Essential tools to monitor your website performance

Online marketing and search engine optimisation comes with so many moving parts that the only way you can possibly keep on top of everything and easily monitor how your website is performing is by having a few key tools in your digital toolbox. From monitoring ranking changes to judging how effective your emails are at getting shoppers through to site, investing in a few specialist pieces of software can make life a lot easier.

1. A ranking tracker First and foremost, you’ll need a tool to help you monitor your website’s search engine rankings. This tool will help you track where your site appears for certain keywords in the search engine rankings – a professional tool will monitor different search engines and both mobile and desktop positions. This is vital to measure the impact your SEO work is having on your search engine visibility. 2. A website auditor Your SEO work is never done so you’ll also need to add a website auditor to your suite of tools. Even though your new business website design will be built to SEO best practise, optimisation is an ongoing job and you’ll want to routinely audit your pages to ensure that your content is optimised. When you add new pages, a website auditor will also help you tweak your content so that it’s search engine friendly. 3. Google Analytics Google’s own Analytics package is something that you should set up and use. This will give you a wealth of useful data, including things like your most popular pages, pages with the highest bounce rate, source of visitor and much more. From here, you can identify the types of blog posts and content your audience loves, how visitors find your site, how long they stay, which pages they exit from and even whether they use a mobile or desktop device.All of this data can help you make positive changes to your website to drive up performance. 4. A/B testing An A/B testing tool is a great resource to have in your stable of web site tools – this allows you to test different variations of the same page with just one element, such as the image, the headline or the call to action changed. You can then compare the two versions to see which performed better. This means that you can continuously improve your website performance. You can also use your A/B testing tool to create better email marketing shots and blog posts.