Does your SEO agency provide you with quality reporting that assists you in understanding and measuring the success of your online projects?
Every SEO agency should have some type of client reporting, from the standard report that every single client receives, to the more advanced custom reporting to which bigger budget clients will have access.
Clients should not just be grateful that they receive reports, it is the quality of those reports that really matter. More importantly, has your agency been sending you exactly the same report for the last 24 months or has their reporting advanced to a new level in accordance with the maturing of the search industry? What metrics are you receiving? Is it valuable to assist in growing your business or is it simply a throwaway report sent by the agency to cover the ‘reporting’ element of the contract?
Moving Beyond the ‘Ranking / Visibility Report’
Even though a visibility report that highlights a website’s rankings for the tracked keywords in Google, Yahoo! and Bing (formerly MSN / Live Search) does provide a useful snapshot of the rankings at a particular time, this should not constitute the only reporting that a client receives. It indicates where a website is positioned and highlights whether the SEO project is moving forward or lagging, but it does not tell you if that number 2 ranking in the SERPs for a particular keyword is actually driving a positive ROI.
Warning 1: This ranking /visibility report can be manipulated to present misleading data particularly if during the keyword research process very easy-to-rank keywords were selected. This creates a false sense of success because even though a company may rank very well for the chosen keywords, this does not automatically translate to a positive ROI.
All clients should receive a benchmark report for the selected keywords, prior to the launch of the SEO campaign, so that there is a clear distinction between rankings at the start of the project and how things look 6 months into the job.
Analytics Reporting
If you are not receiving any analytics reporting from your SEO agency this is something that should be addressed immediately. If the data is being tracked, you can always ask your agency to share the information with you, but what is even more concerning is the possibility that there may NOT be analytics tracking code inserted on your website. Fixing this is critical. Analytics data that is not being tracked is money being flushed down the loo, it is every piece of actionable data that could have saved you thousands of dollars or gained you more customers.
Google Analytics is free software available to every website owner. Before your website goes live you should have the tracking code string implemented on your site. If your SEO agency does not ensure that you have Google Analytics tracking, at the simplest level of analytics tracking, you have cause to be very concerned. For an excellent guide to how Google Analytics can be used as a powerful tool, visit VKI Studios’ post: The Complete Google Analytics Power User Guide
Warning 2: If your Google Analytics has been implemented and is tracking data but you do not have direct access to this platform, instead receive some variation of weekly /monthly reports, this is a SERIOUS problem, for a few reasons:
1. The real value of Google Analytics is the ability to track metrics over time, create custom benchmark reports and compare relative time periods. If you are receiving a weekly / monthly snapshot of your analytics data in PDF format, you are missing out on the true value of this platform.
2. Any SEO agency / consultant who withholds such valuable information from you may be doing so because ethically they are not very transparent. Furthermore, once you see the valuable analytics data it may reflect the quality gaps in their work.
Measuring the KPIs that matter
As a client you should be receiving insight into as many metrics as possible.
There is no defined set of KPIs that are important, this depends on what the purpose of your website is and what you want users to do on your website, i.e.: how do you qualify a conversion. An e-commerce site will have different KPIs from an information based business website.
Certainly, traffic volume from organic keywords is important because this is the stress test for your visibility report. If your keywords rank highly in the SERPs but do not drive a great deal of organic traffic, this indicates that the keywords recommended during the keyword research phase were not the right keywords for your business.
Other metrics of interest include organic traffic broken down into branded vs. non-branded searches, organic conversion percentage, the amount of time that users are spending on your website, the bounce rate, average order value, revenue per visit etc. The metrics almost never end and for this reason it is important to understand how to segment them, analyse the results and draw conclusions leading to action that will have a positive effect on the bottom line of the client’s business.
