[display-name-category]

[post_author]
[wtr-time]

When it comes to every SEO strategy, the most expected moment is when you show your client how you’ve managed to boost their site’s organic. Here’s where the effectiveness of SEO reports comes into place.

But what happens when even if the strategy has nailed it, the client still does not have a clear understanding of how it helped their online business? We understand the effort that takes place in generating an SEO deck can be intimidating and even more so when you need to include engaging data that proves your strategy is working.

For this reason, if you are:

• A small business owner evaluating the accuracy of your organic efforts.
• A digital marketing agency that started diving into SEO and is looking for an innovative and highly productive way to exhibit the outcome of organic campaigns to their customers.
• A marketing manager looking to justify the ROI of SEO.

Then this two post series will provide you with all the necessary data sources, tools, structure, and main key metrics to help you succeed with your SEO reports.

Acknowledging the Value of SEO Reports

As mentioned above, no amount of hours spent in SEO will pay off under clients’ eyes if they don’t understand the results. A well-planned SEO report is your ultimate ally to:

• Develop a strong digital marketing strategy based on insightful results and conclusions.
• Collect the best data to spot areas of improvement.
• Convince your client to continue or increase the current investment in organic efforts.
• Forecast future results and growth for the website, online presence, and sales.
• Evaluate the use of top-performing content and pages for other digital channels such as emails, social media, and pay-per-click.

To set an example of how impactful SEO reporting is, we’ve learned through the experience with our clients by boosting web ranking and traffic. Meaningful reporting communication led to trust in our SEO strategies.

A Winning SEO Report Structure

The perfect SEO report must match the goal of the strategy. Generally speaking, an SEO strategy looks forward to improving the organic ranking of a website. This improvement translates into more exposure. Consequently, the more users see the site, the higher the organic traffic and engagement. In the end, relevant traffic is what converts into leads and/or sales.

To illustrate better, the process of a strategy’s goal in SEO is summarized in the following equation:

Now it’s time to dive deep into the details. Here is how we recommend segmenting your SEO reports:

1. Ranking

2. Exposure

3. Traffic

4. Engagement

5. Conversions

6. Strategy Status

Let’s take a closer look!!

Ranking

Helps explain how a site ranks in the SERPs with a comparison to previous months. The most essential part is to highlight general changes for the domain as well as the keyword strategy.

Domain Ranking

To show the improvement of the overall ranking for a site, the average position metrics of Google Search Console fit like a glove.

Pro Tip: When analyzing an average position consider it as just that, the average. The best way to measure improvement is to ensure it decreases in number and does not increase.

Organic Keywords Ranking

On the other hand, while the average position shows a general overview of ranking it is necessary to communicate how specific keywords of a strategy are improving.

To make this a breeze, we recommend using Ahrefs reports. In the subsection of organic keywords in the Site Explorer Section, you’ll find a chart for all keywords that the site is currently ranking for and the position in SERPs.

Pro Tip: Download monthly data to serve as a follow-up on performance, especially as a comparison month-to-month.

Exposure

Once you’ve presented the performance of the site’s ranking, it’s time to go over impressions or how many times your business is being placed in front of through SERPs.

As a representation of the times your site appeared in the search engines results pages, impressions mark how well you are ranking. Ideally, you want to be ranking on the first page of a SERP, average positions 30 or higher will just not cut it in the competitive world of organic ranking.

Traffic

Now that we’ve gone over online presence performance, now we get into a more technical aspect, meta tags. Ensuring they are appealing enough to drive relevant traffic to the site is crucial to your SEO strategy.

KPIs that support meta tag performance you’ll want to keep an eye on:

Clicks

Similar to the average position and impressions, you can find this metric in the Google Search Console account for a site. It represents each time a user clicks on your site from an impression on the SERP.

Pro Tip: Clicks undergo a gradual increase in performance, so you want to align this section with engagement metrics that communicate traffic trends to gain insight for SEO strategy.

Users

As defined by Google Analytics:

“Users are those who have initiated at least one session during the date range.”

Within the platform, you can compare total users vs. new users. This helps you segment your traffic from people who have already been to your site and those who have not.

If you are new to this data source platform, Google Analytics has a good source of info, we also frequently post on our YouTube channel, where you can find the most updated info in digital marketing.

Sessions

A user might visit your website several times, so how do you differentiate it from the user’s metric? That’s where the session’s come in handy

“The period of time a user is actively engaged with your website, app, etc. All usage data (Screen Views, Events, Ecommerce, etc.) is associated with a session.” –Google Analytics

Stay Tuned For More About SEO Reports

Reporting can make or break a client’s perspective on how they experience SEO marketing and staying on top of how innovative and knowledgeable your reporting is will mark the longevity of your relationship.

We’ve only covered half of how you can maximize engagement for your SEO reports, so keep an eye out for our second post on how to effectively engage performance and insights through your SEO reports by subscribing to our blog.