Semalt: Monitoring Capabilities


Table of Content

  1. Introduction
  2. What does monitoring mean?
  3. Why is it important?
  4. What is the meaning of monitoring capabilities?
  5. The best monitoring capabilities for your business.
  6. Conclusion

Introduction

Imagine this scenario, you have a store (it's not online - a physical store) where you sell nice and quality products. Then you advertise your business using any marketing strategy available to you or prescribed by your marketing officer. Will you or will you not supervise the advertisement progress to check if the advert worked, and check how many customers it converted for you? The truthful answer would be yes, you would. 

Some businesses do this by carrying out surveys and giving out sets of questionnaires. Others ask for project reports from their marketing teams and officers. Either way, it is carried out, the progress will be monitored. The same goes for online businesses. Several digital marketing tools can be used to promote an online business and no matter which strategy you choose to use, you need to monitor to know if it is working for you or not, and how much it works. Learn about monitoring capabilities and how you can monitor your website in this guide.

What does monitoring mean?

Monitoring is the act of allowing monitoring operators to monitor the health and working condition of your website as well as its operating process. And the key thing about monitoring is that it is repetitive and systematic. It also involves the process of checking for your website's ranks and visibility so that you can know how far you have gone and how you can improve it. 

When you monitor your website or your business's online profile, you should be checking for the level of your organic traffic, bounce rate, click-through rate, keyword rankings, backlinks, page loading speed, and customer conversion rate. And by monitoring these things you would be in charge of making or breaking your business marketing strategy. 

By monitoring your business, you would be aware of how you can make things better in your business promotion strategies. You would also know where you should apply changes. This can either be on your choice of keywords or your structure and approach to content writing or even the way your meta titles are being written and so on. So the more you monitor your site, the faster you'll know how to improve your site towards better ranking and visibility. So what are the other benefits of monitoring your website? 

Why is it important?

Monitoring can be expensive, same as it can be very stressful, technical, and complex. But yet many people monitor their websites. And several articles online talk about monitoring as part of a healthy practice to maintain success in your online business (including this one). So why is it that important? Here are five brief highlighted reasons for monitoring in any business that wants to remain successful.
  1. Monitoring your campaigns means that you are keeping yourself up-to-date on what SEO strategies work and don't work for your website. This gives you the silver platter to make improvements to your site which would improve your SEO ranking. 
  2. It helps you to know what is right and what is wrong on your website which makes you better and has a competitive edge against your competitors. 
  3. It plays an important role in helping you determine the steps to take towards improvement. Monitoring helps you identify issues with content quality, page speed, indexed pages, meta descriptions, page titles, and crawlability. 
  4. Monitoring also spreads out to competitors. You can monitor your competitors and discover why they rank higher than all. See it as spying on your competitors so that you can outrank them and improve. And why this is a great strategy is because your competitors are actively working to get better and so are you.
  5. By monitoring your website, you can also keep your website from violating the rules of search engines. You would be able to know if your website consists of things that can affect your search rankings. 

What is the meaning of monitoring capabilities?

Monitoring capabilities are the must-have features of applications, tools, and infrastructures put in place for website monitoring. These tools are with the sole purpose of monitoring a websites' data, crawl ability, metrics, ranking, visibility, structure, and so on. These capabilities are countless and are divided into troubleshooting capabilities, data capabilities, network performance capabilities, technical capabilities, content capabilities are so on.

The best monitoring capabilities for your business

Many companies that are sold out to monitoring a business's website have most of these tools and applications within their system. But without important monitoring capabilities, they are more or less useless and ineffective. 

So in the case that you purchase a website monitoring service from a company, employ a team to do it for you, or maybe you even decide to do it yourself, you need to know these capabilities. And this is so that you can get the best quality when carrying out needed supervision on your website. Without any more ado, here are five of the best and most important monitoring capabilities you need in a monitoring application.

1. Real-time monitoring:

This is a monitoring technique that allows you to check what's happening on a website right now. It gives the service provider (or you) the opportunity to check the current status of the website in all aspects. It tracks and takes continuous snapshots of the website's ranking, visibility, crawlability, links, page loading speed, content quality, and other aspects that determine a good ranking on search engines. It is important because it helps to track the current status and know which steps you took are effective right now and those that are effective later. It also helps you make quick improvements and updates that keep you above your competitors and within search engines' guidelines.

2. Repetitive and Strategic monitoring:

Another capability is to be able to conduct continuous, repetitive, and strategic monitoring on the business's website. Monitoring is not a one-time thing. It has to be done over and over and over again and not just lackadaisically - with strategy. This means the audit should be done hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, or yearly - depending on the package you want. It should also be done before and after every new tool, service, or process is introduced. Monitoring is only effective if it is done again and again. This is because that's the best way to track the progress of the website's performance and measure its trend. 

3. Troubleshooting

Troubleshooting involves the search for and repair of problems within a system. In this context, it involves looking for things that stand against a website's high ranking on search engines. And this can go from the title structure to the links in the content, the quality and friendliness of the site's pages, and so on. It also has to do with the website's technical performance (page loading speed, mobile usability, and so on). 

4. Reports

The next most important capability is the provision of timely, accurate, and frequent reports of the website's stats. This includes the current state of its performance (recall real-time monitoring) with the inclusion of how many times it was observed plus the times too (recall repetitive monitoring). It will also include a detailed list of the problems and issues that the website is facing at which moment and a suggestion of how it can be fixed in front of every listed problem. Finally, some companies can decide to add a detailed list of the steps taken to fix the problem (that's if there was an attempt to fix the issues listed). 
 

5. Support

Some companies can decide not to leave you alone with the list of problems in a detailed report. So there comes to support. Support refers to the process of solving the issues that have been detected with a website. A company that offers support with their monitoring services are like friends that stick with you through the process of improving your website. They'll find the problems with your website, give out advice and suggestions on how it will be fixed, use the best method available to fix the problem (with your permission), and stay to answer any question you might have concerning your website's monitoring.

Conclusion

A business needs to take quick and strategic steps towards success but more importantly, you need to look before you leap and look again if your leap was a development or a fail. Bringing this into the context of this guide means that when you do something towards the success of your business, check back to see if it worked and how you can improve it. That's monitoring. And from this guide, it is clear that monitoring capabilities can be technical and slightly complex to understand. So you can hire professional service to make use of these applications for the monitoring of your website's performance.