SEO reporting, is so much more than just showing clicks, impressions, as well as some of the top landing pages and the statistics in Google Analytics. What we really need to understand is, who will be reading the report? We have definitely three types of people interested in SEO reporting and therefore the reporting should be different for all three.
1. C-Suite
The C-suite are looking at business numbers such as the turnover generated from SEO. What are leads and micro conversions that has been due to the work from the SEO team.
2. Marketing
They are interested in brand awareness and if this has increased over time. Therefore their report should show if the clicks and impressions have increased over time due to the marketing campaign. Has market share increased and therefore we are beating competitors?
3. Operations
As an SEO consultant, my clients working in the SEO team want to know about clicks, impressions and rankings. My client needs to know if the site is performing well.Â
Whether you are meeting the C-suite, the marketing or the SEO team, SEO reporting is more about understanding the data and knowing what to do with it. You need to ensure the dashboard is operational, 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 my agency is if you look at keywords, for instance, we might have a list of keywords that we’re following. Then we go in and blend the data, the typical 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, then I can add this data to my rankings and it will help me to decide if these keywords are not just important for the SEO team, but also for the C-suite, marketing as well as the wider business.
If I have landing pages that are not performing as well, I could go in and put in demographic data there. I can then see if the content I am writing is tailored to the right market. For example I can see that the bounce rate for that page is high and the target audience is 50 plus. If I take a closer look at the demographics, I can see that it’s actually 20-30 year olds who are digesting this content. Therefore I should tailor it more for that demographic.
I think it’s very 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 I mentioned earlier in the post.
Steph talked about getting alerts in your inbox. From Power BI we can nudge users to use the dashboard by sending them alerts, and they can be screenshots of the dashboard in their inbox, once a week or once a 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 day and set up rules to get notifications if you 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 we can use in our daily business.
