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!
Table of Contents
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Hreflang
If the team’s adding new translations or the international links have suddenly broken, get immediate alerts.
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.
Twitter Image
Similarly to the open graph tags you can see the same changes for Twitter tags.
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.
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.
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!
