SEO Website Change Monitoring using Google Sheets
Ever faced a situation when SEO traffic was affected after some production release?
Well, Google Sheets can help us detect if there was an unexpected SEO metadata change!
Link to the sheet https://bit.ly/3zjrDtX
SEO is all about consistency. And, we’ve all been there where some release goes live and:
a) canonical tag goes missing or
b) canonical gets moved to the <body> instead of <head>
c) Title tag on all pages defaults to the Homepage Title
d) noindex tag on Homepage!
The craziest SEO disaster I experienced was when all pages carried a 404 HTTP status code but in the UI everything was working perfectly! It was like a 200 OK page in the UI but 404 in the detail :)
I use different change monitoring tools like SEORadar and Botify. These tools notify me whenever unexpected hiccups happen which might result in an SEO disaster.
At bigbasket, we have also developed an SEO Automation Testing Suite that runs every time a release is pushed to the Staging environment, and Production website.
Here is a very handy SEO website change monitoring tool built using Google Sheets https://bit.ly/3zjrDtX
It uses the IMPORTXML function to scrap:
1) Title
2) Canonical — Pulls this value from <head> of the page.
3) Checks for noindex tag
4) Meta description
5) H1
And a Script to return the 6) URL Status Code.
You just have to change the URL in column A and update the Expected values.
Every time you open the sheet — It compares the scraped values against the Expected values. If EQUAL it returns TRUE otherwise returns FALSE. I hope to see TRUE always!
How do you monitor SEO changes? Let me know in the comments.
