When you begin a new campaign you generally set up a number of metrics to gauge your progress; site traffic, conversions, and other key performance indicators. Normally you will research your competition, identify keywords of interest, create new content, and start in on your social media and link building initiatives. Stakeholders will also be issued periodic reports. There are a number of activities that must be coordinated and monitored.
We will give you some tips on how you can stay up-to-date with the crucial external and internal issues that way crop up while you are executing your campaigns.
The Availability Of Your Site
If your site goes down your online initiatives screech to a grinding halt. Both visitors and search engine crawlers are unable to access your site and you will lose both search engine rankings and customers. Consequently, it is imperative that you are notified if this occurs.
Since this is vital, many services exist that perform these monitoring functions, however, monitor.us and Pingdom have free options that may be suitable for smaller sites to obtain alerts via email if their site goes down.
In addition to email alerts it is often helpful to receive a text message notification as well when your site goes down and when it becomes accessible again.
Monitor Google Search Activity
You can monitor your organic and page search, product pages, mobile activity, international traffic, conversion decreases and increases and other parameters by setting up custom alerts in Google Analytics.
These alerts can be configured so that you receive email alerts any time one of your pre-set criteria is triggered. In order to receive these alerts via SMS, a label can be created in Gmail and a filter can be applied
After you have set a label for Google Analytics that is applied to emails automatically you can make use of IFTTT to have an SMS sent every time an email is received from Google Analytics.
Keyword And Brand Mentions
You can make use of Mention or Talk Walker to generate alerts for mentions of your important keywords, your brand and the brand of your competitors. This will help you to monitor your reputation online, and to find opportunities for link building. You can receive these alerts via an RSS feed or email. You can also configure Talk Walker so that you can receive SMS alerts.
New Links Pointing At Your Site Or Your Competitors Sites
You can remain updated with regard to links to your site and links to your competitors sites by using an operator in Moz Fresh Web Explorer called rd:. This will display new links to a domain and generate an alert via email. In your Gmail account you can create a label Moz Alerts and use IFTTT to generate an SMS message when these emails are generated.
You can create similar alerts utilising LinkRisk. LinkRisk permits you to integrate MajesticSEO, Ahrefs, and Google Webmaster Tools data. When it detects a new link, it will generate an email alert. You can use an IFTTT recipe to get an SMS from your Gmail account as well.
Website Changes In Targeted Sites
You can use Versionista to detect changes in pages on your site and your competition's sites. From descriptions and titles to product prices, HTML snippets, and links you can select the areas of pages that you want alerts on and receive email alerts whenever an update occurs.
Similar to some of the aforementioned services you can receive SMS alerts by configuring your Gmail account and making use of an IFTTT recipe.
Industry Trends And Popular Search Topics
To stay abreast of search topic trends and queries that are made by top media and industry influencers you can use Google Hot Trends, HARO, and Topsy.
With Google Hot Trends you can have an RSS feed generated that you can subscribe to using your RSS reader of choice.
With Topsy you can configure it so that you receive email alerts for search queries of your choosing and you can also set it up so that you will receive SMS alerts.
Some of the HARO email alerts you will receive will not contain information that is relevant to you. You can set a label for HARO email alerts that contain specific keywords and configure your filter so that it will be applied to all of HAROs emails so that you will only receive emails that satisfy your criteria. You can also have SMS messages generated by using an IFTTT recipe.
Site Issues Detected By Webmaster Tools
Whenever you choose to register a website in Google Webmaster Tools there is an option for email notifications. Webmaster Tools will generate an email when there are warnings about the health of your site including crawling and linking issues.
Make sure that you have selected this option and use an email address that you actually monitor on a frequent basis or configure your Gmail account using IFTTT to generate an SMS whenever a Google Webmaster Tools alert is generated.
Hello Cameron,
The list of tools that you have listed is fine. I would prefer Google Analytic and Webmaster tool for monitoring a website.