Has Your Reporting Structure Changed? The SEO Policy Certainly Has!

Producing ranking reports for keywords on a regular basis is a must for SEOs. This can be done maybe weekly or monthly, but it’s done by all at some point. With the frequent yearly and monthly changes, ranking reports is definitely not the only metric to SEO efforts, oh no!

Now SEOs need to use many keywords variation whilst link acquirement as exact match anchor keywords can be dangerous. Google has also moved entirely to secure search, which means it has stopped providing keywords data in all Analytics Tools. Hummingbird update has also changed the way it serves results. Now, Google understands the user search queries and gives the results based on its understanding, instead of just the keywords being typed in.

With these updates, only a small ranking report containing only targeted keywords cannot possibly prove SEO efforts. Reporting should not be limited as efforts of SEOs are no longer limited to targeted keywords, so why limit your report? As a SEO, your effort goes towards content marketing, quality link gaining, increasing accessibility and generating social signals just so you can get rankings in search engines. All this effort also helps websites get referral traffic – if link acquisition or quality content is done and increase in brand awareness – if social media strategies are successful. Likewise, when using assortment of keywords in on-page and off-page optimizations, you also help increase search engine rankings for other non-targeted keywords. To make sure you are reporting all of the benefits of your work, below are many recommending reports for any SEO Campaign:

Five Reports

1)      Ranking Report – This should not be limited to targeted keywords. It must be on a wider scale, e.g.) if you are targeting “Sneaker Shoes”, and whilst your optimization you use many variations, such as “Red Sneaker Shoes” or “Blue Sneaker Shoes”, then these should also be included in your ranking report.

2)      Activities Report – This report needs to include all the activities you completed, e.g.) what info graphics you spread and where, what content you marketed and where and any other action you took that as a result benefited for the client.

3)      Total Reach Report – This needs to include direct, referral, and search traffic. This is because your efforts may help increase brand awareness, which means content, direct traffic and social media marketing referral traffic would also increase.

4)      Endorsements Report – This needs to include increases in the total number of domain and page authority, backlinks and increase in social engagement, etc.

5)      Conversions Tracking Report – For all businesses, conversion is the ultimate goal, which means this is one of the most important things to track and report. This can be based on the average time on site, decrease in bounce rate, number of inquiries, etc.

In the past, SEOs only had to focus on getting a high number of backlinks, but today, they focus on webpage accessibility, quality links, quality content and social signals. This means with the change of efforts, you need to change your reporting structure and take the credit for all the results of your work.