Whether you are meeting the C-suite, the marketing or the SEO team, SEO reporting is about understanding the data and knowing what to do with it. You need to ensure the dashboard is operational and there are actions from the report. For example, if we’re getting this amount of clicks or if we’re seeing these keywords performing better it should be clear what direction the business and the SEO strategy is heading.
One of the ways that we’re trying to do this at IMPACT Extend is if you look at keywords, for instance, we might have a list of keywords that we’re tracking. Then we go in and blend the data, the organic traffic data with conversions from Google ads. These search queries, you can see directly in Google ads. You can see if they’re converting, or if they have led to assisted conversions. If they have, we can add this data to our rankings and decide if these keywords are not just important for the SEO team, but also for the C-suite, marketing and the wider business.
If we have landing pages that are not performing as well, we could go in and put in demographic data there. We can then see if the content that has been written is tailored to the right market. For example, if the bounce rate for that page is high and the target audience is 50 plus, we would have a look at the demographic data. If we take a closer look, we can see that it’s actually 20-30 year olds who are digesting this content. Therefore the content should be edited and tailored for that demographic.
It’s important that we ask ourselves the question, “What do want to show from the report?”” and “How can we use this data from a business perspective?”. We are getting all the data from BigQuery into Power BI so we can dissect any information we choose and have it ready for the three different business units mentioned earlier.
From Power BI we can nudge users to view the dashboard by sending them alerts, which can be screenshots of the dashboard in their inbox, once a week or month – the frequency is up to you. I would not suggest more than once a week to your clients as it can be a little overwhelming. However, you could send it to the internal SEO team once per day and set up rules to get notifications if you are reaching more than a certain amount of visitors. This way you are not waiting until the end of the month to report on figures but SEO reporting is becoming a daily task. Just a few minutes a day to investigate surges or drops in traffic instead of leaving it until the end of the month.
My last piece of advice which has worked well for our agency is to start thinking about SEO reporting as a tool that you can use within the company on a daily basis. It is not to be used just once a month, forgotten about until the next time you run the reports. Make sure SEO reporting is integrated within the business as a whole, not just for the SEO team.
