Going to install VBSEO on established forum, which stats to track?

[cgchris99]

OK, I'm going to install VBseo on my established forum that has been going for nearly to 2 years.

What stats should I be tracking before I install and after I install?
I have google analytics installed already.

I currently have the following SERPs in google for the following keywords

archery forum #2
archery forums #6
bowhunting forum #1
bowhunting forums #3

I'm sure some will ask, why install VBseo. Because I want more traffic.
I am concerned that I will loose these google rankings when I install VBseo though.

My forum currently has 7900 members and 118,600 posts.

[AWS]

You shouldn't lose those rankings or pagerank on internal pages as long as you use the feature to redirect the old URLs.

I say shouldn't because Google can be fickle when you make wholesale changes like changing the format of the URLs. I have purchased a second license for a board that is approaching big board status. The only reason I haven't installed it yet is because I rank high on some keywords that are hard to rank high with and don't want to lose that.

I will say the forum I do have it installed on it works very well. Every thread is indexed and I rank top 3 for the keywords I'm targeting.

I will install it on the other forum soon. I just have to forget about my worries.

[cgchris99]

What stats should I track before and after vbseo installation

[jeffinj]

You shouldn't lose those rankings or pagerank on internal pages as long as you use the feature to redirect the old URLs.

And how do you do that?

[Joe Ward]

And how do you do that?

This is a default feature. It will be in place as soon as you install.

[Joe Ward]

What stats should I track before and after vbseo installation

The ultimate metric to track is unique web hits.

However, I would keep an eye on the "# of keywords that are sending you traffic". When vBSEO starts to kick your forum into high gear, this number should grow significantly.

It's always good to keep an eye on the position of keywords you already rank prominently for to monitor changes.

You can use a search with site:yoursite.com on Google to keep an eye on trends in the count of indexed pages. But keep in mind that this is for general trend information only, and is not accurate (and the estimates change frequently). This part should jump pretty rapidly once you have our sitemap installed.

Other areas that you want to check are posting activity, member conversions, and ad revenue. The best possible outcome is that these increase at a rate exceeding your traffic growth, for a slight %-age, indicating greater traffic/ad relevancy.