SEO Strategy Has Changed, But Has Your Reporting Structure?

As SEOs, we all generate ranking reports for our keywords on a regular basis. Maybe weekly or monthly,  but we all do it at some point. With so many changes in the last few years (or months, even!)  do you really think ranking reports are the only metric to track SEO efforts? I don’t think so, because:

1. Now SEOs have to use lots of keywords variation while doing link acquisition, because exact match anchor keywords can be dangerous.
2. Google moved entirely to secure search and stopped providing keywords data in all Analytics tools
3. Hummingbird update has changed the way it serves results. Now Google understands the user search queries and serves the results based on its understanding, instead of just keywords typed-in.

With these updates, how can a small ranking report of ONLY targeted keywords prove SEO efforts? It cannot. Efforts of SEOs are no longer limited to targeted keywords, so why should we limit our reporting?

Difference between Old Reporting and New Reporting

As a SEO, you put effort into increasing accessibility, content marketing, quality link acquisition, and generating social signals just to get rankings in search engines. But these efforts also help websites get referral traffic (if quality content marketing or link acquisition is done) and increase in brand awareness (if social media strategies are successful). Also, when using diversity of keywords in on-page and off-page optimizations, you also help increase search engine rankings for other (non-targeted) keywords. Are you all reporting these metrics to your clients or bosses? If not, you are undervaluing yourself and your work.
So, how do you make sure you are reporting all of the benefits of your work? The reports I recommend for any SEO Campaign are as follows.

Activities Report

Pretty self explanatory, but often overlooked. This report should include all the activities you completed. For example, what content you marketed and where, what infographics you distributed and where, and any other action you took that resulted in benefits for the client. 

Monthly Activities Reporting

Ranking Report

Ranking Report should not be limited to targeted keywords, but must be on wider scale.

• For Example: If you are targeting “Sport Shoes”, and while optimization you also use different variations like “white sport shoes” and “red sport shoes”, then you should also include them in your ranking report.

Targeted + Variations of Keywords Ranking Reporting

Total Reach Report

This should include direct, referral, and search traffic. Why? Because your efforts may help increase brand awareness, so direct traffic and content and social media marketing referral traffic would increase as well.

Direct + Referrals + Search Engines Traffic Reporting

Endorsements Report

This report should include increases in the total number of backlinks, domain and page authority, increase in social engagement, etc.

Above Graph Shows Number of Links Increased, and Below Graph Shows Number of Facebook Likes Increased

Conversions Tracking Report

For every business, conversion is the ultimate goal. So, this is one of the most important metrics to track and report. It can be based on the number of inquiries, average time on site, decrease in bounce rate, and so forth.

Increase in number of Leads (contact request, quote request, etc.)

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