Miami, November 2, 2009

How to avoid the SEO reporting fiasco

Filed under: Business, SEO, Tutorials - How To's — Posted by Charlie @ 12:14 pm

When it comes to showing improvements in rankings, analytics, conversions, or growth in your link profile, you need to have a system for developing easy to understand reports.

Just because you can spot growth in anchor text variation, an increase in conversions, or interpret visitor behavior on-site…doesn’t mean your clients can. They rely on you to provide accurate, poignant, and consumable information in order to justify search marketing budget.

Ranking reports simply aren’t enough these days. Gauging the performance of your SEO campaign solely on organic positions for keywords doesn’t provide your client with a tangible way to evaluate conversions or the effectiveness of your comprehensive SEO strategy. Focusing on traffic, shareability, and goal conversions is key – which means consolidating analytics and offering thoughtful commentary (as well as utilizing data from tools your clients can access themselves) adds credibility to your reports.

Keep it Visual

One of the biggest challenges I face in developing reports for clients is keeping it short and to the point.  I tend to provide more information than my clients need…because i’m a huge fan of citing multiple sources of data, drawing in-depth conclusions, and proposing thoughtful analysis.  For some reason…this often gets me chastised (even though I refuse to stop). The fact is, most CMO’s and marketing director’s don’t have the time to read more than a five sentence paragraph.  They don’t care to hear why something worked, how a result was the product of a well-planned implementation model, or what the data from a tool like linkscape represents.

They care about bar charts, venn diagrams, line graphs, green arrows pointing upwards, and leads in their inbox.

The best way to report on your SEO victories is to use as many screenshots from tools which display comparisons.  I’m a huge fan of Spyfu Kombat, Linkscape (and the visualizer), Linkdiagnosis, and Insights for Search.  Google Analytics provides enough pie, line, and bar charts to keep everyone happy for a long time…and if you really want to get serious with it…the Crazy Egg heatmap usually brings down the house.

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