No matter what kind of products or services you offer, your business website or professional blog is essential for attracting customers and closing deals. In most areas and specialties, there is fierce competition for top search engine placement and this is where search engine optimization becomes essential for SEM. SEO metric can help you to monitor progress toward goals can be done with the use of an SEO report.
Setting up an SEO Report
SEO has turned out to be a crucial component of Digital Marketing because the majority of companies nowadays depend on their visibility in the SERP as one of their most important customer acquisition methods.
Every day, millions of people use search engines like Google and Bing to find specific products and services. Many people use search engines specifically to find a good service that an established business offers. A service provider is more likely to gain new clients than its rivals, who show lower on the results page if it ranks well in SERP results. This is the reason why businesses today invest so much effort and money into improving their SERP (search engine results page) rankings.
Businesses typically utilize SEO Reports to monitor their SEO campaigns. This article will explain many metrics you may use to gauge how well your website is performing on search engine results pages (SERPs).
Before you can understand what SEO is and how it works, you need to be aware of what Organic Search Engine Results are. Paid and organic results are the two categories that show up following a search in a search engine. A search engine may provide “paid results” when you use a keyword or set of keywords. These results are often advertisements for certain websites. As part of the “Organic Search” results, search engines often include a list of websites that correspond to the user’s query.
The user can usually tell the difference between a Paid and an Organic Search result. A modern search engine’s results page may have one or two Paid results at the top or along the side of the display. All Paid Search listings include a brief disclaimer that the result is an advertisement.
Paid and Organic Search Results
Search engine bots trawl the Internet in an effort to understand the context of the material on the billions of pages that are accessible there. Complex algorithms evaluate this data to decide if the content of a web page is pertinent to a user’s search. After locating all pertinent pages, they are evaluated based on a number of criteria before being presented to the user in increasing order of the rank assigned.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is used to multiply the quantity and caliber of visitors coming to a website from search engines. In order to do this, both your website and its content must be optimized for the various factors that search engines consider when deciding where to rank a page.
Types of SEO
- On-Page SEO
You must carry out on-page SEO on each and every page of your website if you want to improve its visibility in search engine results pages (SERPs). The use of relevant titles and meta descriptions, the inclusion of high-quality content that is centered on a certain keyword, and conducting keyword research are a few examples.
- Technical SEO
Technical SEO is performed on a website’s backend. Several strategies for enhancing the site’s essential infrastructure are included in this list. With technical SEO, you may enhance your site’s functionality, mobile friendliness, structured data, crawlability, and other metrics. All of these might ensure a pleasurable user experience, increasing exposure and participation in turn.
- Off-Page SEO
You can widen your online audience and build valuable relationships with other websites by using off-site SEO techniques. With the aid of this, you could be able to acquire more backlinks, which can greatly improve your ranking. Having your website recognized as reputable by having it connected to multiple other websites (backlinks) will increase traffic and user engagement.
Key SEO Metrics For WordPress
1. Traffic Source
Increasing the totality of organic traffic to a website is one of any organization’s SEO operations’ most important objectives. As a result, this should be the first metric in the SEO Report. This indicator gives you a general concept of website traffic and a very basic understanding of how much your SEO efforts are advancing the success of your company.
To ensure that your SEO Report is comprehensive and has all the necessary information, it can be a good practice to expand on your initial estimate of the amount of traffic your website receives and explain where that traffic originates.
The information gained from this can then be utilized to determine which channels are operating efficiently and which aren’t. The marketing and business teams can use it to help them plan their future plans in a way that will ensure that the channels that are operating well continue to grow and that they can also figure out how to improvise the performance of channels that are not performing well.
It makes sense to acquire the same expertise for all the pages on your website now that you have a clear understanding of which Marketing Channels are working effectively and which aren’t. This indication will help you identify which pages on your website aren’t doing well in search engine results.
The content on that page can then be optimized using this data in order to include specific keywords with high search volume that may correspond to a user’s search intent on the search engine.
This statistic, which may be included in your SEO Report in a format similar to the one below, can be used to see the trend in the number of visitors to a particular page.
2. Audience Engagement
A crucial factor to take into account while creating SEO analytics is audience involvement. The level of engagement that a website or online piece of content generates from its audience is typically used to determine how successful it is. This engagement may be assessed using metrics like page views, bounce rates, time spent on the site, social media shares, comments, and conversions.
These engagement metrics must be looked at while creating SEO reports in order to gain an understanding of how users are interacting with the website or content. This can help identify areas for improvement, such as content optimization for particular keywords or user experience enhancement to lower bounce rates and increase time spent on site.
Monitoring audience activity over time might also reveal trends and opportunities for development. For instance, it might be lucrative to post more of a certain piece of content if it routinely receives a lot of interaction in order to boost traffic and conversions.
3. Lead Conversion Rate
An important factor that needs to be mentioned in your SEO Report is your lead conversion rate. A large amount of traffic is not very helpful to the business if it is not turning into leads. Visitors turn into leads when they start a conversation with your business. This conversation could take the form of a query, a request for information on new products or services, etc.
Customers might become leads and are ultimately responsible for generating income for your business. Every company wants to increase the Lead Conversion Rate or the proportion of visitors who turn into leads.
4. Page Speed
For this section, briefly divert yourself from Google Analytics and try out a Google product called PageSpeed Insights.
It’s a completely free program designed to showcase to your clients the speed at which their pages load and identify any performance issues they may address to improve their results.
Occasionally, it could be something minor, such as a video with an excessively large file size. Resolve this issue swiftly, and your pages will be live in no time with this simple, quick fix.
While page speed may not have always been a primary concern, the increasing expectations of customers for seamless online experiences underscore the importance of ensuring swift page loading to retain visitors on your site.
Google even claims that increasing load time from one to three seconds increases the likelihood that a user would leave a website by 32%.
5. Dwell Time And Bounce Rate
Understanding who has visited your website, which pages they clicked on, and, in some situations, if they converted is quite useful.
But to get the whole picture, your client needs to know how long visitors stay on their website and how many leave after the home page.
Visitors who arrive via an organic search remain on a website page for a certain period of time. This is known as dwell time. Do they want a quick response, or are they just surfing the page to find other things?
High bounce rates, though, are not always a problem. It’s possible that they moved on to study these outbound connections if they left your landing page, which contains numerous internal links to other pages on your website, without taking any more action.
6. Keyword Rankings
This SEO metric can be used to determine the keywords that your pages rank for. Therefore, if your pages rank for terms with a low search volume, the organic traffic to your website will undoubtedly be restricted. You can also add high-traffic, often searched-for keywords by editing the content on your website.
The keywords it ranks for, the number of searches for each term, and the rate at which the quantity of searches has changed over time may all be found in your SEO Report to demonstrate this measurement.
7. Technical SEO
The technical aspects of your website will significantly influence whether or not your SEO effort is ultimately successful. As a result, it’s crucial to keep track of the fluctuations in your website’s technical SEO. In fact, you most likely have a technical issue if your website is having trouble ranking in search results despite having quality content and off-page SEO.
Include a section in your SEO report that monitors 404 errors, poor redirects, Google Search Console crawl issues, and pages that your robots.txt file forbids.
8. Referring to Domains and Backlinks
It is referred to as a backlink to your website if a link on another domain points to it. Backlinks play a vital role in SEO since they act as a “vote of confidence” from one domain to another.
Search engines basically use backlinks to your website as an assurance that other websites trust your content. If more than one website links to the same web page or domain, search engines may infer that the content is worthwhile for linking to and, thus, worthwhile to appear on a SERP. Therefore, obtaining these backlinks may improve a site’s ranking or exposure in searches.
It is reasonable to suppose that a page will link to your page only if the information on your page is relevant to or essential to the material on the external page. Search engines assume that your content is relevant for a certain term based on the relevancy of a page that has previously been crawled by them.
If there are many pages that are relevant to your website linking to it, your website’s score will rise considerably. A domain that has one or more Backlinks linking to your website is referred to as a Referring Domain. A lot of Backlinks and Referring Domains should point to your website.
Your SEO Report needs to include the referring domains and how much traffic they drive to your website.
9. Organic Click-Through Rate (CTR)
Your organic click-through rate (CTR) represents the number of users who go to your website from a search engine results page (SERP) among all those who saw your website listed in the search results. When your content closely aligns with the majority of users’ search intentions, your material achieves a high CTR for those specific terms. Consequently, an increase in CTR corresponds to an improvement in your SERP ranking.
In this section of your SEO report, it’s crucial to monitor how frequently site visits lead to conversions or sales. The definition of appropriate conversions may vary depending on your website goals. For instance, you might be aiming for lead generation rather than an immediate sale. Therefore, to ensure progressive success in conversions, the following statistics are significant:
- Conversion Rate: Represented as a percentage, this metric indicates the proportion of visits resulting in a conversion event.
- Number of Conversions: Reflects the count of visitors converting into customers or generating sales leads, encompassing various actions.
- Total Revenue: Quantifies the overall cash generated by your website, including revenue from purchases, advertising sales, and subscription fees.
- Average Order Value: Measures the average amount spent when a sale is completed, with the aim of continually increasing this figure for most ecommerce brands.
- Abandonment Rate: Illustrates the percentage of people out of 100 who abandon their cart without completing the order after placing items in it.
- User Registrations: Tracks the volume of individuals signing up as site users, especially relevant for communities or subscription-based platforms.
10. Bounce Rate
The “bounce rate” is the number of visitors on your website that leave without taking any further action. This suggests that the visitor did nothing more than view your site without clicking any links, filling out any forms, making any purchases, etc.
A high bounce rate on your website may be an indicator of issues with the user experience, content, page structure, etc., even if the Bounce Rate is no longer an important ranking factor for search engines. Every visitor that leaves your website is a potential customer you have lost, so any business should strive for a bounce rate that is as low as possible. Therefore, even though it might not be considered to be a major factor for ranking, Bounce Rate should be included in your SEO Report.
11. Crawl Errors
To easily rank websites when a person looks for something, search engines use bots that crawl web pages on the search engines to understand the context of the material on them. While browsing the pages of your website, the crawler could encounter several problems.
Most modern search engines identify crawl issues as site errors or URL faults. Site errors are when a crawler cannot access your entire website, while URL errors are when it cannot access a specific page on your website. Any form of crawl fault will stop your website or some of its pages from ever being indexed in SERP because search engines can’t access the page to analyze the context of the content on it.
A considerable number of URL mistakes on your website will also impact the domain’s rating, which will affect the rankings of the pages that the crawler was able to access. These factors make it an essential signal that belongs in your SEO Report.
To avoid any sort of crawl issues, ensure that each URL for your domain produces a real page. The page might be made available, or users could be directed to another page to achieve this.
Also Read: 7 URL Shorteners To Elevate Your SEO Strategy And Enhance User Experience
12. Monthly, quarterly, or yearly comparisons
Metrics and statistics have no value without context. Hence, they are useless. Keeping track of these indicators and data for Month-over-Month (MoM), Quarter-over-Quarter (QoQ), and Year-over-Year (YoY) is one of the best practices. Performances for the week-over-week (WoW) and year-to-date (YTD) intervals should also be mentioned.
This presents an opportunity for you to increase the client’s knowledge and trust while also educating them on how to properly evaluate the data. Additionally, it allows the client to see how your work has changed over time, which is what you hoped it would accomplish.
13. Web Traffic
The first segment of your SEO report ought to provide details about your website traffic. As commonly acknowledged, traffic holds a paramount position because it not only serves as a gauge of success but also aligns with the primary objective of SEO, which is to boost traffic. These metrics are a product of both fundamental SEO techniques and more sophisticated approaches.
- Organic Traffic
A clear indicator of a successful SEO campaign is the noticeable rise in organic traffic to your website. This applies to various elements such as backlinks, citations, content marketing, technical SEO, and more. Whether your objective is to enhance domain authority, improve keyword rankings, or increase conversions, organic traffic becomes a key metric in measuring your main Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).
The optimal method for gauging organic traffic in a report is through Google Analytics (GA), a long-standing and still unparalleled source for website traffic data. To assess your organic traffic, extract the following information from your GA account:
Sessions: How frequently did users visit your website through search engines?
Time-based Comparisons: Analyze sessions on a week-to-week, month-to-month, and year-to-year basis to identify trends.
Landing pages: Evaluate whether the pages you optimized are experiencing a rise in sessions.
While there are additional traffic-related metrics available in GA, and various segmentation methods exist based on how you wish to gauge SEO success, it’s advisable to, at the very least, examine these key aspects.
- Traffic to Key Landing/Sales Pages
In this context, you’re informing the readers of your SEO report about the frequency of visits to specific pages. Unlike the “pageviews” statistic, the focus here is exclusively on particular pages. These could include a web form, lead magnet, or promotion page, for example.
- Search Engine Traffic
This metric centers on traffic generated from search engines, specifically encompassing both organic search results and paid placements. Assessing search engine traffic provides a valuable gauge of the overall interest in your company.
14. Audience Engagement
In order for visitors to move down your sales funnel, they must interact with your website, regardless of the type of content you generate or the nature of your company. You may fine-tune your sales funnel to be more efficient and go beyond the fundamentals by using the information in this section of the SEO report.
- Average Session Duration: After a visitor arrives on your website, what is the duration of their stay? This metric is determined by the total time spent on your site, irrespective of the number of pages viewed.
- Average Page Views per Session: During each visit, how many distinct pages does a user explore? In this context, the duration of stay on each page is not a factor.
- % New Sessions: Among your overall visitors, what percentage is making their first visit? This metric is particularly crucial to monitor in the context of a brand awareness campaign.
15. Search Engine Rankings
When contemplating “SEO,” our minds typically gravitate toward actual search engine rankings and a website’s performance in search results. As such, certain key statistics play a pivotal role in any comprehensive SEO report:
- Number of Organic Keywords Ranking: Assess the quantity of keywords for which your site holds a position without resorting to paid search. Ideally, this number should be substantial. A well-executed strategy should demonstrate a progressive increase in rankings for your selected keywords.
- Keyword Search Engine Ranking Tracking Visibility: Among the keywords you monitor, how frequently do users click on your website through organic search results? This metric presents insights into the effectiveness of your keywords in attracting organic traffic.
- Search Engine Positions Breakdown: Examine the specific search engine rank for each keyword under observation. If your rankings fall short, these areas signify opportunities for enhancement. Conversely, robust positions necessitate maintenance to fend off potential declines.
- Average Search Engine Ranking: Calculate the average position by summing up the position numbers for each keyword and dividing by the total. For instance, averaging the ranks across keywords related to influencer marketing provides a consolidated perspective.
- Competitor Search Engine Ranking Tracking: Evaluate the placement of your competitors on the SERP. A comparative analysis with your own rankings offers valuable insights for refining your SEO strategy.
- Search Engine Impressions: Determine how frequently pages from your site appear in user searches, focusing solely on organic results and excluding paid results.
- Search Engine CTR by Keyword: Explore how often users click on any link when searching a particular keyword. This metric is reported for each tracked keyword, providing a nuanced understanding of user engagement with different search terms.
16. User Experience
Consider “user experience” as akin to the sales staff in a local store or the employees in customer-facing businesses. In the context of a website, user experience, or UX, serves as a gauge of how enjoyable visitors find interacting with your site. Research indicates that more than 80% of website visitors assume a website will load within 2 seconds. If the loading time exceeds this threshold, there’s a risk that visitors may exit, thereby increasing your bounce rate. In such situations, the following factors should be considered in an SEO report:
- Average Page Load Time: In straightforward terms, what is the usual duration for a page to load? Ideally, it should consistently be under two seconds, with quicker load times generally being more favorable. Frequently, this metric is conveyed in milliseconds.
- Google Page Speed: This tool enables you to assess the speed of your page loading while also offering improvement recommendations. Google presents the speed as a score rather than a specific time, providing insights into how your performance compares with others.
17. Trends
Every SEO campaign should be created with the significance of seeing the larger picture rather than fixating on minor fluctuations. It’s crucial not to be overly alarmed by metric drops or to be confident in short-term successes. Successful SEO campaigns typically unfold gradually over time, emphasizing the significance of observing trends rather than expecting abrupt, explosive changes.
This involves staying attuned to marketing trends, industry shifts, and nuances within your client’s niche. Each new Google algorithm update can impact specific industries more than others, necessitating a mindful consideration of these trends whenever notable changes appear in your SEO reporting—whether they involve declines or increases.
Demonstrating your awareness and proactive response to these trends not only reassures your clients but also fosters ongoing confidence in your capabdoesn’t.
Conclusion
The phenomenon of analysis paralysis is real. Even with just these fundamental elements for SEO reporting, there’s a substantial amount of data to consider. Each SEO report not only presents the data but also offers explanations and delineates any plans for future performance enhancement, if applicable. Anticipating the questions your clients might have is crucial, and the answers should be seamlessly integrated into the report.
Clients don’t simply want data dumped on them with a directive to interpret its significance. Most likely, they aren’t well-versed in the importance of various SEO metrics, and it’s essential to prevent them from drawing incorrect conclusions from the data.
Incorporate commentary in your reporting detailing the tasks you undertook, and explicitly highlight data points that illustrate the impact. If there were factors like algorithm changes, ensure that you mention them, elucidating whether they had a positive or negative effect on your client.
