One of the best ways to prove enterprise-level SEO provides a strong, consistent return on investment is to provide ongoing SEO reports to your bosses or clients.
Many SEO professionals in the past relied on providing simple visibility reports that detailed the rankings for particular keyword phrases in the top search engines – namely Google, Yahoo and Bing. While this data can provide some excellent illustration of a project’s success, it is possible that reporting of this nature can be misleading or irrelevant when considering things from a conversion/revenue perspective.
Continue reading to learn about 3 essential components your SEO report should have so your bosses or clients can have actionable insight into how their SEO campaigns are progressing…please note that each client is different so you may have to provide modified/customized reporting formats.
1. Executive Summary
This summary provides a quick overview of the SEO campaign’s performance and describes what activities were performed since the last report. This section can also provide other metrics that apply to the client’s particular situation.
2. Visibility Reporting
When starting an SEO project, you collect a list of keyword phrases you intend to target, giving you a baseline ranking report for positioning in the search engines. Progress is measure against this baseline ranking on an ongoing basis.
A good visibility report provides the baseline ranking, the prior report’s rankings and the current rankings for your chosen phrases. It’s important that people who look at your report understand these rankings represent a snapshot in time, as they may not actually match when the report is actually completed and delivered.
WARNING: Unethical SEOs can manipulate this type of information, targeting easy-to-rank for keywords and making it look like the client is farther along than they really are.
3. Analytics Reporting
Analytics should be the primary driver for any actionable data contained in an SEO report. Any number of key performance indicators can apply, including:
- Organic traffic (broken into branded and non-branded searches when possible)
- Organic conversion percentage
- Average order value
- Revenue per visit
There are many ways you can present this type of information but the most important thing to remember is that analytics data should drive ongoing strategy and adjustments to an ongoing SEO campaign.
Many have a tendency to think that search engine rankings for a particular set of keywords are all that matter but realistically, conversions are what matter so don’t forget to include this type of information in any SEO report you provide clients.
Simply tracking organic results is doing a big disservice to them.