How to use Site Monitoring
In this guide, we are talking about one of the most essential tools on Sitechecker - Site Monitoring. It allows you to monitor changes on your website and get notifications about the most important ones that can influence your SEO performance.
1. What is Site Monitoring
This tool monitors your website and shows you the feed/chart of the changes which occurred, as well as sends you notifications about them so that you can quickly check if anything important has happened.
Site Monitoring is especially handy and convenient if your website is constantly changing, and third-party contractors are working on it.
2. How it works
Site monitoring automatically starts checking your website as soon as you create a new project (make sure to look for a checkmark on Daily Monitoring line which is accepted by default)
2.1 Elements of Site Monitoring
On the monitoring page, you have two main elements:
Graph and
Timeline.
On the
Graph, you can see the overall amount of changes in certain days and analyze how many pages were changed/added/deleted.
Some elements can be turned off to remove them from the
Graph. Just tap on one of three options to exclude it.
To see the overall number of URLs your website has over a specific time, click on URL's total checkbox. You can also modify the displayed time frame in the top right corner.
On the
Timeline, you see more detailed information about all updates of your website.
You can scroll down to see a day-by-day report on what occurred on your website and click any tile in Timeline to see URLs and specific changes that happen.
2.2 What does Site Monitoring check
Site Monitoring tracks your website for the things that really matter, like:
- www / non-www
- http / https
- robots.txt deleted
- indexation
- new pages
- broken pages
- orphan pages
- deleted pages
- <title>
- <description>
- <h1>
3. Use Cases
Now we will look at some main use cases for Site Monitoring.
1. Evaluate the activity of people who work with your website
The monitoring report is a great way to control subordinates, freelancers or agencies who work with the website. Check how many pages were added by months, days and review events log to understand what kind of work was carried out on the site.
2. Find new content ideas by tracking competitors' websites
Your competitors are one of the most valuable sources for content ideas. Track new pages on their websites and improve your content and SEO strategy.
3. Don't allow your website to be hacked
The security issues are not something you can joke with. Monitoring report helps to react immediately as soon as you notice suspicious activity on the site. A huge number of added/deleted pages, closing the most valuable pages from indexing or redirecting them - each of these actions can be the result of hacking the site or unfair actions of competitors.
4. Find what changes on the page had an influence on rankings in SERP
Changes in title, h1 and description of the page sometimes have a big impact on the number of impressions, clicks. To understand what changes affected on the page ranking, find a point of sudden growth or fall using Google Search Console and then review in our monitoring report what changes were made on the page before this date.
4. Tips and Tricks
Monitor your competitors
Changes that competitors implement on their websites is the best look you can get into their SEO strategy. By monitoring your competitors you may find valuable ideas for content, see updates for meta tags and what pages are being added or removed.
Check details of the changes
In your monitoring results feed you will find a short summary of changes. By pressing on any of the change you can see more details. It's very helpful to have for some changes, like edits of meta tags.
Don't miss the email notifications
They can go to the Spam folder depending on your email provider. Be sure to find this letter and add it to your Inbox. This way you will always be in the know about what's happening.
If you have additional questions about Site Monitoring or ideas on how we can improve it, please let us know at support@sitechecker.pro. We will be glad to help you.