Posted by Cyrus-Shepard
New year, new you — when it comes to SEO reporting, at least! We’re kicking off 2020 with a comprehensive yet gloriously simple recipe from Cyrus Shepard for creating truly effective SEO reports. From tying KPIs to business metrics to delivering bad news effectively, such reports “ve never” appeared so good.
Video Transcription
Okay, so we have 400 transgressed pages. Ah, we rank amount 7 for best plumbers in Idaho. Oh, hey, Moz devotees. I’m Cyrus Shepard. Today I’m talking about SEO reports, specifically how to create 10 x SEO reports.
I’ve gotten hundreds of SEO reports like this in my career, and I’ve got to tell you that’s useless. No one is reading those. This is unfortunate because this is your direct lane to communicate the value of what you’re doing, drive act, and essentially shape more money with your job. Now a good SEO report tries to accomplish three things 😛 TAGEND You just wanted to tie the report directly to your business metrics. You want to show the value of SEO, what you’re doing, how SEO is delivering to those business metrics. Ultimately, you want to drive action. When people read your SEO report, you want them to take action on specific things, fix locate issues, those sorts of things, etc.
But people make a lot of misstep. Typically, if you’ve established SEO reports, if you’ve read SEO reports, you’ve seen these gaffes over and over and over again:
It’s not a site audit. It’s not a list of every single thing that is wrong, every single traffic metric. It’s usually simply the top things, the things that we want to focus people’s attention on. It’s not something that only delivers good news. You determine these hour and time again, SEO reports, they paint a rosy picture. But people aren’t stupid. They know that if their business is not improving and you’re continually delivering good news, you’re not really tying SEO to the business.
So we want to create even reports.
5 things to include in every SEO report
Now over the years, with review reports I’ve generated, I find that there are generally five key things that you want to include in every SEO report that help you drive act and testify the value of SEO and ultimately help you stir more fund.
1. 2-4 KPIs
The first thing that you want to include in every SEO report is KPIs. These are key performance indicators. These necktie directly to your business metrics. Generally, you want to include about two to four members of these. You want to keep them top of mind.
A) Changeovers, aims, sign-ups, downloads, etc.
Now, generally in SEO, these can be transitions, aims, e-commerce, how many things are you selling. It can be sign-ups for your email newsletter. It is feasible to downloads.
Generally, anything having to do with money, your business metrics, or your key performance indicators, these are good things to include.
Pro tip: When to provide information on your key concert benchmark, organic traffic, the SEO work that you do is often the last transition canal that people will use. So it’s good to use facilitated changeovers.
This is often found in Google Analytics or whatever analytics program that you use. This will determine a look-back window and show how organic traffic, how your SEO attempts lent even though it is their last-place visit was direct. So it’s good researching that and understanding how you can use assisted transitions in your reporting.
B) Traffic MoM, YoY
Another key performance benchmark that is very common in SEO reports is traffic. In fact, some people like to lead with it. I like to lead with the business metrics. But it’s inevitable that if you’re doing an SEO report, you’re going to include traffic.
Now if you want to construct that traffic report a little more valuable, you are required to comparisons, generally month-to-month comparings or more useful year-over-year comparings. This helps avoid the problem of like traffic was down because of Christmas or a certain holiday or regional occurrence.
So when you compare year-over-year, you can show actual concert that varies a bit more reasonably.
2. Search visibility& share of voice
Second, and this is where a lot of people stumble, hunting visibility or share of voice( SOV ). Now where people stumble is this is not a higher-rankings report.
A lot of SEO reports include higher-rankings. Rankings, I’ve got to say, actually aren’t the best thing to include in your reports. Rankings fluctuate. They are so personalized from country, machine, and individuals. So including rankings for individual keywords is not very informative. Fortunately, there are a lot great alternatives that you can include that are much superior to rankings.
A) Search visibility( click calculates)
Search visibility, you’ll find this in many SEO tools. Moz has it. Different SEO tools have it. It’s basically an estimate of clicks for all your tracked keywords. So if you’re tracking hundreds or thousands of keywords, pursuit visibility can show you an estimation of how much traffic you’re actually getting from those keywords based on rank and hunting volume and things like that.
B) Share of voice( visibility& volume)
Share of voice is very close to that, but it’s not based on clicks. It’s based on visibility and volume. For endeavor, STAT does an excellent job with share of voice. What’s cool about share of voice is it tracks all of your keywords against all of your challengers for those keywords. So “if youre having” 200 keywords ranking for best plumbers in Wisconsin, it will show you where all your competitors are and how much of that traffic you are actually gaining, whether it’s 13% or 30%. That way you can track against your competitors. It’s a considerably better metric than those individual keywords that don’t tell you much.
C) Rank index( grouped keywords)
Finally, if you don’t have access to the premium SEO tools, you can do something which is called a rank index. A.J. Kohn has an excellent post on this. It’s a little older, but still very relevant.
A rank index is basically grouping all of your keywords by kind. For example, perhaps they all have the word “plumber” in them. You track their higher-rankings together as a group, hundreds or thousands of keywords, and you can see waverings. That gives you a much better performance indicator than those individual keywords.
3. Site health
This is your on-page work, your technological SEO. Again, where most people stumble, “theres not” an audit. You don’t want to list every issue on your site, all the 404 s, all the 500 s, and things like that because no one genuinely wants to read those things. They get very repetitive.
Focus on your most important issues
Instead you want to focus only on your most important issues. Generally, when I create an SEO report, that’s three to five issues. If people want more information, you can deliver it to them. You can give them in-depth downloads, site stats, and all that. But for review reports, we only want to focus people’s attention on three to five issues, that they can actually fix, that you want them to work on. We’re going to list the most important issues on there that we are willing to to taking any decision on.
Pro tip: When you’re writing your website health report, use the word “because.” When you use the word “because, ” it helps people take action. For example, “We have a lot of 404 pages on the site because we introduced some new busted links.” That tells people that we have a problem, this is why, and they want to take action.
Show progress
Also, if you’ve made any progress since the last time you depicted review reports, you determined those 404 s, this is a good place to include it.
4. Content concert
One thing I like to include, that often isn’t, is content concert. This is your top content, whether it’s a blog or whatever content you grow, by connections, shares, and traffic.
Drive activities through recommendations
Now the reason I are happy to point out to the website owneds content concert is because I want to show them what’s performing well to encourage them to create more of it. I want to drive activity through recommendations. This content, this blog post that Britney wrote did very, very well. We should have Britney write another one on this.
Suggest topics, keywords, and authors
By doing this, you’re helping your client or your boss or whatever help you by establishing that content that’s going to do well.
Highlight low-performing content
Also, if you want to highlight low-performing content or content that has moved stale and is going down, this is also a helpful region to do that, just to help inform the decisions of your content team.
5. Opportunity
This is probably the most important one. This is the crux of the SEO report — opportunities. Possibilities is the key that you’re trying to drive here. These are recommendations.
4-5 recommendations per month
Based on everything that we talked about here, what are the four or five most important things that we can do right now to improve SEO next month?
Prioritize
You want to prioritize. This is the most important. This is the second.
Keep it simple
We want to employ KISS. If you’re not familiar with KISS, it’s an acronym, keep it simple, stupid. You’re not stupid. You’re just going to keep it simple.
You want to stimulate your recommendations as simple and easy to follow as possible. One, two, three, four, that’s it. We’re not going to include everything. A lot of SEO reports want to list dozens of things. We want to hold those back. If you have dozens of specifies that you are required to specified on the site, it’s probably not a great thing to throw them in there because you’re going to overwhelm your clients and boss and people taking action.
Provide precise steps monthly
Again, four to five a month or whatever sort of cadence you’re on, weekly, monthly, and how many things you think your client can reasonably tackle. Next month you’ll give them four to five more, and you’ll stay employed and you’ll continually have a brand-new roster of things to work on.
Tie determines to KPIs
You want to make sure they’re tied to the KPIs.
We want to fix these since they were directly influence these. In fact, I just wanted to shake things up a little. I know we listed amount five as possibilities. Don’t end your report with that. Make possibilities the number one thing in your report. Open it up, here are the opportunities, and then here are KPIs, pursuit visibility, etc ., so they know exactly what they should be working on.
We only liberated a brand-new guide on SEO reporting. You should check it out 😛 TAGEND
Read the Guide to SEO Reporting
We released some new functionality in Moz Pro too if you’re into that sort of thing. If you have any questions, let me know in the comments below. If you like this, please share. Thanks, everybody.
Video transcription by Speechpad.com
Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad relates uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read!
Read more: tracking.feedpress.it