SEO Monitoring & Analytics

Monitoring your SEO performance helps you identify issues early and measure the impact of optimizations. This lesson covers essential tools and metrics.

Google Search Console

Google Search Console (GSC) is essential for monitoring your site's search performance.

Verifying Your Site

Add verification to your Next.js app:

// app/layout.tsx
export const metadata: Metadata = {
  verification: {
    google: 'your-verification-code',
    yandex: 'your-yandex-code',
  },
}

This generates:

<meta name="google-site-verification" content="your-verification-code">

Key Reports to Monitor

Performance Report

Queries - What people search to find your site
Pages - Which pages get the most traffic
Countries - Where your users are located
Devices - Mobile vs desktop traffic

Coverage Report

Valid pages - Successfully indexed
Errors - Pages that couldn't be indexed
Warnings - Pages with issues
Excluded - Intentionally not indexed

Core Web Vitals Report

Mobile and desktop performance
URLs grouped by status
Specific issues to fix

Sitemaps Report

Submit your sitemap
Monitor discovery and indexing

Common GSC Warnings

"Duplicate without canonical"

// Fix: Add canonical
export const metadata: Metadata = {
  alternates: {
    canonical: 'https://example.com/preferred-url',
  },
}

"Crawled - not indexed"

Improve content quality
Add internal links
Ensure page provides value

"Redirect error"

Check redirect configuration
Avoid redirect chains

Analytics Integration

Google Analytics 4

// app/layout.tsx
import Script from 'next/script'

export default function RootLayout({ children }) {
  return (
    <html>
      <head>
        <Script
          src={`https://www.googletagmanager.com/gtag/js?id=${process.env.NEXT_PUBLIC_GA_ID}`}
          strategy="afterInteractive"
        />
        <Script id="google-analytics" strategy="afterInteractive">
          {`
            window.dataLayer = window.dataLayer || [];
            function gtag(){dataLayer.push(arguments);}
            gtag('js', new Date());
            gtag('config', '${process.env.NEXT_PUBLIC_GA_ID}');
          `}
        </Script>
      </head>
      <body>{children}</body>
    </html>
  )
}

Vercel Analytics

For Vercel-hosted sites:

// app/layout.tsx
import { Analytics } from '@vercel/analytics/react'

export default function RootLayout({ children }) {
  return (
    <html>
      <body>
        {children}
        <Analytics />
      </body>
    </html>
  )
}

Key Metrics to Track

Metric	What It Tells You
Organic traffic	Overall SEO success
Click-through rate (CTR)	Title/description effectiveness
Average position	Keyword rankings
Bounce rate	Content relevance
Pages per session	Site engagement
Conversion rate	Business impact

Automated SEO Testing

Add SEO checks to your CI/CD pipeline:

// __tests__/seo.test.ts
describe('SEO', () => {
  it('has required metadata', async () => {
    const response = await fetch('http://localhost:3000')
    const html = await response.text()

    expect(html).toContain('<title>')
    expect(html).toContain('<meta name="description"')
    expect(html).toContain('<link rel="canonical"')
  })

  it('has Open Graph tags', async () => {
    const response = await fetch('http://localhost:3000')
    const html = await response.text()

    expect(html).toContain('og:title')
    expect(html).toContain('og:description')
    expect(html).toContain('og:image')
  })
})

Lighthouse CI

Run Lighthouse in CI/CD:

# .github/workflows/lighthouse.yml
name: Lighthouse CI
on: [push]
jobs:
  lighthouse:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v3
      - name: Run Lighthouse CI
        uses: treosh/lighthouse-ci-action@v10
        with:
          urls: |
            https://your-site.com/
            https://your-site.com/courses
          budgetPath: ./lighthouse-budget.json

// lighthouse-budget.json
[
  {
    "path": "/*",
    "timings": [
      { "metric": "largest-contentful-paint", "budget": 2500 },
      { "metric": "cumulative-layout-shift", "budget": 0.1 }
    ]
  }
]

Setting Up Alerts

Search Console Email Alerts

Google sends emails for:

Critical indexing issues
Security problems
Manual actions

Custom Monitoring

// Monitor for 5xx errors
export async function checkSiteHealth() {
  const urls = [
    'https://example.com',
    'https://example.com/courses',
    'https://example.com/blog',
  ]

  for (const url of urls) {
    const response = await fetch(url)
    if (!response.ok) {
      await sendAlert(`${url} returned ${response.status}`)
    }
  }
}

Third-Party SEO Tools

Free Tools

Google Search Console - Essential, from Google
Bing Webmaster Tools - Similar for Bing
Google PageSpeed Insights - Performance testing
Rich Results Test - Structured data validation

Paid Tools

Ahrefs - Backlinks, keywords, competitor analysis
Semrush - All-in-one SEO platform
Moz Pro - Domain authority, link analysis
Screaming Frog - Technical SEO audits

Weekly SEO Checklist

Task	Frequency
Check Search Console for errors	Weekly
Review Core Web Vitals	Weekly
Monitor organic traffic trends	Weekly
Check for new 404s	Weekly
Review top queries/pages	Weekly
Test structured data	Monthly
Full site audit	Quarterly

Summary

In this lesson, you learned:

Setting up Google Search Console
Integrating analytics (GA4, Vercel)
Key SEO metrics to track
Automated testing in CI/CD
Setting up monitoring and alerts
Third-party SEO tools

In the next lesson, we'll cover common SEO mistakes and how to avoid them.