Ranking Reports Don’t Mean Anything! What Effective Reporting Looks Like In 2014

For some time, keyword rankings have served as the most important metric that business owners are concerned with regarding their SEO progress reports and the success of their online campaigns.

There are always questions about rankings and how well or poor the supposed “magic” keywords are doing.

This singular metric certainly proved as a viable means for understanding how well a particular campaign was performing in 2008; but in 2014, there are multitudes of metrics that search strategists and business owners can look to in order to determine the validity of their ongoing SEO campaign.

Today’s search marketing landscape shows that rankings are not the only way qualified consumers can find a particular business, product or service. From social media platforms to third-party hosts, credible directories to press releases; SEO success in 2014 is really determined by the volume of appropriate environments a particular brand can be found within, as well as how meaningful the relationship between a brand and their traffic is.

I certainly can’t blame the business owner for thinking highly of ranking reports, especially when most inexperienced, money-hungry search agencies promise to increase keyword rankings within a month of working on the site.

However, the reality is that it is impossible to do this so quickly unless your dedicated SEO specialist is performing black hat tactics that may improve rankings for a month, but ultimately end up getting your website flagged by search engines as manipulative and/or spammy.

Aside from keyword rankings, business owners should expect to receive reports that discuss and highlight other critical aspects of their SEO campaign that not only touch upon rankings, but also qualified traffic, conversions and user engagement.

What Should Your Search Agency Report On?

1.  Traffic to your site: You need to know where most of your traffic comes from. Is it through Organic channels? What about referral traffic derived from your Facebook account?

This metric helps you understand what channel provides the most opportunities for connecting with qualified consumers depending on the nature of your business and the medium people use to reach your site. It also helps you decide where to focus your resources and content development efforts, maximizing efficiency and allowing you to remain agile in how you allocate your time and energy.

A few specific channels to look for in your report are:

  • Organic Traffic: Traffic from organic searches like Google, Yahoo, Bing and other search engines. This could either mean you have good rankings or that people are searching for the keywords within your site.
  • Direct Referral: Consists of all the people who visit your site directly. Whether by typing or pasting your URL directly into the search field.
  • Referral Traffic: This is all the traffic coming from other domains including: links from other sites, directories, mentions, blogs and other places (This is where back links comes handy).
  • Social Referral Traffic: Results showing traffic to your website from social media sites like Facebook, Google+, Twitter and other social platforms.

2.  User Engagement: One way of finding out what people do when they visit your website is through user engagement. User engagement helps you understand the effectiveness of your content and your site in general, based on the reaction and behavior of your site’s visitors.

In order to understand the relationship your website has with its audience, make sure to check out these specific areas:

  • New Sessions: These show the percentage of new sessions to your site. Every time a person visist your site, Analytics will record it as a new session. This includes both new and returning visitors.
  • New Users: Shows the number of new people who visited your site. This is a result of the efforts made on brand awareness, link building and positive rankings on organic search listings.
  • Bounce Rate: Higher bounce rate could mean that the site doesn’t have enough information or that the content that does exist has misleading information. It can also mean that the messaging on your site does not align with the expectations of your audience. The national average of bounce rate is 65%, but it’s advised to stay below 50%. Hint: Red arrow in bounce rate is a good thing in Google Analytics report.
  • Average Duration: This is the average time people spend on your site before leaving. According to Nielson, the national average for time spent on site is only 30 seconds.

3.  Landing Pages: This metric will give you an idea for what the top pages are in terms of popularity and traffic. You can also compare the current pages to older ones in order to find what sections of your site are not performing well and need more attention. This essentially helps you readjust your site depending on the pages you care about the most or depend on for conversions.

4.  Link Building and New Directory Listings: The report should include all the new links accrued and the number of directories joined over a period of time.

5.  Good or Bad News: Make sure your search agency shares all of the details pertaining to the strengths and weaknesses of your campaign. It does nothing for you if you are told that your SEO campaign is performing excellent all of the time, when there are ALWAYS things than can be improved upon.

6.  Next Steps: So that you are always aware of how your investment is being allocated, make sure you hold your search agency accountable for providing detailed information on what has been done to the site, as well as what the next steps are based on the above data.

There are various tools that can provide data and information needed to create an effective SEO report. From my experience, Google Analytics, Webmaster tools and Open Site Explorer are very helpful and easy to use. The good thing about some of these resources is that you as the client can actually log into these sites and view the data for yourself.

Remember, more information is always a good thing but sometimes it leads to confusion. The above guidelines will help anyone know exactly what to look for without getting overwhelmed. Your monthly progress reports should include a summary of what has been done to the site, the position of the website and all future plans for development.

By: Naima

The comments are closed.

No reviews yet