The Most Important SEO Reports
SEO is comprised of many functions, one of which is reporting. After all, if you’re going to be investing time and money on optimizing your website, building inbound links, writing link worthy content, and sharing your content in social media – don’t you want to know if it’s working over time? There are so many data points that it’s easy to get bogged down in SEO reports. Large corporations with huge teams might choose to pull and analyze every SEO report available, but there are a handful of reports that will paint an accurate picture for the majority of website owners including the following:
Organic traffic report
Typically, the execution of an SEO campaign coincides with traffic increases from multiple sources, but the most important report for SEO purposes is the organic traffic report. After all, this is the primary goal of the campaign, isn’t it? To increase organic search traffic? For most websites organic traffic isn’t going to shoot up every month, there could be ebbs and flows depending on seasonality, but over a period of time the overall trend should be upward growth as an SEO campaign is executed.
Keyword report
Website owners shouldn’t get too wrapped up in keyword ranking data because it fluctuates so much, but the data is still worth looking at on a regular basis in order to see what keywords are gaining traction and what keywords might need to be focused on going forward. It’s also a good idea to separate keywords driving traffic into branded and non-branded lists. Branded keywords are obviously important, but a good SEO campaign will drive traffic from visitors who have never heard of the brand before.
Referral traffic report
An important part of an SEO campaign is inbound link building. These links help to establish trust with the search engines but ideally, they should also be delivering traffic from target audience members. Traffic coming from these links confirms that they’re relevant and will improve SEO efforts.
Organic conversion report
Organic traffic is great, what’s even better is when that traffic is converting by buying something, signing up for something, or filling out a lead form. Not every organic visitor is going to convert, especially if they’re just conducting research, but the traffic should eventually be translating into conversions. If it’s not, the website might require some conversion improvements.
While SEO reporting is important, you don’t need to worry so much about the data. It can take months for the search engines to re-index a site and notice new links. Once the campaign has been underway, create reports regularly but not too often. SEO doesn’t require daily reporting. Nothing in SEO changes that quickly!
Categorized in: SEO
LIKE AND SHARE THIS ARTICLE:
