SEO Reporting can take a lot of time and often the data is not not widely shared within the company. Sometimes it stays only within the SEO team (and the respective clients), it is filled with way too much information and is basically a data dump which is hard to understand for anyone not in SEO. This has a negative effect on the client as they soon lose interest.
In the past, these reports used to include rankings and organic traffic and sometimes the number of back links. They also did not always reflect all the results from the work the team had done that month/quarter. The SEO industry has developed since then and many of us have moved away from rankings and using this as a KPI metric, however reporting can still consume a lot of hours. It can be difficult for some teams to include metrics the C level wants to see such as conversions and overall traffic.
It is important to educate your clients and your wider marketing team highlighting the results as well as touching upon some of the technical changes to be made to the site to achieve even better results. Reporting should include processes, data analysis and insights. At Tea Time SEO, we were joined by Steph, Barb and Christopher who each shared with us their own way of creating SEO reports which will take less time, get more buy in from the wider team and truly reflect the results from the past month/quarter.
You can watch our speakers share their insights at Tea Time SEO here!
Steph is an SEO Manager at Blue Array, with a special interest in data, reporting and analytics. She’s spoken on the main stage at Brighton SEO as well as at Reading SEO, Authoritas’ Tea Time SEO and Women in Tech SEO meetups. She loves both learning and teaching.
Christopher is the lead SEO consultant at the agency IMPACT Extend. He helps omnichannel players in Denmark and big B2B companies with SEO. He has also been a speaker at SEOday in Denmark in for three years running. He is excited about customer journeys, content and data. During the lockdown, Christopher has been very busy. He helped out his clients, done webinars at IMPACT Extend, been working on developing pixel tracking (as an alternative to rank tracking), and been working on Python scripts to automate SEO tasks. Christopher has also managed to get his first blog post published at Moz, great achievement !
Barb Davids is a digital marketer, SEO strategist and owner of Compass Digital Strategies. Driven by data and analytics, she works hard to get business-changing results for her clients, such as 256% more website traffic and 22% more leads. As lockdown began and clients lost budget, she continued working on some pro bono for a couple of months. Offering free help to select industries. Her own business as a result has pivoted and begun to offer online courses so that business owners can work to gain more site traffic and leads at a more budget friendly cost.
A big thank you to our co-authors for giving up their time contributing to the Ultimate Guide to SEO Reporting.
If there are elements you want to add where you can draw from your own experience, please contact the marketing team.
If you are looking for an easy way to automate much of the advice given in this guide, then please book a call with one of our platform experts to explore whether we have what you need.
