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Control all Changes on your Website with the new SEO Monitor

Monitor SEO

Each day, us SEO professionals work our socks off trying to increase the organic traffic to our websites, and with it, the revenue they bring in. However, often things that are out of our control get in the way, meaning that we lose all the hard work put in over the previous months or years. I’m sure you can relate to this and think of some incredibly stressful examples.

  • A noindex tag is added to a key page
  • The robots.txt file disappears or a disallow rule is added
  • Key articles or pages are no longer available

Now you can forget about all these issues thanks to SEOcrawl’s new SEO Monitor. It’s a code monitoring system that reports all changes to you in a handy, organized way.

Find out more below!

How does SEO Monitor work?

SEO Monitor works in a really simple, but incredibly useful way. It monitors your project’s most important urls and alerts you to any changes according to preferences defined by you. The monitor is divided into two tabs:

  • Change monitor
  • Url monitor

The first shows a list of all the changes detected and their type and the second shows a list of urls with the changes detected on each of them.

Change monitor

The change monitor shows a graph with the number of changes detected each day and a list of them all with their different types (headings, status code, canonical, etc.). Also, there are a whole load of filters to check a specific type of change or all the changes that have been detected on a specific url.

Changes in the SEO Monitor
View of the SEO Monitor Dashboard with all the changes detected.

Url Monitor

You can use the second tab to see all the urls you’re monitoring. You’ll see you are given a number of credits. By default, we add the top urls by organic traffic, then you can use the credits to add the urls that are necessary for you and your business.

SEO urls monitored
View of all the monitored urls with the changes that have been detected in each one.

And what happens if you click on “View details”? It gets even better! It opens a page that shows all the changes detected on any specific url.

SEO Changes in an url
List of all the changes on one specific url.

Now, I’m sure you’re wondering, what elements does SEO Monitor control? Great question! Let’s find out. All you have to do to view this section is click on “Email Settings.” Here you can see all the elements that are controlled and how often you’ll be notified about each one.

What elements does SEO Monitor control?

One of the key advantages of SEO Monitor is the fact that it is made to measure! Not only can you control which elements are monitored but you can also change the frequency with which you’re notified about the changes.

SEO elements monitored
Elements controlled in SEO Monitor and notification frequencies.

Title

As you’ll be well aware, the title of an article and its SEO title might be different. One is geared towards the reader and the other towards search engines, although sometimes they coincide. If the SEO title changes, you’ll receive a notification and details (see below) so that you can check if it was a deliberate change or not.

SEO changes in title
Example of a change in a website’s SEO title.

Canonical Tags

If a page’s canonical tag isn’t correct Google might get confused and de-index the page or bypass it completely. Monitoring the canonical tag makes sure this doesn’t happen. Not only does it report changes to the canonical tag it also tells you if the canonical tag doesn’t exist or if it’s been identified correctly.

SEO Canonical
New canonical tag identified.

Meta Description

Just like as we saw with the SEO titles, a change to the meta description can lead to a better or worse CTR particularly for key dates (Black Friday, Christmas, sales, etc.).

SEO changes in meta description
New SEO meta description identified.

Indexing

If you think a change in the title or meta description is important, just imagine a change in the indexing, for example, if a page was indexed but now has a “noindex” tag. If this happens on your home page or your page with the best turnover, it could spell disaster.

SEO changes in follow tag
Example of a page that has gone from “noindex” to “index.”

Robots.txt

If there’s one file that is sacrosanct for web SEO, it is the robots.txt. Not only can it block search engines, but if it is not available, it could delay search engine indexing and crawling, creating a serious problem. This is why monitoring this element is essential.

SEO Changes in robots.txt
Example of changes detected in the robots.txt file.

Sitemap.xml

Having issues with Google indexing? This is where the sitemap plays a vital role. With this function you can keep track of the urls that appear and disappear to make sure you don’t get a shock.

Example of changes on sitemap.xml
SEO changes in sitemap.xml

Headings

Improving an article’s on-page? Thanks to the headings monitor, you can see the new structure clearly and check if there are any problems or potential improvements.

SEO changes in headings
Changes in the SEO headings of an article.

Status Codes

If it’s vital to check the indexing status, just imagine the status codes! If one of your key pages is redirected or starts bringing up a 404, you need to be warned immediately.

example of status code
Example of the status code of a page that doesn’t work and now brings up a “200” code.

Hreflang

If the team’s adding new translations or the international links have suddenly broken, get immediate alerts.

Hreflang changes
New translation added to the “SEO Tools” page and shown in the hreflang code.

Open Graph

Open graph technology is used to make sure that the design of articles you share on social media (Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.) is correct. If a highlighted image suddenly breaks or there’s an issue with the metadata it could mean you lose much of your social network traffic.

changes in Open Graph
Changes in an article’s “open graph” social network tags.

Twitter Image

Similarly to the open graph tags you can see the same changes for Twitter tags.

Changes in Twitter tags.
Changes in the Twitter metatags

Google Analytics and Tag Manager

You invest a month defining and configuring the Analytics and Tag Manager properties, the objectives, and conversions, and suddenly one the of the “deploys,” the Analytics code, breaks or disappears. If you don’t receive a warning, you might not realize for several days and lose really useful data about your users’ behavior.

Changes in Google Analytics and Tag Manager
New Google Tag Manager code identified for a specific page.

Email Notifications

As you’ll have seen, for each of the elements you can specify how often you want to be sent an email notification. We’ve set some recommended default configurations. But if you like you can change them to suit your needs. For example, you can specify that you want to receive a “daily” notifications email.

Daily Notifications for the SEO Monitor
Example of daily notifications for SEO Monitor.

Roadmap and Next Steps

That’s not all folks! Our aim is to keep improving SEO Monitor with your feedback, ideas, and suggestions. One idea is to develop a SEO plugin or a CDN solution so that you can detect changes directly in the server instead of having to crawl your web. This will avoid you spending a lot of resources on SEOcrawl crawling and requests from your server.

Do you have any ideas for how we can improve our Monitor? It’d be great to hear from you!

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About the author

David Kaufmann
David Kaufmann
I was first introduced to SEO in 2011 and since then it has been a huge part of my life as it is something I am completely passionate about. It's my pleasure to be the CEO of SEOcrawl, an innovative all-in-one SEO software that is changing the way businesses manage their SEO strategies.

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