtering out the best ones.

In this post I’ll cover a range of the top plugins that you might want to consider installing – I’ll also highlight a couple of other useful tools that can provide you with lots of useful feedback about how well your optimization strategies are working.

What Do You Need From A Statistical Tool?

All of the tools outlined in this post have some unique features that allow you to track your site’s visitors – however, there are some core things that you require from all statistical tools when using them for SEO purposes. This obviously includes tracking the number of people who visit your site, but there are a number of other important things to monitor and analyze as well.

For instance, it’s important to know about how much of your traffic is coming specifically from the search engines (as opposed to other sources) and which keyphrases people are using to find your site. This is useful for a couple of reasons – obviously because it allows you to see whether you’re getting traffic for the keywords you’ve optimized for, but also for identifying other keyphrases you can target.

So, for example, you may find that you’re getting a lot of traffic for a search phrase you were unaware of and haven’t optimized for – if this is the case, it might be worth putting up a page based around that phrase to help consolidate and possibly increase the amount of traffic you receive.

Being able to track your busiest days can also be useful when thinking about when to submit your best content. If you find that you typically get very little traffic at the weekends compared to week days, it makes no sense to publish your best content over the weekend.

Knowing this can also be important when promoting your content via social media as discussed in part seven – you ideally want to be doing this promotion on your busiest days, not on the quieter ones.

WordPress Stats Plugins

Below is a list of some of the best WordPress stats plugins around – all include the core things you need to monitor the impact of your site’s optimization and will do a good job of monitoring traffic to your site. They also allow you to do all of this from within your Admin panel without the use of any external software which is very handy!

WordPress.com Stats

This is the “official” stats plugin developed by the company behind WordPress (Automattic) that allows you to track all the essential things you need via a relatively simple interface. Installing this plugin is similar to the installation for Akismet – you’ll need to use your API key to set it up, but once this is done the plugin will start collecting data for you.

WassUp

A nice feature of WassUp is the ability to track your visitors in real-time so you can see exactly how many people are viewing your site at any given time. However, whilst this is a nice feature, I’m not sure how useful it is from a productivity perspective – tracking your stats in real-time can become very addictive and you may find yourself constantly checking your traffic when you’ve got lots of other things to do

Analytics360

This is a plugin provided by MailChimp and might be a good choice if you use their software to manage your site’s mailing list. It still provides all the main features you’ll need to track visitors to your site, but it also allows you to see how your email campaigns impact upon your traffic. If you don’t currently do any form of emailing marketing it may better to go with one of the other plugins/tools.

CyStats

CyStats is another popular plugin you may want to take a look at – it provides you with lots of data including your traffic for the day/week/month/year, the sites that refer traffic to your site, your most read categories, 404 error requests (i.e. page not found errors), and much more!

WP-ShortStat

This is a very nice plugin that provides all the standard features you’ll need for analyzing your data – however, it can significantly add to the size of your WordPress database as it stores a lot of its data there. Check out this page if you find that this a problem for you.

Other Tools

Market Samurai

This isn’t a stats application in the sense that it allows you to monitor the traffic to your site, but it does have one very handy tool that’s ideal for SEO work. It’s called the Rank Tracker and what it essentially enables you to do is to add all the keyphrases you’re targeting and then track their positions in the major search engines. This may not sound like much, but it saves so much time – instead of spending lots of tedious time clicking through the search results to find where your site is ranked for lots of different keyphrases, you quickly get all the results stored in one convenient place.

Google Analytics

This is the main tool that I use – it provides you with so much data that you can track just about anything on your site. It’s not a plugin, so you’ll need to copy some JavaScript code into your site’s footer.php file. Once you’ve done this it will start collecting data – if you have several sites you can track them all under one account which is also very useful. A great tool – and it’s free!

Conclusion

So, that completes An Essential Guide To WordPress SEO – I hope you found it of some use and learned some new things that help you drive more traffic to your site. Please leave a comment if there’s anything else you’d like me to cover or if you have any questions about this topic. Also, if you enjoyed the course, I’d really appreciate it if you would be willing to Tweet, Digg, Stumble, or share it with others in any way you choose

Table of Contents

1. Introduction and Guide Overview
2. Researching Great Keywords To Help Drive Traffic
3. 10 Ways You Can Generate Quality Backlinks To Boost Your WordPress SEO
4. Ten Quick Power Tips To Drive More Visitors To Your WordPress Site
5. WordPress SEO Issues – Managing Duplicate Content Effectively
6. Top 8 Free WordPress SEO Plugins
7. 8 Tips For Promoting Your WordPress Site
8. Great Tools For Analyzing The Impact Of Your WordPress SEO