11 important SEO factors to follow

That’s all well and good, but how useful is it?

• Does it improve your rankings?
• If you’re running 30-50 or 100 or more sites, does professional SEO tracking with cloud crawlers offer something to do?

If you said yes, great! I am happy for you.

But if you, like the rest of us, wish there was a better way, there is!

The key is to be very targeted and objective about which pages we track.

This article goes into what is important to track and how to track each. I will also include useful paid tools for tracking SEO elements. (I am not affiliated with these companies, but I am a customer of a few.)

Elements of identification

Tracking your site’s rankings is important. It should be at the top of your list. If your site is not visible, all your efforts are wasted.

In this section, I’ll explain the key targeting factors that affect your visibility on Google and how you can track them.

1. Robots.txt changes

The robots.txt file is the first file that search engines look at when they crawl your website. This simple file provides instructions on how bots should crawl a website.

What are we tracking?

Every SEO should track changes in the robots.txt file, especially if it starts blocking search engines.

Many tools offer this feature, but it’s important to set up email alerts to let you know if a file blocks search engines.

A common reason for this is when developers push a site from staging to production and accidentally overwrite the robots.txt file.

This happens when all files are pushed live instead of updated.

What tools can you use

While I tend to build Python tools for jobs, why am I reinventing the wheel here? Several inexpensive tools are effective at validating your robots.txt file.

I prefer LittleWarden because it allows you to track specific changes or general index checks and send email alerts. You can set it to check daily or hourly.

However, Visualping (which I used for this data graph study) is also an excellent choice for tracking robots.txt changes.

2. Noindex robot tags

Ah, the anonymous noindex tag. This is a meta robots tag that you can add to pages that you don’t want to be indexed by Google, such as login, account or other low value pages.

Whether you have pages you absolutely need indexed or unindexed, tracking changes to your configuration is essential to your SEO life.

What tools can you use

LittleWarden is great for this because you can customize the settings for each page, allowing you to easily set many pages to be indexed while marking a few as noindex.

Tools like Screaming Frog and Sitebulb can also work, but require more setup.

3. X-Robots-Tag Changes

Simply put, the x-robots tag does the same thing as the noindex meta tag, but instead of

of your website, appears in the HTTP response headers.

What tools can you use

LittleWarden is preconfigured to check your HTTP response headers for any indexing issues that may occur, including canonical tag changes.

4. XML sitemap validation

XML sitemaps are another powerful SEO tool. These files contain a map of all the links on our sites.

Google uses these as solid guidelines for pages to find and add to their index.

If your sitemap has errors (eg, download or parsing fails), Google will continue to try to process it for several days. If the attempts continue to fail, Google will stop trying to crawl the URL.

What tools can you use

LittleWarden also wins for its ease of use for tracking changes to your XML sitemaps and verifying their validity.

5. Canonical tag changes

Canonical tags are something that is often misunderstood and misused in SEO.

Although Google considers these only as suggestions and not strict guidelines (like noindex), it is still important to track if they are changed on the page.

What tools can you use

LittleWarden can track this, but you can use tools like ChangeTower or VisualPing. Screaming Frog and Sitebulb can also track you, but setting up email notifications requires additional steps.

Level features on the page

On-page SEO refers to the elements on your pages that users and search engines can see.

If you’re into local SEO, you may not encounter many site changes. However, if you add more team members by accessing the site, someone may make indirect marketing changes that may affect your ranking.

That’s why keeping track of things on the page is important.

6. Title tag changes

Title tags are any text formatted using the official HTML title (

Google reps say they don’t care much about rankings, but they do for accessibility.

Many SEOs, including myself, believe that a well-designed H1 and title structure can improve rankings, but that’s a discussion for another time.

Meanwhile, it’s important to track changes to your H1 tags on your most important pages.

What tools can you use

This is where the variety of tools we can use really opens up. You can test any of the following with reliable compatibility:

• A junior manager.
• Versionist.
• Wachete.
• Watching.
• SwitchTower.

Also, you could technically use Screaming Frog and Sitebulb, but configuring email alerts from these would be a pain.

7. Internal link changes

Tracking changes in your internal links can be important in maintaining a strong internal link graph.

If a well-placed internal link with optimized anchor text is removed or changed, it can affect your ranking.

Will it affect it too much? Probably not. But are you really willing to test that for us?

What tools can you use

• A junior manager.
• Versionist.
• Wachete.
• Watching.
• SwitchTower.

8. Change of keywords

Tracking changes in keyword usage on your site is critical to your SEO success.

If another advertiser in your group tries their hand at promoting your content, they can unknowingly put your page rank down.

What tools can you use

• A junior manager.
• Versionist.
• Wachete.
• Watching.
• SwitchTower.

SERP visibility

Tracking how you appear in SERPs may not directly affect your ranking, but it may affect your organic click-thru (CTR) rates.

9. Title tag changes

Title tags are the code we give to search engines that suggest what we think our displayed title should be.

Yes, Google changes title tags, but that doesn’t mean we should ignore them.

What tools can you use

• A junior manager.
• Versionist.
• Wachete.
• Watching.
• SwitchTower.

10. Meta description changes

Meta descriptions may be one of the most debated topics in SEO. Some of the things that make this topic so interesting include, but are not limited to:

• They are not technical features, but they are important for our SERP sales.
• SEO tools warn us about pixel and character lengths, but Google will change them anyway to match the search intent.
• I directly heard Gary Illyes at a conference tell the SEO point blank that optimizing title tags and meta descriptions is a waste of time. (I apologize for this.)

However, if you’re already tracking inadvertent conversions on your site, clicking the meta description box is worth an extra second.

What tools can you use

• A junior manager
• Versionist
• Wachete
• Watching
• SwitchTower

11. Schema validation

Schema markup is a powerful tool. It can send valuable structured data to Google and help us create attractive SERP features for our results.

Creating and implementing a schema tag takes time, so it’s important to track any changes, especially since SERP features can improve your organic CTR.

What tools can you use

• A junior manager.
• Versionist.
• Wachete.
• Watching.
• SwitchTower.

Fun follow up

Now that you have your extensive list of SEO factors to track, it’s time to add some solid monitoring to your SEO campaigns.

Trust me, it’s better to be prepared than to learn about a change that happens days later.