SEO Reporting and Analysis
One of the key parts of any SEO process must be tracking and accessing the results of the work that is being done. What you track and how you measure the results will depend very much on the particular nuances of your business model and the objectives of your SEO.
If you track and measure then you can see what needs to be improved. The various tracking and analytical tools available make it very easy to track and measure search engine activity and make decisions based on what you can see.
If you work with a professional SEO then they should be tracking the following:-
Rankings
The first sign of success is an upward movement in your keyword rankings. Assuming you are targeting the right keywords, an upward movement in rankings is always positive. Some keywords will take longer to get to the right position than others and some keywords may even decrease in rank as others move forward but as long as the balance is in your favour this is positive sign. The key factor to remember is that rankings are only one part of performance measurement. On their own they don’t denote success because rankings without traffic are useless and traffic without conversions is waste of money.
Traffic
As we have noted above rankings without traffic are useless. If you’re doing SEO you don’t want to be No1 for vanities sake you want to be there to gain quality, targeted traffic on keywords which are relevant to your business. Measuring SEO without taking into account traffic means your measurement will be fundamentally flawed.
The traffic elements you want to start with are –
Referring Share – You should be looking at every site which refers users to your site. This is crucial because it gives that extra level of valuation to the links you are building by seeing not just the PageRank value they may be offering you but also if they are driving you traffic.
Traffic from Search Engines – This will tell you which search engine actually performs best of you. It can help you identify if the rankings in different engines produce better or worse results and whether your share of traffic from the engines matches its profile.
Traffic from Terms – This will show you how the profile of traffic is increasing and decreasing per term. Ideally you are looking to see that keywords that you are optimising and that have improved position are driving you more traffic.
Pages with No Traffic – This helps you ascertain which pages are not benefiting from the optimisation. This could be because of competitive issues around the keywords targeted or technical issues on indexing.
Conversions
Similarly to rankings with no traffic, traffic with no conversions is of very little value. It does depend on your sites objective of course because if you are actually just trying to drive traffic so you can sell advertising on your site then traffic on its own can be valuable but for most the ultimate aim is to gain an enquiry, booking, sale or conversion. These will be the elements which can have a return on investment attached to them and therefore these are the ultimate measurement of the value being driven by SEO.
The conversion elements you want to start with are –
Conversions from referrers – This shows you which referrers are actually generating you business as well as value from links. This can be an interesting way to improve conversions. You could decide to build a more extensive relationship with these referrers to gain more conversions or you could try and profile the referrer to seek other similar referrers.
Conversions from search – This can show whether overall the percentage of conversions from search is decreasing or increasing compared to other online channels and how each search engine is performing. The different engines do work slightly differently so you may decide to focus on one or another based on conversions.
Conversions from terms – This will show you how the profile of conversions is increasing and decreasing per term. Ideally you are looking to see that keywords that you are optimising and that have improved position are driving you more business and decide which should have more of a focus. If a keyword has moved from position 10 in Google to position 5 and is generating 4 times as many conversions, it is likely that a move to position 1 would have a very significant effect (remember clicks at the top of the page are at multiples of the clicks that appear lower down the page). This can give you a very clear ROI model for refocusing or increasing budget around particular keywords.
Online Reputation
Understanding how you brand is discussed and represent online is an important gauge of your SEO success. Firstly if you have unwanted comments or competitors appearing on Page 1 for you brand name, then SEO can help move these lower down the rankings and placed positive comment and links that directly concern you in front of them. Assessing how the links in the top 20 change as you do SEO can give you an idea of how successfully you are supporting your brand. Also measuring the number of mentions for your brand and URL across the web can show not just the direct effect of the work you are doing but the ripples of that work across the web as those who notice you comment about you.
Links
Link building is one of the primary vehicles used to improve your search engine rankings. Measuring the number and quality of the links you are building is key to understanding the process your SEO program is making. It is difficult to get a decent benchmark, especially if you already have lots of links pointing to your site because many of the tools available do not give a comprehensive list of all the links and cannot accurately estimate the PageRank being passed. Nevertheless if your SEO resource (internal or external) has a good idea how to use the tools they can use them to report on the progression on links and should certainly be reporting the links they have successfully built.
Benchmarking
Measurement is obviously essential but it is impossible without a decent benchmark. Before any work is done a full set of benchmarks should be agreed. These should include elements of all of the above. These will be the foundation from which you can measure the success of your SEO program.
