I speak to many SEO clients who’ve previously spent money on SEO, and they tell me that all they seem to get from it are reports.
Don’t get me wrong—I love a good SEO report—especially if it’s a spreadsheet where I can run queries. But reports are not what you invest in SEO for: you want results.
Why do SEOs love reports?
Reports are an important part of the service you should expect from any SEO professional.
It’s our job to provide evidence that our work is working for you, but the importance of the type of report often gets overlooked.
Here’s how SEO works:
- Optimisation gets your ranking keywords
- These keywords deliver you traffic
- More traffic to your site brings you more leads
- Converting these leads brings you more business
- You get ROI for your SEO
If you report on one of the above, which is the most important?
Well, I can show you what keywords are ranking, including your new and improved positions.
I can also report on the traffic (estimated) each of these keywords delivers.
If you use a CRM on your site, I can show you which pages are delivering you leads and how many,
When it comes to how many of these leads you convert, unless I have access to this data, that’s a report you need to produce.
Again, ROI is something your sales team or bookkeeper is better placed to create.
So here’s the issue.
The reports that matter are not the ones many SEOs provide to clients, and they do not demonstrate how SEO benefits your bottom line.
Sure, they show keywords, placements and estimated traffic, but they certainly don’t show the financial impact of SEO on your business.
SEO is part of your business, not something you bolt onto your business, so you need more results and fewer reports.
Producing effective reports means giving your SEO expert more access to your data.
But here’s the catch.
Probably the most significant thing affecting your SEO effectiveness is your conversion rates.
If your business converts 30% of new leads into customers, your SEO will be far more effective than a business that converts 10% of new leads into customers.
Converting warm leads has nothing to do with SEO (unless your SEO delivers the wrong traffic).
Converting new leads is down to your sales team; marketing has done its bit.
Get results, not another meaningless report.
As an SEO expert who focusses on results (ROI) rather than reports, I can help you with SEO that makes a difference to your bottom line. It doesn’t matter if you’ve done SEO before or are just starting out.
Let's have a chatSo, what are the SEO reports you should be focussing on?
All of them. If you get a keyword report delivered each month but don’t have any method to link this up with sales reports, you will never see how effective your SEO is.
Suppose you’re reading this and you work for a large business. In that case, you’ve probably got staff in place to check all this stuff, but if you run an SME, it’s probably down to you to check this stuff, and that’s why I have written this post; as a freelance SEO expert, I mainly work with SMEs, and it seems to me that small businesses are the ones losing out the most on effective SEO reporting as they don’t have dedicated staff to manage it.
You need to be able to identify ROI.
Paying for SEO without any means in place to identify what is working and what’s not is frankly throwing money down the drain.
Traffic without new business means nothing, so it’s crucial to identify conversions, and keyword reports alone do not do this.
One of the first things I try and address whenever working with an SEO client is how we can identify whether the SEO is working.
This can be tricky; as I’ve mentioned above, if your customers mainly phone you as asking, ‘What keyword did you Google to find us?’ is not practical.
Why not have a phone number just for the website? This is one potential solution – you can have a unique number, such as a freephone number on the site, and when that’s called, you 100% know that your website, in one form or another, is responsible for the call.
Another option is to simply treat phone calls as new business and to not worry about where they came from – after all, it’s a new business lead, so who cares really?
Get yourself a CRM.
No matter how small your business may be, a CRM, free or paid, can help you close the loop on your SEO and identify ROI.
Remember that the days of keyword reports are gone – it’s impossible to tell exactly which keyword your new lead used, but it is possible to see what group of KWs they used if you track the page on which they submitted a form.
If you have a page that ranks for a niche set of keywords and you get a form submission that you know is from a certain page on your site, you can broadly identify that a particular set of keywords is driving new business.
This report comes from the CRM, not your keyword position reports or whatever other stuff your SEO sends you.
So why are reports not results?
Because SEO reports generally focus on different things:
- The keywords you have positions for
- The position of these keywords and any movement
- The average position of your keywords
- New keywords, lost keywords
- And so on
There is nothing wrong with this data, but it certainly does not give you any ROI data – you can’t do anything more than generally stick a fork in what might be happening.
You want results.
Most businesses don’t want to see yet another report; they want results, but some SEO experts make the mistake of sending clients a report each more for results.
Telling clients that their average keyword position has increased from 56 to 48 may be an improvement, but does it make any difference to your new business leads? No.
Results-focussed SEO.
This is what I like doing, and it does mean I need to have a poke around in your sales reports, but that’s the point – if I don’t do that, or you don’t have anyone that does that, your SEO is going to be all reports and no results.
Dave
Dave is a WordPress SEO expert with over 20 years experience in designing, building and optimising WordPress (and non-WordPress) websites for people who are serious about SEO and want to generate more new business from their websites. He's run a creative agency for 25+ years, employs 17 staff and enjoys a good rant about SEO.
