What Are You Reporting On?

I spend a lot of time putting together, and analysing, SEO performance reports. Any client, internal or external, that you do SEO work for will want some kind of report showing their performance. They will also, if they are in a competitive market, probably want something to show how they are doing in comparison to their competitors.

This Data is Important!

What you choose to report on can either be the basis of what drives your future actions, or be the thing that sends you off persuing something that isn’t driving any real results. That’s why reporting, although dull, is really, really important. That’s why I find charts like this so irratating:

Yes, this is a chart from an SEO agency with a lot of clients, and I don’t know where to start with how ridiculous this is. Why are page views such a good thing? Do you either “have” SEO, or “not have” SEO? Where the hell did they get this data?!?

What is the Most Accurate Competitor Analysis?

So what is an accurate way to show how a website is performing against its competitors in a given market? Assuming that you don’t have detailed analytics data on all of your, or your client’s, competitors – any revenue or conversion stats are out of the question. This only leaves us with three measures that can give us an indication of our performance:

• a website’s rankings for a particular set of terms on any given date
• the estimated search volumes for that set of terms
• and the estimated click-through rates for positions in the SERPs

Visibility alone does not give a good picture of how you are doing – if you are only reporting on how many terms you are ranking for, or how many terms you are on the first page for, this could be really misleading because you may be ranking for all the low search volume terms, and your competitors may be ranking for only a handful of really high volume terms, and they could getting a lot more traffic because of that.

By using the search volumes, and estimated click through rates, to give an indication of of the kind of traffic different sites are getting you can really see who is getting the most out of their visibility for your set of search terms.

I am not against showing who has the most visibility for a set of terms, but make sure you are looking at who has the most of the best positions, and use some traffic data to give a different view of the top players in your market. This data will put some kind of scale to the numbers, and if the people you are reporting to do not understand this, you haven’t explained yourself properly. They should appreciate it, especially is you can visualise it for them.

I’m not going to tell you exactly what I do, but this data, and how you visualise it’s change over time, is a big deal in my opinion.

Flickr image from Susan & her 5d