7 Best Practices to Create the Perfect SEO Report

Best Practices for an SEO Report

There aren’t many digital marketers who look forward to the opportunity to report. Putting together SEO reports may be a laborious and time-consuming process, and it’s disappointing to find out that our customers (or our superiors) are merely scanning them for top-line findings. Nevertheless, demonstrates that the efforts put in paid off. The dissemination of reliable information fosters trust and establishes the groundwork for continued success. Marketers need to have an understanding of how to maximize the impact of data.

1. Determine Which KPIs Are Most Appropriate.

There is no standard list of key performance indicators (KPIs) that can be applied to SEO. You need to understand your customer and their business or product to discover the KPIs that matter to determine the relevant KPIs for your campaign – try asking them this set of questions to get things started.

The next step is to determine the business objective. Does the customer desire to raise the quantity of a product that they buy? Increase the visibility of the brand? Choose an SEO strategy for the company that will help them get closer to accomplishing whatever it is they have set out to do for their organization. After that, select key performance indicators (KPIs) that are in line with that approach.

An admissions office at a higher education institution has the objective of doubling the number of leads it receives for prospective online students. To make a contribution toward reaching that aim, the SEO team has made the decision to investigate the kind of search queries people use while looking at e-learning programs offered by colleges. The appropriate key performance indicators (KPIs) for this strategy would be an improved rank position for the targeted SAT keywords, an improvement in organic traffic to the SAT pages, and an increase in organic conversions on the SAT targets.

2. Eliminate Extraneous Items

Does your report contain pages and metrics that aren’t crucial to the achievement of your client’s goals but are nevertheless included? Remove them completely! It is possible to get information overload if you try to cram too many charts and metrics into a single report. Reviewers are bombarded with so much material that the report is useless to them rather than providing them with the abundance of information that you anticipated.

As an illustration, the objective of a software business is to raise the number of demo requests. You, as the SEO, have made the decision to assist them in accomplishing their objective by working to improve the ranking as well as the click-through rate of pages that are known to be conversion drivers. The key performance indicators (KPIs) relating to ranking, traffic, and conversions should be highlighted in your reports, but non-critical metrics such as average time on page should be omitted.

3. Stay away from jargon and focus on simplifying the language.

As is the case with any other sector, search engine optimization (SEO) has its own practitioner jargon. Words and measurements that are common to you and your colleagues are frequently incomprehensible to the customers that you serve. Spend some time defining and explaining the data as well as their significance in the reports you create. Make use of analogies and examples in your analysis writing so that you can firmly state what the data implies and what actions to take as a direct result of it.

An excellent illustration of this would be inbound links. Not only do they go by another moniker, which is “backlinks,” but others who aren’t in the SEO industry frequently get confused about them as well. You may explain that inbound links are links from other websites to your website, and that these links function similarly to votes of popularity. Google will trust you more if you have more links from sites that are both relevant to your content and of good quality.

4. Select Useful Diagrams to Represent Your Data

A poor display may make even the most compelling data look useless. Choose charts and graphs that are able to transmit metrics in a way that is not only clear and precise but also leaves the reader with an impression. Bar charts, pie charts, and line charts are three of the most common types of charts used today. Bar charts are useful for comparing different types of data, and pie charts and line charts are useful for illustrating different components of a whole (good for showing changes over time).

Consider the following scenario: you want to display the percentage of traffic that comes from various referral sources, but you have 20 referral sources, and each of them sends nearly the same amount of traffic. You decide to use a pie chart to do so. Not only would it be difficult to extract any useful insights from such a complex pie chart (twenty slices is a lot for a pie!), but it would also make the chart difficult to read.

5. Offer Some Insights Into It

Until they are accompanied by insights, numbers are nothing more than vanity metrics. In other words, you shouldn’t just stop at providing your customers with the raw data. Discover valuable insights from the data and convey those to your customers in a way that is relevant to them. Put yourself in the position of the customer and try to answer the question, “What course of action should I take in response to this information?”

Example: Rather than merely mentioning a metric such as the bounce rate and allowing the customer to come to their own conclusions, you could consider saying something along the lines of, “Your home page’s bounce rate is higher than normal for mobile users.” It’s possible that this is because your mobile site takes longer to load than the average for the industry. We suggest making mobile pages load faster in order to reduce the amount of users that leave without engaging with them.

6. Break it up in a meaningful way

Your customers will have a far better understanding of the state of their website if you group the data you provide them. You have the option of segmenting performance data according to content type (for example, blog pages versus landing pages), audience (for example, United States against Canada), or goal (ex: informational pages vs. sales pages). This eliminates the possibility of comparing apples and oranges.

As an illustration, you have goals for the top of the funnel for your blog posts and goals for the bottom of the funnel for your landing pages. Don’t group them all together in one category. It is important to keep track of metrics like traffic and rankings for your blog entries, as well as conversion rates and other data for landing pages.

7. Relate the Success of SEO to the Success of the Business

The ultimate purpose of search engine optimization is to… Your customers need to be able to understand how your performance is contributing to the things that are important to them (revenue), or else you run the danger of having a high rate of customer turnover. Before you deliver a report to a client, you should ask yourself if that client will be able to understand the relationship between the SEO data you provide and the performance of their company.

Try expressing something like, “this new keyword ranking is bringing in 200 new visitors per month, which has led to a 25% increase in purchases,” rather than “we got you ranking on page 1 for this phrase.”

Now That Is An SEO Report That Deserves To Be Reported On

If you follow these instructions, the time you spend evaluating data and putting together reports will be time well spent. In order to assist your clients in growing their businesses, you should concentrate on including helpful analytics, expressing insights, and tying the SEO initiatives to real outcomes.