As SEO professionals, reports are a key part of our communication toolbox.
We spend time running workshops and writing summaries of work and project plans. These are all part of our process for gaining buy-in and showing value from the work we’re doing.
Our reports are just as important.
Where We Go Wrong
The problem that we sometimes run into as SEO professionals is not thinking about the report as a communication tool. We take shortcuts, expecting the data to speak for itself. We don’t worry enough about how it can be taken out of context.
If done right, SEO reports will continue to reinforce the messaging we’ve been giving through our training, proposals, and pitches.
When done wrong, SEO reports cause confusion, sometimes panic, and, overall, a sinking sense of distrust from our stakeholders.
What Is The Report For?
When creating reports, we must identify what the report should show.
If we are reporting on the outcome of a specific project, then we need to consider the original hypothesis.
What were we aiming for in that project? What were the promised milestones and the measures of success? They all need to be included – even the metrics that don’t look so good.
Is this a regular report, like a monthly update on performance? If so, we need to consider all the areas of SEO that we are directly affecting, as well as areas outside of our control that can help explain any increases or decreases in performance. There is a need to give the context in which our SEO work operates.
This should form the starting point from which we choose the report metrics.
Aspects Of A Good SEO Report
A good SEO report will help communicate insight and the next steps. It should have sufficient detail to help the reader make decisions.
Include Relevant Data
Reports should include data that is relevant to the topic being reviewed.
They should not overwhelm a reader with unnecessary information.
Keep Them Brief
Reports should be brief enough that pertinent data and insight are easy to find.
Brevity might be the difference between a report being read and being ignored.
Keep the data being reported succinct. Sometimes, a chart will better illustrate the data than a table.
Remember The Audience
Reports should be tailored to the needs of the recipient. It may be the report is being produced for another SEO professional, or the managing director of the company.
These two audiences may need very different data to help explain the progress of SEO activity.
The needs of the report’s reader to make a decision and identify the next steps must be considered. A fellow SEO may need the details of which pages are returning a 404 server error, but the managing director likely won’t.
Make Them Easy To Understand
They should not include unexplained jargon or expect readers to infer meaning from statistics.
Write reports with the recipient’s knowledge in mind. Liberal use of jargon for someone not in the industry might put them off reading a report.
Conversely, jargon and acronyms will be fine for someone who knows SEO and can help to keep reports brief.
Keep Them Impartial
SEO reports are a form of internal marketing. They can be used to highlight all of the good SEO work that’s been carried out.
Reports should be honest and unbiased, however. They shouldn’t gloss over negatives.
Decreases in performance over time can highlight critical issues. These shouldn’t be omitted from the report because they don’t look good. They are a perfect way of backing up your expert recommendations for the next steps.
Provide Insight
Data alone is likely to be unhelpful to most.
Reports shouldn’t just be figures. Insight and conclusion must be drawn, too.
This means that, as an SEO expert, we should be able to add value to the report by analyzing the data. Our conclusions can be presented as actions or suggestions for a way forward.
Reporting On Metrics Correctly
Metrics used incorrectly can lead to poor conclusions being made. An example of this is the “site-wide bounce rate.”
A bounce is typically measured as a visit to a website that only led to one page being viewed and no other interactions occurring.
Bounce rate is the percentage of all visits to the site that ended up as a bounce.
The bounce rate of a page can be useful, but only really if it is being compared with something else.
For instance, if changes have been made to a page’s layout and bounce rate increases, it could point to there being a problem with visitors navigating with the new layout.
However, reporting on bounce rate of a page without looking deeper at other metrics can be misleading.
For instance, if the changes to the page were designed to help visitors find information more easily, then the increase in bounce rate could be an indicator of the new design’s success.
The difference in bounce rate cannot be used in isolation as a measure of success.
Similarly, reporting on the average bounce rate across the entire website is usually misleading.
Some pages on the website might have a high bounce rate but be perfectly fine. For others, it indicates a problem. For example:
A contact page might see a lot of visitors bounce as they find a phone number and leave the site to call it.
A homepage or product page with a high bounce rate is usually a sign that the page is not meeting the needs of users, however.
Reports should look to draw conclusions from a range of metrics.
Metrics Need Context
Few metrics can be used in isolation and still enable accurate insight to be drawn.
For example, think of crawling and indexing data.
A report on the number of URLs that are being crawled by Googlebot sounds like a fair metric to demonstrate the technical health of the website.
Though what does it show, really?
An increase in URLs crawled could indicate that Googlebot is finding more of your site’s pages that it previously couldn’t. If you have been working on creating new sections of your site, this may be a positive trend.
However, if you dig deeper and discover that the URLs Googlebot has been crawling are the result of spam attacks on your site, this is actually a big problem.
In isolation, the volume of crawled pages doesn’t give any real context on the technical SEO of the site. There needs to be more context in order to draw reliable conclusions.
Over-Reliance On Metrics
There are other metrics that are relied on a little too much in SEO reports – measures of the authority of a page or domain, for instance.
These third-party metrics do well in guessing the ranking potential of a page in the eyes of search engines, but they are never going to be 100% accurate.
They can help to show if a site is improving over time, but only against the calculations of that reporting tool.
These sorts of metrics can be useful for SEO professionals to use as a rough gauge of the success of an authority-building project. However, they can cause problems when reported to managers, clients, and stakeholders.
If they are not properly informed of what these scores mean, it is easy for them to hold on to them as the goal for SEO. They are not.
Well-converting organic traffic is the goal. The two metrics will not always correlate.
Which Metrics Matter?
The metrics that should be used together to illustrate SEO performance depend on the purpose of the report. It also depends on what the recipient needs to know.
Some clients or managers may be used to receiving reports with certain metrics in them. It may be that the SEO reports feed into their own reporting, and as such, they expect to see certain metrics.
It is a good idea to find out from the report recipient if there is anything in particular they would like to know.
The report should always link back to the brand’s business and marketing goals. The metrics used in the report should communicate if the goals are being met.
For instance, if a pet store’s marketing goal is to increase sales of “non-slip pet bowls,” then metrics to include in the SEO report could be:
Overall traffic to the pages in the www.example.com/pet-accessories/bowls/non-slip folder.
Organic traffic to those pages.
Overall and organic conversions on these pages.
Overall and organic sales on these pages.
Bounce rate of each of these pages.
Traffic volume landing on these pages from the organic SERPs.
Over time, this report will help identify if SEO is contributing to the goal of increasing sales of non-slip pet bowls.
Organic Performance Reports
These are reports designed to give a picture of a website’s ongoing SEO performance. They give top-level insight into the source and behavior of organic traffic over time.
They should include data that indicates if the business, marketing, and SEO goals are being met.
An SEO performance report should look at the organic search channel, both on its own and in relation to other channels.
By doing this, we can see the impact of other channels on the success of SEO. We can also identify any trends or patterns.
These reports should allow the reader to identify the impact of recent SEO activity on organic traffic.
Metrics To Include
Some good metrics to report on for organic performance reports include:
Overall Visits
The number of visits to the website gives something to compare the organic search visits to.
We can tell if organic traffic is decreasing whereas overall traffic is increasing or if organic traffic is growing despite an overall drop in traffic.
It is possible to use overall traffic visit data to discern if there is seasonality in the website’s popularity.