Almost 70% to 80% of the companies in the USA own a website that helps in targeting more prospective customers. But determining how the site performs and which SEO metrics have pushed the sales is not as easy as it sounds. You need monthly reports on the SEO performance, to determine which factors have contributed to sales. It can be easily determined by reporting conducted by an SEO firm in the USA.
According to the Search Engine Journal, five SEO reporting tools can help in understanding your organization’s progress on a digital platform. They are Google Data Studio, Ahrefs, SEMrush, Agency Analytics & Supermetrics, and Moz.
The purpose of these metrics is to learn about how your website ranking differed in previous months and the current month. You can also understand how your website has performed to pull the organic crowd and converted them to real customers.
As a business owner, you can have an SEO agency upgrade your website as per SERP standards, but how will you determine where you have gone wrong if you do not experience the desired results from your website?
Why is SEO Reporting Important?
The obvious answer is, how else will you know whether your SEO is performing or not? Studying and analyzing the SEO report will only make you understand what should be your next marketing strategy. About 63% of the USA-based small businesses use social media marketing as a regular SEO effort.
Some industry experts say Pay-per-click advertising drives only 25% of the inbound traffic, whereas SEO drives 75% of the incoming traffic. And in terms of cost-effectiveness, SEO is much cheaper than PPC or any other marketing effort. Hence, your maximum focus has to be on the SEO performance of your web pages, followed by SEO reporting to study the key factors influencing your sales.
Essential SEO Reporting Tips
Traffic: A report must focus on through which medium or source the traffic is directed to your website.
Page-level Traffic: Maybe you come to know that the traffic is coming from Google search, but where are these visitors landing on your website is essential. This report will help in understanding the trends and what people are looking for on your website.
Tracking the Conversion Rate: This is the most crucial part of SEO reporting, and most of the clients look only for this report. You need this report to understand how many visitors visited your page and how many made purchases. It will help you to understand what SEO strategies to implement if there isn’t a favorable conversion rate.
Loading Speed and Bounce Rate: An SEO report must have a detailed analysis of how much time was spent by each visitor on your webpage. And how many left the page immediately due to page-load time. The bounce rate is directly proportional to loading speed. Because if the page doesn’t load on time, then people won’t stay on your website for too long, they will move on to the next webpage.
Ranking: Various online tools help you in analyzing which keywords are pushing you on a higher rank, but you must not rely only on this metric because Google uses different results based on search history, personalization factor, and location of the user.
Now, let’s discuss the mistakes to avoid in SEO reporting.
1. Not analyzing the Key Performance Indicators (KPI)
About 40% to 55% of the companies in the USA who upgrade their websites for SEO, tend to forget what are the KPIs they need to study. Like every business has different functions, the KPIs also differ. So, the reports by an SEO firm in the USA are also never the same for every organization.
The study begins with the following questions: Who is the target audience? What drives the audience to your website? How is the target audience converted? What drives the audience to make purchases on your site? And what are the business goals? These questions define your KPIs. If you get favorable answers, then you are on the right track, but if you fail to analyze them, you may suffer losses in your business.
2. No Clearly Defined Goals
About 22% of the business owners in the USA fire the SEO agencies if they do not achieve the desired results. Yes, it is true if the goals you set are not achievable, then there won’t be any success. The objectives have to be clearly defined in terms of investment in SEO and ROI. Some studies claim SEO brings in 75% ROI, but only if there is a considerable conversion rate.
Strategizing the SEO performance and setting goals to achieve in the stipulated time is crucial in SEO reporting. For instance, if you decide to be a swimmer in a month, then the targets have to be set. How many hours of practice is required? How many laps to be covered in a given time? And what should be the speed per minute? Likewise, it will help if you define how you will achieve the target audience’s conversion rate in a given time and the strategies.
3. No Personalized Plan of Action
According to a Deloitte.com report, there are about 28.7 small-scale business enterprises in the USA. They generate annual revenue of $100,000 through different sources of online marketing. Every online marketing becomes successful when the website is SEO friendly. If you want to succeed via online sources, then SEO reporting should be the primary focus.
Every website will perform with different results. Some drive inbound traffic with the help of videos, graphic presentations, infotainment games, or educational reports on their web pages. But only an SEO report will let you know which of these factors have driven traffic to your website.
Accordingly, you can design an action plan. For instance, if your SEO report says, the visitors got redirected to your webpage because of a blog post, then you can ask guest bloggers to blog for you on different occasions to drive more traffic to your website. And this is how a personalized plan of action works.
4. Confusing SEO Report
About 24% of US adults hate reading reports on screen. The more numbers on the screen, the more difficult it is to calculate the progress. Hence, the report has to be concise and detailed. As a business owner, you must ask your SEO firm in the USA to draft a report that is understandable and easy to implement to improve performance.
SEO reporting is a time-consuming task, but if it brings results, then one should invest time and money. Business growth and conversion rates will be possible if you have the correct SEO reporting technique and the resources to optimize the SEO performance.