Consequences SEO Reports: –
- SEO reports are the practice of displaying results for search engine optimization work.
- This is the practice of increasing the visibility of a website and business assets on Google.
- Reports typically show Top Keywords, Top Keywords, New Visitors, Overall Visitors, and website conversion metrics.
- SEO reports can make or break the success of the strategy.
The top five things to work on to improve reporting.
1. Audit the data sources:
Reporting for SEO is infinitely complex, and to develop the most complete and comprehensive understanding possible, it is necessary to use data from multiple sources covering different perspectives.
There are three main data sources that are considered necessary for SEO reports:
> A third-party rank tracking tool to indicate where to rank for the keywords they are tracking.
> Google Search Console, which can indicate how often users see the site in search results and how often they click links to pages.
> Analytics on the organization’s site, which can report on users who came to the site from organic results and what they did on the site.
When configured correctly, these three data sources can provide a pretty clear picture of cause and effect when it comes to SEO,
Detecting changes in search engine presence, Search volume, click-through rate, hit rate. bounce and conversion rate to isolate the factors that cause changes in performance.
However, each of them has its own limitations to consider and pitfalls to avoid.
Third-Party Rank Tracking Tools:
Understanding where to rank the most important keywords is possibly the most important piece of information for any SEO team.
It allows monitoring changes, identifying risks and opportunities, allocating time and resources, and evaluating the direct impact of optimization projects.
Some rank tracking tools will enrich this data by allowing to nominate competitors and collect their position in the ranking for the tracked terms as well, and monitor rich results and report on who is present.
Business tools can also provide some visibility into untracked keyword rankings.
Data from rank tracking tools will only be as good as the keywords to be tracked, so regularly auditing terms and categorization is vital to ensure nothing is missing.
Google search console:
Some of the most valuable SEO data available is completely free and comes from Google’s own Search Console tool.
Find daily data on how people are engaging with results on Google search results pages, with impressions and keywords for each keyword, as well as which page of the site the clicks landed on.
Being able to understand which search terms are driving the most traffic to the website, as well as drawing a dotted line between the position changes observed in the ranking tracking data and the number of clicks of searches for that search term in Google.
By consistently ranking in the top results for a term, also use the impression metric as an indicator of search interest.
One of the things to look out for in Search Console is the “Position” metric, which apparently shows where to rank.
However, with rich results and multiple columns of results in desktop SERPs, the numbering of the results becomes complicated and the meaning of those numbers is difficult to interpret.
Data in Search Console may also differ from other data sources for a number of reasons.
The data may be incomplete (Google cites privacy reasons) and very low volume searches are filtered.
When exporting data directly from Google Search Console, only group the data by one dimension at a time: query, page, country, device, search appearance, or date.
It is recommended to use the Google Sheets plugin “Search Analytics for Sheets” as a workaround that allows multiple dimensions to be used in the same export.
On-site analysis:
The organization’s on-site analytics package (Google Analytics, Adobe Analytics, etc.) is likely the most complex and customizable data source to use for SEO reports.
This data can tell everything users do once they hit the site, and they can set up a segment to filter only users who came to the site from an organic search result.
This will allow creating a reporting view that is aligned with how the rest of the organization reports on performance.
It will help demonstrate the value of the work by showing how visits from search lead to conversions.
Customization and complexity create their own challenges and it is really important to spend time making sure that are satisfied with the configuration of the reports to be received.
2. Choose KPIs carefully:
There are two main criteria that should determine which KPI to use:
1. Metrics that are important to the organization:
These metrics will almost certainly include “Organic Visits” as well as a metric that reflects the purpose of the site.
For eCommerce, it will be “Orders” or “Revenue” from organic visits, but for other types of sites, there will be equivalent conversion metrics.
While these metrics are important in understanding the contribution of organic traffic to overall site performance, they are generally influenced by other factors.
For example, marketing campaigns can increase search traffic for brand terms.
Changes in paid search strategy can affect, causing people to click through SERPs, and changes in weather conditions, holidays, and even news events can completely change user behaviour.
It is difficult to separate the impact of SEO initiatives from environmental influences.
2. Metrics that reflect the impact of the work:
One of the vital roles SEO reports can and should play is to demonstrate the success of the optimization work that is being done.
The absolute best way to do this is to link the KPIs directly to the SEO strategy goals and define the keywords within scope.
This may be simply tracking all the keywords, or to filter the branded terms or create a category that reflects the terms that are being actively optimized.
The choice of KPIs allows demonstrating the success of the approach regardless of the factors beyond the control that affect overall traffic.
Possibly most importantly, monitoring the metrics that the team directly influences will also quickly alert to any actions that can be taken to address any downturns or highlight where an approach is not having the desired results so can change tactics.
3. Turn data into valuable information:
If didn’t understand how complex SEO reports can be, the number of words it took to get to this point should have made that very clear.
When reporting internally, performance is typically reported to a manager who oversees multiple teams.
This is not to say that the reporting and feedback process should be superficial; The best SEO reports involve deep and thorough analysis, followed by ruthless and rigorous editing.
A good starting point is to recognize that the chosen KPIs will quickly show what happened and for every significant change.
To make this investigation process as quick and efficient as possible, make sure to have configured the data in a way that allows to narrow down the view in stages.
For example, creating page segments by page type and/or category will generally help reduce traffic shifts to a handful of individual URLs very quickly, and an organized hierarchy of keyword categories will lead to the keywords with the biggest shifts. classification.
4. Turn insights into actions:
Reporting on SEO is similar in many ways. So focused on summative reporting – measuring performance and understanding why things are where they are.
5. Polish the Communication Skills:
Let’s be honest: The qualities that tend to make someone a great SEO often don’t lend themselves to communicating in a way that instils confidence in senior managers.
It’s a well-known stereotype that asking an SEO question frequently prompts an answer that begins.
Love finding the outliers and exceptions to the rules, pulling on threads until to gain more knowledge and understanding.
Senior managers are a different breed.
They want straightforward information, delivered quickly, clearly, and succinctly.
They can often be frustrated by conversations with SEOs who are reluctant to overgeneralize or jump to conclusions.
This means it’s important to put time and effort into understanding the communication styles and preferences of the individuals we report to.
Use graphs. Rather than describing a trend, show it.
As long as choose the graphs to use carefully (a pie chart to show market share, a line graph for traffic/rank over time, etc.), they are a valuable way to communicate a lot of information very quickly and effectively.
Communicate clearly and honestly.
A Few More Tips for Impactful SEO Reporting
Keep an archive of the reports.
This is particularly important if the organization reports year-over-year.
Being able to refer back to what was happening a year ago can make the difference between spending a lot of time fruitlessly looking for what has gone wrong, and pinpointing an unusual spike in the previous year’s data, accounting for the discrepancy, and moving on.
Become proficient in Excel.
A lot of the manual work involved in reporting can be eliminated by creating some templates and using a handful of formulae (my most-used are VLOOKUP, SUMIFS, COUNTIFS, IF (S), AND, OR, INDEX, MATCH).
Add a sprinkling of conditional formatting and graphing and can create some impressive dashboards that look great, streamline and simplify processes, enables to delegate to other team members, and free up time for reactive investigation.
If using an enterprise SEO platform, look into the Workspace / Dashboard function.
A short amount of time setting these up with the tables and graphs to look at every time to report can save a ton of time in the long run.
Make sure to be receptive to the response to get. Remember that feedback does not necessarily mean the work was bad; it means it could be better optimized for its specific purpose.
Different scenarios require different approaches and need to learn the requirements in order to give people what they need.
Requesting feedback doesn’t need to be uncomfortable or formal.
Use the data sources to validate each other.
The numbers will never completely match, but a difference in the trends could indicate a data issue rather than a performance issue.