The Value of Your SEO Reporting

SEO is an unstoppable process. In the beginning, you struggle to rank your site first on Google and when you finally do, you can’t just enjoy this moment with a glass of wine because you have to continue working to keep it there.

But how do you know that you’ve chosen the right strategy to follow and whether or not it’s working as planned?

This is where SEO reporting comes to help you. The surprising fact is that only 22% of all the marketers implement data-driven initiatives, but it plays a leading role in their SEO success. 

And yes, you might have been creating occasional reports and even include your favorite metrics in there, but are you sure you’re using SEO reporting to the fullest extent of its possibilities? 

Keep on reading to figure out what you were missing all this time and how to unveil the true power and value of your SEO reports.

Why is SEO reporting crucial?

Using proper SEO reporting may become your competitive advantage. You might be surprised but 74% of marketing specialists are not able to tell you how their efforts have affected the company’s SEO results because they keep losing their primary focus and get it all wrong. 

This is not about dull reports, but in the big picture, you get when you gather all the necessary metrics and analytics. With proper SEO reporting, you track, collect and analyze data in order to get a clear understanding of your current status and be able to say what strategy works better. 

Companies with a serious attitude toward their marketing outcomes use reports to constantly monitor what actions bring more engagement with their users and, therefore, know exactly what type of content brings the highest conversion. This way instead of putting time and money into actions with hypothetically good results, they focus on trending topics that have proven chances of high engagement with their target audience.  

Also, Read: Vital Google Marketing Tools You Should Not Miss

The value of SEO analytics to boost rankings and improve sales funnel

What’s the point in spending your time and money on digital marketing efforts without having a big picture? In order to implement changes you need to have a clear understanding of who your leads are, where do they come from, what makes them stay and convert into customers.  

Reporting is the key to your success. It keeps all the parameters and metrics in order so you know exactly if your funnel is working the way it was supposed to be and what brought the most value to your SEO services. 

There is a huge variety of metrics to use in your report, but you don’t need all of them to understand and track your performance and how your sales funnel works. 

At the top of your funnel, you should start with tracking such basic metrics:

• Traffic and its channels
• Keyword rankings and 
• Conversion rate
• Engagement on social media

And here is a quick guide on how to start taking advantage of simple but valuable SEO reporting.

• First, focus on the quality of your content and how well it brings you visitors. You can do it with Traffic and keyword rank tracking. 
• After, you will need to have a clear picture of how well that content encourages visitors to come closer to conversion. Here you might be more interested in engagement rates and return of users. 
• Don’t forget about optimizing bounce rate, as it may cause drops in positions.
• Then, in order to track how well the traffic you get turns into leads, you might want to use non-purchase conversions as well as email open rates. 
• And lastly, you’d want to monitor the conversion of leads into real customers and be able to answer how much money all those efforts brought. In this case, you may opt for metrics like conversion rate, goal conversion, and the average purchase per customer.

Example of beneficial SEO reporting [based on Google Analytics]

The goal of this article isn’t to dive deep into every possible metric that you can include in your SEO report, you can read Critical SEO Metrics You Need To Track here. For now, we’ll provide you with an understanding of why you need them. Let’s dive into specific examples to show you how you can benefit from implementing SEO reporting. 

“The number of organic visitors” is a must metric in your report, so let’s start with this one.

This is a very important metric to focus on as it will help you have a clear understanding of how your actions encouraged internet users to engage with your website. 

It’s easy to track your organic traffic with the help of well-known Google Analytics by going to Acquisition > All Traffic > Channels > Organic Search. 

Because SEO reporting is not about writing down numbers, when you’re tracking organic traffic, it’s important to dive deeper into what pages users are landing on. This way you know exactly what content attracts more visitors and can start analyzing the reasons for it in order to implement changes for an increase in traffic and, accordingly, higher rankings.

Also, it would be beneficial to figure where all your traffic comes from. To do it go to Google Analytics again, click on Acquisition > All Traffic > Source/Medium, and use the obtained data to know where to focus your money and efforts.

The second metric we’ll take as an example is “Conversion”. Because the end result of any marketing activity is the overall revenue it has brought,  SEO specialists use this metric to know exactly how many visitors ended up as real clients. 

The desired action that you want your users to take may vary depending on your business type. It can be a completed purchase, paid membership signup, preceded download of an e-book, a newsletter subscription, and many more. 

In order to track those actions, webmasters use call-to-action buttons or special pages to be able to monitor interactions. At this point, our job is to know the exact number of converted visitors into leads or customers in order to know whether our efforts have paid off and what we should be doing next. 

That is why this metric is highly important because you can track the impact of your SEO efforts and be able to calculate your ROI (Return On Investment).

To measure conversions just go to your Google Analytics and click on “Admin”. From here you can navigate to the “View” block and click on “Goals”. Remember to assign a monetary value to your goal if your aim is to calculate your ROI.

We recommend using Google’s official guide about how to set up goals in Google Analytics in case you strive for more in-depth information.  

After you’ve set up your goal, give it a month to gather data and then begin measuring the overall outcomes of your SEO efforts. To do it just follow the following steps. First, go again to your Google Analytics, click on Acquisition > All Traffic > Channels. 

At this point, you must focus solely on the second row called Organic Search. Because we aim to track the success of our goal, you have to look at the “Conversions” block.

1. Goal Conversion is the average number of achieved conversions.
2. Goal Completions show us the exact number of people that completed the action we’ve planned.
3. Goal Value essentially tells you the ROI on your SEO efforts.

This is a small example of how empty numbers gain the power to show you what outcomes your SEO activities bring so you can begin tracking your effectiveness over time. 

Let’s say you’ve hired an SEO Company that costs you $800 each month. If you’re not able to see how much profit it has generated, you may be massively overpaying without knowing it. But if you’ve set up goals and tracked them for some time, you have full control of the goals values during a certain period of time. This way you will decide whether the agency’s results are worth that $800 a month. 

Conclusion

With proper SEO reporting, you can monitor every tiny bit of information about your website’s activity and use this in your favor.

With the right metrics, you are able to identify what pieces of content attract more visitors, define how many leads you need to secure per customer, calculate the value of every lead, and convert your SEO efforts into real numbers and worth. 

By implementing data-driven initiatives, you know exactly how well your content and SEO perform throughout your sales funnel, where to focus your efforts, and why. 

About Author –

Julia is a professional business development manager with proven experience in customer acquisition, strategic partnerships, and outbound marketing. Now she takes care of global marketing and business growth at Wincher, a keyword rank tracker.