Metrics to Show in Your SEO Reports

Before you dive into your SEO campaign it’s vital tracking and expectations are set. Ensuring the campaign is running properly it’s important to compare previous metrics, watching the graph increase. Determining which metrics to show within the reports can be difficult for some. What are important, what do clients, owners, and managers want to see? The following list will help streamline your reports to show the most important metrics.

Organic Traffic

This one should be pretty obvious. SEO campaigns are built to increase the organic traffic to the site and a majority of clients want to see this first in a report. Additional visitors means more conversions which means more revenue.

The best source to track this information is through Google Analytics. Under the Acquisition tab, and then All Traffic and Channels we can review all sources of the traffic. The organic traffic section shows all traffic that came to the site from search engines for that specific time frame. Compare the organic traffic from different time frames, depending on how often you send out reports. For instance, if you’re sending monthly reports compare the last 30 days of organic traffic.

Referring Domains

Domains with links pointing to your site are referring domains, and these help increase a site’s ranking. There are multiple sites that offer referring domain tracking, and may offer different numbers. Pick one and stick with it for your reports. Here at Adficient we like to use AHREFs, they offer an easy to follow graph that monitors progress over time. As new content is created and syndicated new back links will begin to point to your site. As back links increase, rankings will begin increasing as well. Hence, the reason it’s important to track this metric.  

Conversions

The number one goal for a business is often to increase revenue and profit, this is done by increasing the conversions to the site. Conversions can be a number of different things from form fill out to checkout completions. Before starting your SEO campaign it’s important to identify with the team what a conversion is. Some sites may have multiple conversions, all of which should be tracked within Google Analytics. When providing your report make sure to mention how conversions have changed, where the conversions are coming from, and how they are interacting on the site. This will help determine who your audience is, which will help target proper users.

Keyword Rankings

Rankings of your keywords will determine how much organic traffic lands on the site, which influences the number of conversions. When first talking with companies about an SEO project many of them only want to see their rankings increase. They understand the ramifications of being listed above their competitors. Again, there are many different tools available that monitor ranking changes. Agency Analytics allows users to add focused keywords to the list, categorize them, and monitor their changes. To show the SEO campaign is working business owners want to know the rankings are increasing. SEO campaigns take time so it may take awhile to see results.

Broken Pages, Links, and Images

One of the first steps before starting an SEO campaign is running a site audit. Once the audit is complete and the fixes have been completed it’s important to ensure no new issues come up. By using tools like Raven Tools and Google Search Console users can monitor the health of their site. Check for pages that are broken or 404, any broken links within the site, and any broken images on the site. If the site is monitored regularly there should be no issues and within the report it should show this, reassuring the site owner these are being taken care of.