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.

This is the central reason why installing a “site search” function on your website is a necessary investment for making your website a dependable lead generating tool.

Below are 7 advantages you can expect to see from installing a “site search” function on your website.

1. Satisfies customer’s “I want now” attitude

Time is money no doubt and many people who encounter a confusing site with lots of content won’t stick around long to dig through it. A site search gives someone the opportunity to quickly enter keyword phrases on what they’re looking for rather than sift through what they see as a confusing navigational structure.

2. Helps make your site more “customer-centric”

Successful websites must cater to a wide-range of Internet users – knowledge seekers, prospects, buyers and long-term customers. Site search helps you do this since it helps knowledge seekers find information on your site more easily…in essence, site search helps you transform your site from a “one size fits all” to a more “customer-centric” approach.

3. Appeals to the “searcher” type site visitor

People are different and prefer different ways of finding things. If someone uses a Google search to find you, they are more likely to rush to the search box to find information within your site.

4. Obtain valuable marketing data

With the right analytic tools, you can gather data from your site search function that gives you valuable information on who visits your site and how they navigate around it – their desires, intent and behavior. You can see exactly which pages they looked for and found and which ones they read and which ones prompted them to leave the site…this information can be tremendously helpful when planning your marketing strategy.

5. Site search provides insight into usability issues

Saving usage data and click path from real users through your site search function allows you to easily locate where users had difficulty, giving you clues as to places you need to update or expand. Adding typical searched on phrases can help you and your copywriters learn about who is using your site and plan content accordingly.

6. Get new product ideas

Looking at user’s searches can also help you identify new products. If a large number of customers search for something you don’t yet offer, you may want to consider offering a product that fills that void – especially if your site is already bringing in traffic for it.

7. Learn new keywords

Site search may also help you find keywords you weren’t aware, allowing you the opportunity to work those into your content. You may have pages you think are relevant to a specific topic that is missing the words people actually use to look for it. This information can help you refine your content and reach a wider audience.

To be successful online, you need to be mindful on new ways people are using to find and disseminate information online. Those looking to evolve their websites according to user demands could use a good site search function on their sites.

We recommend starting with Google custom search, which is readily adaptable to your needs.

No reason for despair if this happens to you. Rather, look at it as a process of discovery as to why you’re site’s dropped…you may be surprised at what you find out.

Here’s a method you can use to aid in your quest of finding the source of your problem and getting right with Google…watch the video below for more details.

Are you sure it’s a penalty?

There’s a good chance that it’s not even a penalty per se but more of a technical issue. Maybe there’s a crawl problem or you forgot to include keywords in some of your content. Check and see if Google is indexing your pages by typing a keyword phrase, a colon then your web address (keyword:http://www.yoursite.com/) and see if they’re indexing your pages.

Try and identify whether you’re experiencing a rankings drop or a traffic drop…doing that will help you determine what you can do to fix the problem.

Are any links you have causing the problem?

Links are big part of building rankings in the search engines so it stands to reason something could go wrong and cause a drop in rankings or traffic. There are a couple of possible reasons for this.

The first is a more outright penalty for having links from sites that make it look kind of obvious that you’re employing spammy/black hat type practices. They frown upon this and you can consider it to be more of a direct penalty.

On the other hand, you have many sites linking to you that were acquired legitimately through Google’s eyes that may not be valued as much or not at all for whatever reason. Maybe they’re engaging in bad linking practices or another site linking to them is. Either way, the link value you were getting isn’t there anymore so it will be prudent to get rid of that link to try and remedy the problem.

Getting right with Google

Once you’ve identified the problem, now you need to get back on the right side with Google’s spam team. Getting back in is usually based on three factors:

1. Severity of the penalty or mistake
2. Is this the first time or is it a repeat problem?
3. Are you a brand name or little guy?

The more severe the error the tougher it will be getting back into Google. If you’ve engaged in any spammy/black hat practices for example you will have a harder time getting back in. First timers are given a little more leniency than repeat situations. And of course, size matters in this world so if you’re a big brand name site like Sony, Walmart, etc. you will have an easier time.

But if you’re a little guy and it’s the third time on a pretty bad penalty, you’re probably toast…you’re really at the mercy of the Google gods so the best thing to do is when you contact their spam team, be completely honest about any mistakes, etc. and what you discovered as your problem.

It’s possible they may ignore you and at some point, you will need to decide what to do. If you go a couple of months and you’re not getting anywhere with Google after you’ve discovered your problem, consider redirecting your site through a 301 redirect and starting over.

As you see, there are many reasons why you could be experiencing trouble with your Google rankings…watch the video for more details and other technical reasons as to why.

Heat mapping is one such metric that effectively shows you how visitors interact with your landing page. Heat mapping software programs use computer algorithms to simulate where people look and click on your page.

Using a heatmap can allow you to do several things, including:

• Determine exactly where links and ads should go
• Get more visitors to purchase a product or fill out a form
• Predict how site visitors will interact with your page in the future
• Make Web usability testing easy to implement

Heat mapping shows the density of user clicks using a red to green color-coded system. Red indicates a large number of clicks while green indicate fewer clicks.

Here’s a sample heatmap from a U.S. government website.

Not all heat mapping programs are considered the same and while we may recommend one here, we do not guarantee individual results.

Google Analytics offers a tool that shows general web site usage statistics. However, it does not track click ratios for individual links. For instance, if you have two links on the page that go to the same place, Google’s tool will combine the results.

CrazyEgg is another utility that’s much better than Google since it is a visually-based program that allows you to see your page’s effectiveness at a glance. It gives you an idea of how your site is performing from your audience’s perspective, the only perspective that really matters in the end.

Whatever you do, heat mapping is definitely a great tool for helping you increase conversions.

Intuitively, best practices don’t make any sense in the SEO profession.

Best practices grew out of organizational management techniques that became popular in the mid-to-late ‘90s. The idea was that certain groups who achieve “best practices” could then teach those practices to the entire organization.

From a practical point of view that makes sense…but in order for “best practices” to work in a strategic sense, the environment must be relatively static and homogenous…two characteristics online marketing & SEO don’t have at all.

Something that works today may be obsolete by the middle of next week in this business.

Instead of working under a static rule set that’s worked in the past for something (old) and has been popularized (is average), which is what best practices essentially are, use metrics to experiment with what works and what doesn’t.

It’s appealing to think there’s a magic formula of best practices you can employ and then just sit back and watch the sales come in.

But the Internet, you and your competitors are constantly changing.

In the end, “best practices” can offer the value of a good starting point to begin experimentation but nothing more. Establishing a good feedback loop and basing your decisions on results of your experimentation means you will go much farther than just re-hashing someone else’s “best practices” plan.

Focus on your business and be ready to constantly modify what works and what doesn’t.

You can now access the new feature through the “Site performance” reports under the “Labs” section of the tool. It basically shows how fast your site loads in comparison to other sites and also includes a nice graph that shows your site’s speed over time.

It’s a small step in their larger effort to make the web faster for their users. Studies show that speeding up a site leads to higher user retention and activity, along with lowering costs and increasing revenue.

In addition to general site speed, Google also details specific pages and their load time. They give tips on how to improve speed on a per-page basis.

This new tool can be very helpful to ensuring your pages load as quickly as possible. While we don’t know how much significance will be placed on the new ranking factor, you can be sure that having fast loading web pages will be beneficial to your site. However, since they are adding this new feature to Webmaster Tools, it may be safe to assume that page speed will become an important ranking factor.

See a screen shot of one the site performance reports below.

But the truth is, the Internet and by extension the world is a very complex place. So mass generalizing the latest popular search engine optimization technique is a bad idea. You simply cannot derive universal truths from a single landing page’s test results.

Any “learnings” from a single landing page are likely to be uncertain at best.

Why? It’s because of what science dubs as “false causality”, meaning “correlation does not imply causation.”

This phrase is referring to a common error people make, no matter if they’re thinking about a science experiment or a webpage. That is, they assume that since two effects are related or occur together, one causes the other. However, this assumption fails to recognize the fact there could be a third variable, or confounding variable, that causes the other two.

In landing page optimization, it’s dangerous to rationalize results after the test. Rather than focusing on elements of design that had nothing to do with improving performance, try to come up with diverse and interesting ideas for each landing page test you do. Be forward thinking and do not simply accept the most apparent analytic answer.

Read in more detail this concept along with some real world examples from this Search Engine Watch article from Tim Ash.

I was interested, since analytics are key to measuring success and refining your online marketing efforts, and those who specialize in analytics can clearly see results across the varied industries of their clients – surely they must have some worthwhile advice.

For example, 5 key areas the Best of Web Analytics Guide include how to:

You’ll Have to Sign In – But Consider It An Opportunity
You’ll have to either sign in or sign up with yor contact information in order to get to the page where you can download the guide. Which means this guide is a lead generation vehicle for Web Analytics.

This should be of interest to you as a marketer, even if you’re not considering using Web Trends. Although a nuisance for many who just want the free content, getting on the “lead lists” for companies like this gives you a firsthand look at how competitors or operators in certain industries carry out their campaigns.

I may get a follow up call or email. And you can bet that I love to collect and analyze those, from all the companies in our industry. Designers, take note of layouts and typesetting methods used. Copywriters, see the approach the copy takes. You’ll notice trends and be able to spot the ones that are working and used more often.

Go here to see the landing page from the promotional email: Best of Web Analytics Guide