Track SEO issues over time
SEO is not a one-time cleanup. Sites change, content ships, and old problems creep back. Tracking a site means crawling it on a regular cadence and watching the trend.
That way you can confirm fixes held and catch regressions before they cost you.
Why track over time
- Confirm fixes held. An issue you cleared can return after a template change or a new deploy.
- Catch regressions early. A change can quietly reintroduce broken links or a stray
noindex. Regular crawls surface it fast. - Show progress. A health-score trend that climbs over weeks is the clearest evidence the work is paying off.
The workflow
Tracking is a simple loop: crawl, note the state, make changes, crawl again, and compare. Done on a cadence, it turns a one-off audit into ongoing maintenance.
Step 1: Establish a baseline
Run a full crawl and treat it as your starting point. This is the crawl every later one is compared against, so make sure it reflects the real site, with the right settings and, if needed, JavaScript rendering on.
Step 2: Re-crawl on a cadence
Crawl again on a regular schedule that fits how often the site changes:
- After every deploy or migration, which is when regressions appear.
- Weekly or monthly for sites that change often.
- Before and after a launch, to confirm nothing broke.
Step 3: Compare and read the trend
Use crawl history to compare the latest crawl against the previous one and to see the health-score trend across all crawls. Focus on:
- The score trend. A steady climb is good; a drop points to a specific crawl to investigate.
- Issues introduced, especially at the critical or high tier.
- Page-count changes, which can reveal new or lost pages.
Keeping comparisons clean
Keep your crawl settings steady between runs. If you turn on JavaScript rendering or change the page limit partway through, the next crawl will differ for that reason, which muddies the comparison. Change settings deliberately, and note when you did.
Scheduled monitoring
Automatic scheduled crawls, where the app runs crawls for you on a cadence and notifies you of changes, are planned. For now, tracking is a manual re-crawl on your own schedule, which works well and keeps you in control of when crawls run.
Common mistakes
- Only crawling when something breaks. By then the regression is already live. A cadence catches it sooner.
- Changing settings mid-track, which makes crawls hard to compare.
- Ignoring small, steady declines. A slowly dropping score is still a trend worth investigating.
Frequently asked questions
How often should I crawl?
Match the site's pace of change: after every deploy for active sites, monthly for stable ones, and always around a launch.
Can the app crawl automatically on a schedule?
Scheduled monitoring is planned. For now, re-crawl manually on your own cadence and compare the results.
How do I see the trend over time?
Crawl history shows the health-score trend across all saved crawls and lets you compare any two.
Why did my score change when I did not touch the site?
Check whether the crawl settings changed, for example rendering being turned on, which can change what the crawler finds.