Getting More Benefits From Your SEO Progress Report
Updated 8.13.2021
Since Search Engine Optimization SEO and user engagement to continues to change, the way we report on SEO and website lead conversions must change too.
The are many benefits from your SEO Progress Report that you will come to lean on to know if your site’s SEO is done correctly. Effectively setting up SEO reporting metrics to show progress will help you meet your business goals and make wise decisions that improve ROI.
What is an SEO Report?
Scheduled SEO reports help communicate to clients and stakeholders the benefits that your SEO efforts are providing their business. Too often templated SEO reports don’t inform the reader of key insights or are too hard to understand. Since the level of not-set data in Google Analytics and new opt-in privacy issues have increased, better reporting is needed.
SEO reports provide website’s stats, show current web traffic levels, keyword rankings, associated conversions, and more. The challenge is getting past exhaustive page reports that are loaded with too complex metrics. Unless the one receiving the report has a basic understanding of what SEO is, the report is likely to be completely meaningless or misses the context presented.
What is the Primary Benefit of a Regular SEO Report?
Businesses make better decisions with regular SEO Reports. Since SEO is typically the best online investment that any business makes, it merits a sufficient investment, attention, and integration. Business growth and revenue are at stake. Businesses are relying on organic search as a key marketing platform; owners, marketing teams, CFO’s and other major stakeholders want to see that their investment is paying off.
Making future content marketing plans, improvements to your evergreen sales funnel, and advertising decisions is more ontrack if reports quickly identify:
- Search trends (both positive and negative)
- Changes in consumer preferences and shopping activities
- Competitive changes
- Technical SEO areas needing attention
- How each person, technology, and workflow can be better
When SEO Reporting includes the right metrics and are understood, the reports become all the more valuable.
How do Businesses Choose SEO Reporting Metrics and KPIs?
You need to first establish which metrics matter most and align them to your business goals. Each business is unique and needs to know what they do best. The metrics chosen should make it clear the value that is provided to consumers and stakeholders. Vanity SEO reports more often communicate numbers that are redundant. With the right metrics and KPIs established, progress, success, and next actions are clear.Reporting on too many areas can overwhelm the reader and they may lose interest.
How do Search Marketing Reports Document Conversions?
Conversions are the lifeblood of online business. All of our SEO campaigns are associated with conversions to generate leads, build relationships or make sales — meaning that these are the end goal. We should be reporting on conversions; otherwise, we are really only reporting on part of the picture.
Setting the right expectations about the conversions that matter is the cornerstone to perceived success. If different conversions are lumped and reported together it becomes meaningless and lacks the details needed. Whether it is event signups, the number of inquiries received, downloaded directions, reservation bookings, or items added to your shopping cart, you should have unique sections for them in your report.
Build in the time it takes to explain these reports on how recent algoriyhm updates may impact SEO. Be open to new ideas; if you have all the essential schema markups in place, you are ready to get more advanced and better results.
Moving Past Bad SEO and Doing SEO Right
Your SEO Progress Reports help you know what users want. If what SEO is has been mistakenly taken as just rank, your SEO reporting can be refocused to create a better user experience and how to become the best answer for viewers. Keeping you informed to the detail needed will spare you endless hours of gathering the same data manually. Before you engage in paid search strategies, PPC campaigns, or organic search engine marketing improvements, set your metrics and SEO progress reporting so you can better manage your spend. It is a must to know the conversion rate per keyword (for the top keywords and an average for other long-tail keywords) on your website to improve on your bottom dollars. Improving your site’s lead generation opportunities and how consumers engage with your site will have a direct revenue impact.
You can step out of the jungle of search reports, SEO tools, and interpretations. We’ll help you get in front of interested buyers that are already searching for products and services like yours, which makes it easier for them to become your next customer. After we conduct a thorough analysis of your website’s structure and identify how we can improve the navigation, organization, and optimize content, you will see the results in upcoming SEO Progress Reports.
In the same manner as plotting a road trip, whether, for business or pleasure, you arrive in the shortest time frame if you plan your route. We will lay out a roadmap for your search marketing plan, after conducting a website audit and then build your optimized web content to support where your business wants to go.
An X-Ray Look At Your SEO
Search analytics includes the analysis and aggregation of search engine statistics that can be used in search engine marketing (SEM) and search engine optimization (SEO).
Your SEO progress report from Hill Web Creations will contain actual figures and facts and well as professional guidance. We will take an “x-ray look” and see how your website is viewed through search engines’ eyes. From there, you can improve your website’s structure, UX experience, content curation, coding, paid advertising, and organic marketing. Everyone on your team can check in on your site’s SEO progress. We consider SEO reporting as more of an essential art rather than a science and will continue to listen to your needs.
Whether you want a report that you can peruse over lunch with time to spare or deeper insights, having it at your fingertips is our job. We understand when you want a broad overview without using any confusing industry jargon. And we know that SEO is a cornerstone to the success of small businesses.
We will help you identify both opportunities to improve your online authority and threats. By identifying potentially damaging situations immediately you can avoid most problems. Conversely, by making continual positive SEO Semantic improvements, you can drive more traffic and gain higher volume in search.
Timely SEO Reports
Do your SEO reports pile up unread? If regarded as too detailed to comprehend or just a quick export from whatever reporting tool is used and skim, you are missing key insights. Someone with dedicated time to study and glean insights can offer you much. Rather, rely on how your data is pulled and gathered in a useful manner.
Accruing a combination of standard SEO metrics like rankings, user activity, organic traffic, conversions, and every necessary target landing page metric is core to what we rely on. Data is only data until it is used to move forward smarter. Your SEO reports are full of clues. We take analytic data and “poke” through it to help you.
By determining user trends and what offers viewers useful solutions, we learn the whys and what works. Hill web Marketing Schema markup audits are core to advancing in search rankings. It’s not enough to know that a metric changed. Knowing how it influences business reality and impacts KPI’s is key. Data inspires questions that lead to answers. When this data drives your on-page optimizations, you can more relevant leads and conversions.
In order to keep track of your website’s search engine rankings, you’ll need to track your progress and prepare timely SEO reports. A list of suggested improvements to the site will be offered that list out the steps forward that we recommend.
Your SEO Reports will help you determine if and how Google Updates impact your website. You may want help reading and understanding your reports detect if your site traffic and rankings are suffering from fluctuations as the outcome of a Google Helpful Content System update, Panda, Penguin or other algorithm updates. Together, we can better set your SEO tasks, and next objectives.
We continue to expand our use of SEO analysis tools to give clients even more sophisticated guidance. Which on-page SEO factors you should prioritize, if you should update widgets, and how advanced your Google structured data markup is can all be reflected to quickly assess in easy to read graphs and charts. Weekly and Monthly SEO Reports will help you better find on-page SEO issues and effectively track your overall on-site health as well as performance trends.
3 Initial Website Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Reports
2. Competition Analysis Reports
3. Basic Website Audit Reports
Benefits Gained from These 3 Initial SEO Reports
When generated before an SEO campaign begins, we create bench line SEO reports that will later be useful to measure results. They can be generated repeatedly on a scheduled basis, or immediately to see impact after installing SEO updates.
1. Keyword Research Reports
They contain information that helps to evaluate your SEO budget and the potential cost of Google AdWords campaign by determining average CPC and competition per your list of keywords. This is helpful to glean a clearer idea of how many additional visitors the site can get if it ranks in the top 10 for the keywords selected. Your website’s level of SEO sophistication will be a part of your ability to rank in the top 10; the reports help us decipher whether it’s cost-effective to promote highly competitive keywords.
2. Competition Analysis Reports
This is an important element if our SEO strategy; to win in search you must your offer the answer to a searcher’s query. So by learning if you are behind your competitors’ websites or ahead of them, is necessary. These reports should tell you which keywords your competitors are promoting and how. Our team work will move forward better once we know if it’s necessary to target keywords used by competitors but not by you. Additional information is gleaned about how your competitors are obtaining their links, and offer ideas for your future plans.
3. Basic Website Audit Reports
What is covered in a basic SEO audit report?
These cover a wide range of factors related to on-page optimization. It’s important to have this base overarching view of factors that cover industry standards in order to identify potential issues and elements that need to be improved. They should also include website and page statistics, such as PageRank, link popularity, and the number of indexed pages. It can support your paid search efforts to reach more digital shoppers, getting in the Maps Local Pack, and the highly-visual product carousels. A good Website Audit Report should provide information on different content-related issues; we show progress in our Minneapolis Local search work. Aspects found in each basic website audit report are listed below.
7 Key Aspects of Your Basic Website Audit Reports
To help you get actionable ideas with a minimal time investment, you will benefit from the following:
1. Keywords – 10 to 20 primary keyword position comparisons
2. Content – measurements of your content’s authority, momentum, and ability to answer consumers’ questions
3. Channels – a view at how your business signals, traffic and/or conversion on social
4. Backlinks – to key pages for building authority
5. Competitors – looking at data and identifying how to gain new competitive wins
6. Load Speed – a change in your website load time may be influencing your bounce rate, mobile conversions and much more
7. Website Performance – integrating your SEO Progress Report with Google Analytics so you’re able to combine analytic metrics with daily rankings to generate more granular insights on what pages and keywords are performing best
8. Your level of successfully gaining reviews or if you are at risk of a penalty.
Search Console Updates Impacting SEO Report Data
At times an event in Google Search Console updates may impact SEO report data. At times some have experienced changes due to Google data aggregation methods. Logging errors can also cause fluctuations such as a dip or bump in your chart. Google provides a page that documents common issues* that may be behind unexplained changes. The new AMP reports give key insights for improving your mobile results in SERPs.
For example, Google states that, “An incremental improvement in Google’s logging system now provides better accounting for results in lower positions. This change might cause an increase in impressions, but also a decrease in average positions. This change only affects Search Console reporting, not your actual performance on Google Search”.
Google also continueously updates reports in it’s console that help you discover if your schema markup has drifted or broken and is now rendered invalid.
9 Ongoing Weekly SEO Reports You Can Build On
These reports are used to measure, track, and tweak your website’s SEO progress. We will use them to ensure that everyone on your SEO team is working uniformly to achieve your goals and focused where it matters most.
1. Keyword Rankings Reports
2. Competitor SEO Ranking Changes Reports
3. Link-Building Validation Reports
4. Changes in Structured Data Reports
5. Website Link HTTP and HTTPS Status Reports
6. Changes in Brand Visibility
7. Rate of Integration with Social Media Efforts
8. Website Mobile Interaction and Number of Users
9. Structured Data Report
1. Ongoing Keyword Rankings Reports
Fluctuations in keyword rankings can be expected and search queries are dynamic and your competitive landscape changes daily. When insights are obtained regularly, you benefit from being able to diagnose problems at an early stage. It’s also important to compare your current keyword rankings next to previous checks as well as next to the best results ever achieved. By aligning rankings and traffic for the keywords that generate your top ROI, we’ll be able to know if you are getting what you expected, and if your long-form articles are out-performing thin content.
2. Competitors’ SEO Ranking Changes Reports
With a keen eye on your competition, you will recognize any abnormal growth in their rankings. Following key digital profiles and their on-page SEO practices means be knowledgeable enough to be in the player’s ballpark Never steal, but it may be helpful to borrow ideas gleaned from others successful strategy.
3. Link-Building Validation Reports
Link-building is often questioned as important. What is important is how you go about doing it. While considered by many as the most tedious of all SEO tasks, we help you keep your expenditures worthwhile by closely following your link providers’ digital achievements.
We find that too many businesses come to us because they are doing a bad job of link acquisition. Rest Assured. Much has changed which has left many unaware that they are still doing it wrong. We go about it in terms of thinking of the ROI of link building as a component of SEO. There are many good tools one can use, such as Raven, SEOMoz, etc. But to sum it up; we track valuable relationships rather than just links. Before you build both internal and external links to a page, make sure that it is quickly indexed by Google.
4. Changes in Structured Data Reports
It is important to keep a clean well-structured site that is easy for search engines to read. As structured data and rich snippets grow up and offer you more opportunities to look nice in the Google Knowledge Graph and rank in SERPs, we will keep you current in best practices.
The Structured Data page in Search Console shows the structured information that Google was able to detect on your site. It also provides information about errors in page markup that may prevent rich snippets (or other search features) from being displayed.
5. Website Link HTTPS Status Reports
A link health and reliability check is important as changes to both your internal and external linking structure may change. For example, if you one of your outbound links is updated from HTTP to HTTPS status, then you may either have a now 301 redirect that you are unaware of, or worse, a new 404 error. Either way, we recommend staying on top of both inbound and outbound links to make it easier for search bots and users.
We typically began our HTTPS Status Reports with tools like Open Site Explorer, Xenu, and VLookup. While there are many more tools of value, one key thing is to watch your inbound links, most linked to web pages, and what is going on in your occurring anchor text links.
6. Changes in Brand Visibility
Brand Visibility is a collective search results report providing weekly rank position fluctuations for brand-related pages (including: website, Maps, Google Business Listing Page, Facebook business profile, LinkedIn company page, directory listings, Google News, etc.) ranking in the primary search engine results, along with expanded position distribution, digital visibility trending, Page 1 exposure, and category results changes.
7. Rate of Integration with Social Media Efforts
In order to secure high rankings for the keyword phrases that drive your ROI, we can leverage your current social media efforts and brand equity to boost our search engine optimization campaigns. Each business has a unique buyer, and therefore, social networks can be optimally used to market your website’s content. We will help you read results and plan for expansion where you can gain the most benefit. Maybe that is the Twitter, maybe it is LinkedIn for Facebook ad campaigns.
8. Website Mobile Interaction and Number of Users Report
How do I find my site’s Mobile-Friendly Score?
A search professional can test and report on your site’s Mobile-Friendly Score. The percentage of people who use a smartphone has increased from 51% in 2012 to 71% in 2015, according to Consumer Barometer**. Your business needs to know how it is faring in taking its rightful share of mobile searches. Don’t forget, the thought behind every search query is still the most important signal — “so even if a page with high-quality content is not mobile-friendly, it could still rank well if it has great, relevant content”, says Google.
If your site isn’t easy to read and navigate on mobile, it will be ranked lower when someone is searching from a mobile device. Both the Google Search Console and Google Analytics offer you insights on mobile usage; the importance of having mobile-friendly websites will be easy to see. You will learn how your site’’’s mobile-friendliness is improving as score results reflect our site improvements.
9. Insights from Your Structured Data Report
Four easy steps to use the Google Highlighter Tool:
a. Start by clicking on the large red ‘Start Highlighting’ button.
b. Next add the URL of the page that you are trying to markup with structured data.
c. Fill out as many fields as possible.
d. Now “Publish”.
Completing this process work to inform as to how you want it to use and update structured data when it next re-crawles your website. Should you change your mind or have reason to remove any structured data, it is simply done by clicking ‘Unpublish’ on the same page at any time.
Currently, you can customize the following types of structured data to better introduce your website in the Knowledge Graph:
- Featured Image
- Title
- Subtitle
- Description
- Social profiles
- Other Items: You can provide feedback about “More images” — the images beyond the featured image in a knowledge panel — or items in the “People also search for” section. However, we only act to remove items in these areas if they fail to conform with Google’s policies. We cannot add suggestions or customize these.
Additional Insights Gained In Advanced SEO Progress Reports:
• GOALS PROGRESSION – How effective your SEO efforts are at reaching your organic search goals are progressing
• SEO WEBSITE IMPROVEMENTS – What SEO accomplishments were gained in the last month
• NEW BENEFITS GAINED IN WEB PRESENCE – The benefits of these efforts you can expect on your web presence in organic search queries. For example, are you showing up in Google Top Stories or news? In not, how can you gain the visibility.
• USER INTERESTS – New opportunities will be identified to optimize for viewer interest and organic search
• COMPETITION LEVELS – Determine what new competitive changes create new opportunities for you. This may include overall positioning in search results, visibility compared to competitors, how many backlinks verify a site’s importance, and technical comparisons.
• SOCIAL PROOF – Are individuals sharing, liking, commenting on your social networks
• CAMPAIGNS – How one social media campaign compared to another to tweak spends for higher lead conversions. Understand what marketing presence metrics are out-performing others. By measuring where each of these events occurred, where your spikes are, and how engaged is the traffic to each of those pages over a specific period of time, you can learn a lot.
• CONTENT CURATION – Understand where you are getting the most SEO benefit from your content and where you should be. If you are a service-based business, where are you winning visibility on the SERPs?
• LINK ACQUISITION PACE – Your site is validated by other’s who have gained authority online who give you a backlink. When industry related to your content, you have more benefit. We typically approach existing SEO problems on a website by conducting a deep competitive analysis of your competitive niche players. This enables us to note the particular backlink building practices that offered the greatest ROI, which adds insights to our ability to achieve higher rankings in SERPs for you.
Paid Search: Active View reporting
We mention this type of marketing report here because of its high value when PPC is combined with organic search reports. Active View tracks the viewability of ads served via Google Publisher Tags (GPT). Understanding your site ad’s viewability helps determine how likely it is that an ad was indeed visible and viewed by a user. Two key factors are (a) what percentage of an ad appears in a viewable space on user’s screen and (b) how long that portion of the ad stays viewable. Measuring ad viewability helps digital marketers and advertisers decipher the value of an impression.
Android App Reports
An Android app must be first published on the Google Play platform before it will be added to data found in the Search Console. Then access your Search Analytics Report for your application to learn which Google search results show your app. After your page is indexed and crawled by GoogleBot, it is possible to learn much about how many users discover or click on your app link when someone uses Google Search, the queries that show your app, where they originate from, etc.,
A May 17, 2017 Tech Crunch post titled Google’s Play Console now gives developers more data about their apps was posted by Frederic Lardinois says that in the last year alone:
* Android users in 190 countries downloaded 82 billion apps.
* The number of developers who have highly popular applications with more than a million downloads grew 35 percent.
Useful insights to grow your business and to help you increase the quality of your apps can be gained right here. Useful consumer insights are vital to expand business revenue and to help you increase the quality of your apps by adding new improvements once you know how more about actual usage. Should there be issues with any AMP Product schema validation, we can fix them for you.
After being downloaded, what counts is how the application is used and if it is used. Google shows data around app stability and aspects like crash rates, App Not Responding rates, battery usage which includes: stuck wake locks and excessive wakeups, and render time (slow rendering problems and frozen UI’s.
SEO Project Goals Determine Your SEO Progress Report
By partnering together and setting clearly defined and attainable goals for your SEO project, it will help maintain focus. It begins with an SEO Site Audit. Including those goals in your monthly SEO report will remind you of your investment’s worth and how the project is going. With a fast pace in your office, it’s easy to forget what SEO tasks were initially identified as important to learn how to market your business most effectively. To help you gain the most impact on your effort to grow your web presence, setting goals and benchmarking your current web presence is necessary.
According to the tasks, the pace of work progression and goals set, your SEO progress report may come weekly, monthly, quarterly, yearly or a combination of all four. To achieve statistical significance you will want to look at your SEO improvements and metrics over a longer time frame. These reports are key to learn what is working or not working, if your business is answering buyers questions, identify top and average page and keyword performers, and trends over time. Trends may include user interests, traffic, social engagements, where you are ahead, where you are behind, and much more.
From an SEO perspective, improvements can be tweaked when cause and effect is understood and implemented at a higher level. The process of testing, measuring, optimization, and repeating depends on the level of expertise of the SEO expert(s) who diagnose, prioritize and implement your website improvements. Once the metrics that matter most to you have been identified, your SEO Progress Report will be fined tuned to focus on what constitutes a completed goal or conversion for your business.
“The truth is there are many great SEO’s, working hard and getting great results, but at the end of it, some clients aren’t as happy as they should be. There could be plenty of reasons why this is the case, but one of the most common factors is the reporting.” ~ Moz.com
“Being able to show clients the reports and what they look like before a sale is awesome. Being able to benchmark and show results after the first few months tends to WOW our clients.” – Raven Tools
We have been able to apply a number of SEO best practices to client website in order to rank them highly for competitive keyword phrases. Obtaining these high search positions helps the business to win traction in organic search results for both existing service offerings and newly launched services. We welcome the opportunity to help your business move forward too. We may begin your SEO optimization strategy by targeting less competitive (“long-tail”) keyword phrases that would empower us to quickly show results for your company. Be the one best informed about your website’s SEO pulse: get the details in your SEO progress report sent right to you.
Google’s algorithms change and that means that you need to be taking a continually look at your SEO reports. We understand the motivation behind the search engines when choosing to rank one site better than the other in the SERPs. Much is gleaned and easier to explain when you know how to get the most out of your SEO Reports. While our SEO efforts track Google Assistant usage, it is currently hard to prove from most tool reports.
You may read additional QandA about SEO Reports**.
Regular SEO Progress Report Services
Some SEO reports need to be churned out monthly; others may be important to view weekly. They start at $1,500 per month with fixes and improvements made (offer valid through 7.31.2024. We can tweak them to fit your rate of expansion and budget. Our SEO reports let you eliminate the tedium of gathering like information on your own. Learn of all the website audit types that your business can benefit from. These SEO Summary Reports are vital to every small business.
We strive to include metrics that matter to your business. We are here to make your jobs easier with the reports you want. You’ll be able to see which ranking changes impact your business and more.
Summary
For help with your search analytics, Hill Web Marketing can help you use your search data to investigate particular interactions among Web searchers, the search engine, or the content during searching episodes and incorporate them into our SEO reporting. We’ll also measure how well your SEO and social media marketing are working for insights that lead to improved consumer-centric marketing.
We schedule and generate regular website SEO reports in minutes. We will send reports – from daily to quarterly – as best fits your business. Gain the full benefits from your SEO Progress Report by having someone guide you in how to get the most from them.
If you want your website to increase the number of inquiries and results, start today by choosing one of our Website SEO Audits
* https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6211453#search_analytics
** https://www.consumerbarometer.com/en/trending/
*** https://www.syntacticsinc.com/news-articles-cat/seo-report/