Nowadays, engaging content is king for owned media. Whether that’s Instagram posts, informative articles for a company’s blog, or converting landing pages, every business owner wants to share thoughts with their audience. Although great organic content is vital for a brand’s growth, it’s usually not enough.
Any online business should know about the importance of search engine optimization (SEO). It’s a way of communicating with search engines such as Google to demonstrate the relevance of your website for people searching for a particular topic.
However, the craft of SEO is a unique practice. Search engine optimization is usually misunderstood and can be painfully difficult to get right. Whether you are working at an SEO agency or trying to improve your business’s search engine ranking, there are essential statistics you should consider tracking.
In this article, we will explore the top stats you should share in your next SEO report.
Table of Contents
The basics of an SEO report
The search engine optimization report summarizes metrics that demonstrate how your website is performing. An SEO report is used to identify the areas of your site that might need improvement and monitor the progress. Typical areas covered are organic traffic, website health, keywords, and conversions.
SEO reports are an effective way of communicating to anyone who might need insights on your search engine optimization efforts, usually a client or your boss.
An excellent SEO report should always include an overview, relevant metrics, and recommendations on what to do next.
However, more often than not, many SEO reports are written poorly and do not look at relevant metrics to the business, which results in poor organic marketing strategy decisions.
Almost every person who owns a business with an online presence or works with one is familiar with website reporting tools such as Google Analytics. However, a monthly report on how many website visitors and generated conversions over a certain period is not enough.
The person who gave you this task usually expects to get more insights into how the business’s SEO efforts are performing. Therefore, making them compact with only relevant information is essential – no one wants to read lengthy reports.
Why are regular SEO reports a key?
Nowadays, SEO is a marketing channel that is receiving more and more attention. Businesses that focus on improving their search engine rankings and lead generation tactics notice a 14.6% conversion rate.
Suppose organic growth is essential for your or your client’s business; a regular SEO report shows the progress and effectiveness of your search engine optimization efforts. With an accurate report, you can easily pinpoint trends, get valuable insights and recognize areas of improvement.
What to include in an SEO report
Every business has different goals. You have to ensure that the statistics you are looking for are relevant to your company and can give you actionable insights for future search engine optimization efforts.
A typical mistake when producing a site SEO report is to under or overload it with information.
If you report on too many metrics, the person it is for will lose interest. Report on too few stats, and you won’t be able to give an accurate picture of your SEO strategy performance.
It is essential to tailor your report to show statistics that are relevant to meeting your KPIs. It will depend on your business’s or client’s needs and the industry. Whether it is eCommerce, hospitality, or travel, the report should be created and aimed at the people receiving it.
Our top stats to include in your next SEO report
As we mentioned in the previous paragraph, the information you want to include in your search engine optimization report will depend on the company’s goals.
We created a list of statistics you can track depending on the objectives.
Traffic
Traffic can often be a vanity metric that might steer you into making incorrect assumptions about the website’s performance. However, it shouldn’t be neglected, and if done right, it can give valuable insights into your strategy and audience.
You shouldn’t compare the current month with the previous one. A better practice is to look at the annual traffic and growth to get a bigger picture. Maybe this one month had less traffic in comparison to the previous one, but overall this year’s increase was more significant in contrast to the previous one.
The quality of the traffic
As mentioned in the previous paragraph, traffic can be a vanity metric. There is no use having a dog accessories website and traffic coming from cat owners. Hence, there are metrics that you should look at to know whether the traffic is relevant to the business.
Bounce rate, pages per session, and average session duration
Those are essential indicators of traffic that can show you whether the traffic is coming from the target audience. If the visitors stay on your pages for a long time and interact with your website, it is a sign that the site is attracting the correct audience.
Conversions
Another essential factor that you must investigate is conversions. This metric indicates that the website is attracting the correct audience. You need to set up conversion points on the site through the customer’s journey. By analyzing them, you can identify and understand why they failed to convert at that point. The website might generate a substantial amount of conversions at the beginning of the journey; however, it’s not certain that it is the correct audience if they don’t continue their journey.
Keyword analysis
The main goal of SEO is to improve the website’s ranking on search engine results for the specific words and phrases the customer is searching for.
A well put together SEO strategy should identify the correct keywords, and a good SEO report should analyze those keywords.
Keyword ranking
Every website has its specific keywords, and its positions should be monitored. If you can identify declines quickly, you can recover them and prevent a significant drop in traffic.
Competition analysis
You can find great keyword opportunities by conducting an analysis of your competitors. It will help you discover new words that can be included on the website to generate more traffic.
Website health
The website can have relevant keywords and amazing content; however, all of those might not perform well if the site’s health is poor.
It’s essential to conduct a regular site health check. Some of the benefits are identification of broken links and pages, website performance optimization, and it can show you errors that you might have missed.
Depending on the priorities, you might look at a way to improve the site’s speed, loss of important rankings, or correction of errors.
Content Analysis
While conducting an SEO report, it is important to go through the website’s content. You must establish which pages are the most important for the business.
More often than not, pages that generate a substantial amount of traffic might not be the most important; as we mentioned before, it might be an irrelevant source of traffic.
A common occurrence is that a page that you might consider the most important during a customer’s journey and that creates a business potential might get less traffic than others on the website.
When determining which pages are the most important, you must conduct a content analysis to understand whether it is quality content.
There are some metrics you can look at to determine whether there is a need for improvement so the page can rank higher in the search engines.
Click-through rate
CTR is an important metric that shows the quality of your content. When the pages have correct titles, they will attract clicks and, therefore, more visitors to the website. Use bad titles, and the amazing content on the page won’t perform as good as it could be.
Pages per visit
The amount of pages that are visited by your audience is an important factor for search engines. If a person is only staying on one page, it might indicate that the content is not engaging; thus, your content’s quality is poor.
Bounce rate
Another important metric to track is bounce rate. It indicates the percentage of the audience which went on the website and didn’t interact with it. Search engines such as Google track how long people stay on a particular website. Therefore, if the audience closes the page quickly, Google won’t show it at the top of search results because its ultimate goal is to provide relevant information.
In conclusion, there are many metrics that should be looked at when conducting an SEO report. It usually depends on the industry and business’s goals; however, metrics such as traffic, keywords, or website health are important to any business that wants to improve its organic growth strategy and must be included in the SEO report.
