The Value of Your SEO Reporting
The mechanism of SEO is irresistible. You fail to place your site first on Google at first, and when you do, you can’t just sit back and enjoy the moment with a glass of wine because you have to keep working to keep it there.
But how do you know if you’ve selected the right approach to execute and if it’s working as intended?
This is where SEO reporting can be useful. Surprisingly, just 22% of all marketers use data-driven campaigns, but it is vital to their SEO performance.
Yeah, you may have been producing reports on a regular basis and even using your favourite metrics, but are you confident you’re using SEO reporting to its full potential?
Continue reading to learn what you’ve been missing out on all this time, as well as how to unlock the true strength and importance of your SEO reports.
Why is SEO reporting crucial?
Proper SEO reporting could help you gain a competitive edge. You may be shocked to hear that 74% of marketing professionals are unable to tell you how their actions have influenced the company’s SEO results because they often lose sight of their primary target and make mistakes.
With proper SEO reporting, you can track, collect, and analyse data to get a clear picture of your current situation and determine which strategy is more effective.
Companies who take their marketing results seriously use reports to continuously track which activities result in greater consumer interaction and, as a result, know precisely what form of content converts the best. Instead of spending time and resources in actions that may or may not yield meaningful results, they concentrate on hot subjects that have a high likelihood of reaching their target audience.
Example of beneficial SEO reporting [based on Google Analytics]
The purpose of this article is not to go over every possible metric that you can include in your SEO report; instead, you should read Critical SEO Metrics You Should Track. For the time being, we’ll just explain why you require them. Let’s look at some specific examples to see how SEO reporting can help your business.
Let’s start with the most important metric in your report: “the number of organic visitors.”
This is a critical metric to pay attention to because it will give you a clear picture of how your actions influenced internet users to interact with your website.By going to Acquisition > All Traffic > Channels > Organic search, you can easily monitor your organic traffic using Google Analytics.
When monitoring organic traffic, it’s important to dig deeper into what pages users are landing on because SEO reporting isn’t just about writing down numbers. This way, you’ll know exactly which content attracts more visitors and can begin evaluating why, so you can make adjustments to boost traffic and, as a result, enhance rankings.
It will also be useful to determine where all of your traffic originates. To do so, go back to Google Analytics and click Acquisition > All Traffic > Source/Medium, then use the information you’ve collected to decide where you should put your money and effort.
We’ll use “Conversion” as an example for the second metric. Since the end result of any marketing campaign is the total revenue generated, SEO experts use this metric to assess how many visitors converted into paying customers.
Depending on the nature of your market, the desired action that you want your users to take will differ. It may be a completed order, a paid membership signup, an e-book download that was followed by a purchase, a newsletter subscription, and so on.
Webmasters use call-to-action buttons or special pages to control interactions in order to track certain actions. Our task at this stage is to calculate the exact number of visitors that have been turned into leads or customers in order to determine if our efforts have paid off and what we should do next.
As a consequence, this metric is crucial because it helps you to track the effect of your SEO activities and measure your ROI (Return On Investment).
Simply go to your Google Analytics account and click on “Admin” to log conversions. You can go to the “View” block and pick “Goals” from there. If you want to measure your ROI, remember to give your target a monetary value.
If you want more in-depth details, we suggest using Google’s official guide on how to set up goals in Google Analytics.
After you’ve set your target, give it a month to collect data before reviewing the overall results of your SEO efforts. Simply follow the steps below to get started. To begin, go back to Google Analytics and select Acquisition > All Traffic > Channels.
You must now concentrate solely on the second row, which is referred to as Organic Quest. You must look at the “Conversions” block because we want to monitor the progress of our target.
- Goal Conversion is the average number of achieved conversions.
- Goal Completions show us the exact number of people that completed the action we’ve planned.
- Goal Value essentially tells you the ROI on your SEO efforts.
This is a clear example of how empty numbers can be used to show you the effects of your SEO efforts so you can start monitoring your effectiveness over time.
Assume you’ve hired an SEO firm that charges you $800 a month. You could be massively overpaying without realising it if you can’t see how much benefit it has made. However, if you’ve set up goals and tracked them for a while, you’ll have total control over the goals’ values for a given time span. You’ll be able to determine if the agency’s findings are worth the $800 a month fee this way.
