What's your preferred approach for recording optimisation changes & impact over time?

[KieranThomas]

I was just curious what methods or tools you all use for documenting (not measuring) the impact of any SEO work for each page on a website.

For example:

Defining the intended:

• Target keywords for that page (both the main seed, and high traffic related terms)
• Target intent for that page

Defining:

• What you're going to change on the page (From what, and to what)
• The rationale behind the change

Recording both pre and post optimisation metrics (preferably automated) for:

• Average rankings for the page
• Ranking metrics for the associated keywords for that page
• Impressions for the page
• Impressions for the keyword
• Average CTRs for the page
• Average CTRs for the associated keywords for that page
• Traffic levels for the page
• Traffic levels delivered by each associated keyword for that page
• and so on

Summarising the impact:

• Preferably automated summary of "This was changed, and this was a summary of the impact..."
  (I appreciate the challenge there is defining the best metrics to report on to provide the truest picture)

History:

• A quick and easy to scan list of previous changes so you don't undo/conflict with an earlier optimisation, or accidentally try optimising something which has already failed an earlier optimisation test

Currently we're capturing this data across different tools and in different ways (spreadsheets, documents, annotations, in GA, etc), but it feels a little clunky, disjointed, and doesn't provide an easy way to look back on what was changed without having to connect the dots. Google Data Studio I know will help with some of that but I can't help feeling there has to be a better solution.

As a result, I was just curious how everyone else documented optimisation impacts (inc the historic aspect to avoid conflicts with future optimisations), and whether a tool currently existing which could gather & display all of that, via a single interface and report?

 

[Colan Nielsen]

One of the things we do at Sterling Sky is track EVERY change that we make in a worklog that we update manually as we work on a client. Might not be the ideal solution you are looking for but it's become one of the greatest tools for us over the years.

Outside of that, I like to use Google Analytics, Search Console and our rank trackers, and what we do is compare the period before and after the optimization.

 

[KieranThomas]

@Colan Nielsen When you say a "worklog", is that a spreadsheet/document, or is that tied to a specific tool?

My current process is to:

* document all changes in tasks in a Kanban board,
* include screenshots from GSC, Ahrefs, GA, etc which allows us to capture pre & post optimisation data,
* feedback the data to the client via a document / report

However, it's all very manual at present and does not provide a way for us to make any prediction forecasts etc (other than that led by our own experience of typical impacts).

Therefore, one of my goals for 2022 is to get smarter & more efficient with the way we're predicting, measuring and reporting on impact going forwards.


Since posting this, I had a search and can't seem to find a tool that does everything I'd ideally like but I did find a couple of other tools which had interesting features. Search Pilot (SearchPilot - SEO A/B testing software for a scientific approach to SEO) does A/B testing, and Dragon Metrics also seems to have some nice features (The First Global SEO Tool Platform Designed for Asia | Dragon Metrics).

I think I may give the latter a trial but would be interested to know if anyone else has tried it and how accurate they found the prediction aspects.