Search engine optimization (SEO) campaigns yield different results. As a digital marketer like you, gaining favorable results is always the end game.
But clearly reporting on a particular SEO campaign’s performance to a client can be a complicated task. How do you convey the value of your work and quantify its results? How do you highlight successes while also addressing areas that need improvement?
It’s a no-brainer: an SEO report is crucial in any marketing campaign. Yet the technicalities that come with it will sometimes be difficult to present. Thankfully, there are methods for reporting on SEO campaigns that can help you communicate easily and effectively with clients, even if they don’t have much experience with digital marketing.
This post explains how to report your SEO campaign results and the elements you need to include in it. Continue reading to learn more.
What’s An SEO Report
SEO is boosting your website’s visibility in search engines so that more people can find it on search engine results pages (SERPs). A good SEO report will help you know how well your site is performing and what steps you can take to improve its performance standing.
An SEO report is a summary of what your website’s SEO strategy is and its current performance. It gives you an overview of your website’s organic traffic, backlinks, keyword research, and more.
The report will also help you identify any problems that you might have with your site or its content. This can be anything from duplicate content to broken links, or even something such as misspelled words.
Core Metrics Used To Measure Progress
In this section, the post explores how to use analytics tools to measure SEO campaign progress. It’s essential to keep in mind that there are two types of metrics: core metrics and non-core metrics. Core metrics are the ones that matter most when measuring SEO campaign success; they include organic traffic (visits), keyword rankings (or SERP listings), and bot crawls (how often crawlers visit your website).
Non-core metrics include site errors, user engagement data like time on site or pages per visit, conversion rate information, and backlinks added or lost (with data sources). These will be covered later on.
1. Organic Traffic
Organic traffic is the number of visitors to your website from search engines. In this case, ‘organic’ means visitors garnered without a paid advertisement.
To calculate organic traffic, you must add all the numbers in your analytics tool and visit conversions. This gives you an estimate of how many people visited your site over a given period. Keep track of any changes in rankings or total visitors each month by comparing these numbers with your previous reports.
2. Keyword Rankings
Keyword rankings are a valuable metric for measuring your SEO success. By tracking the number of times your target keywords appear in organic search results, you can determine which keywords have the most traffic and which ones aren’t producing results.
It’s crucial to measure keyword rankings over time so that you can identify trends and track progress. You can compare your rankings by device (desktop, tablet, or mobile), location (Canada vs. the US), and search engines.
3. Site Errors And Other Issues
Site errors can affect the search engine rankings of your site. These include broken links, broken images, links to malware or spammy sites, competitor links, duplicate content (i.e., the same article found on more than one page), pages with low-quality content, or no content at all (i.e., 404 error pages).
In addition to these problems, some other issues can affect your website’s performance in the SERPs:
- Pages Without Titles: A page title is an important ranking factor because it helps both algorithms determine a page’s relevance to a specific search query. If you don’t have any titles on your site, then search engines will be unable to fully understand what each page is about and may not rank it as highly as it could if those titles were present.
- Small Amounts Of Text: Even though search engines have gotten better at understanding images over time (especially when using image recognition software), they still prefer text-based results over image results whenever possible because they tend not only to provide more information but also show up higher up in search results due to their prominence on-screen space alone
Non-core Metrics Used To Measure Progress
Now that you know the core metrics used to measure SEO campaign progress, next is to discuss non-core metrics. Here are some of them:
1. Conversion Rate
Conversion rate is the ratio of people who take a desired action divided by the total number of people who visit a site.
Conversion rate is one of the most important metrics used to measure the progress of your SEO campaign. It should be measured on an ongoing basis throughout the term, and you should pay particular attention when it changes significantly from week to week or month to month.
2. Time On Site Or Pages Per Visit
Pages per visit (P/V) is the average number of pages visitors view before leaving your site. For example, if you had 100 visitors who viewed an average of 2.5 pages each, your P/V would be 2.5.
On the other hand, time on site (TOS) is the average time spent on your site by visitors who stay longer than one minute. If you had 100 visitors that stayed on your website for an average of 5 minutes each, then TOS would be 5 minutes.
3. Inbound Links Added Or Lost
One of the best ways to measure your SEO success is by looking at backlinks. Backlinks are a measure of how many websites link to you and also a measure of how well-respected those websites are. This means that more backlinks equal more traffic.
Nonetheless, another element needs consideration: the quality of those backlinks. If you get one website linking out on their homepage with an anchor text pointing directly at your site’s uniform resource locator (URL) but don’t have any other link coming in from elsewhere, such as blogs or press releases, that doesn’t mean much in terms of measuring success.
The goal here should be getting as many high-quality backlinks as possible, otherwise known as authority sites or topically relevant properties, that’ll help your rankings in search engines by including them on their lists.
Conclusion
Reporting your SEO campaign results is essential for measuring your SEO success and revealing the amendment you might need to improve results. It’s essential to use the metrics that are most important to your business.
