SEO Reporting Is All About Your Objectives – Decide On Those First

It may seem extremely simplistic to say this but the purpose of SEO is to deliver better results from your website. You can request daily, weekly or monthly tracking and observe metrics go up or go down but that is only of relative interest. First, decide on your target numbers and timescale. Only then will your site analysis report tell you if you are on track to meet them.

Relevant targets vary by industry and type of business. A service company may wish to develop an email list and therefore subscriber numbers are the target. A company selling physical products will definitely count conversion rates and sales value as their objective. A large Fortune 500 corporation may consider visitor numbers merely as marketing and branding outreach measurements. There is no "one size fits all" SEO report.

Traffic figures alone are not a good indicator

For most businesses, traffic figures alone can be meaningless if a large proportion of visitors simply read a blog article and never click through to your core proposition pages. There is a lot more to be interpreted from naked traffic figures, such as where the traffic is coming from, which sources, geographies and what demographics.

What are the SEO reports that matter?

SEO is focused on performance is search engines. That is its primary purpose. Therefore pure SEO reports extract information from tools such as Google’s API, or tools that use similar entry points to the major search engines. There are also site and page performance reports that are generally a start point such as:

Search Engine Ranking report

Also known as a SEO rank report, this important information shows how keywords are performing in search engine results page (SERP) rankings. Data for this can be drawn from Google Search Console (previously known as Google Webmaster Tools) which shows indexing status and visibility of websites.

Keyword Position Ranking Report

This is a very closely scrutinized report because important keywords for a website can rapidly move up or down in SERPS. SEO effort should result in a steady improvement and this report is often used to gauge the success of a SEO program.

Site Analysis report

The website analysis report is one of the most important for any business. It presents metrics on a large number of factors, from individual page performance in terms of results achieved to which links on a page received the most clicks. It forms the basis of a task list for our website optimization specialists.

Take the first step to proper website reporting

Choosing which metrics to report on and then presenting them in a useful executive summary dashboard or weekly emailed report is a skill all to itself. There is a fine line between getting the information you need and being deluged with too much detail. We at Avada have been doing this since 1999 and our happy client list depends on our reports to keep a finger on the pulse of their websites. Contact us today on 954-478-6944 and see just how easy we make it to get the SEO reports you need.