Strategic SEO Reports Deliver Insight, Not Just Data

Do your eyes glaze over when you look at your team’s SEO report? Ever get the sense that the numbers and charts you’re seeing have meaning for the SEO team members themselves, but not much relevance to the actual state of the business? First, you’re not alone; second, it’s time to demand more strategic SEO reports, like those provided by (un)Common Logic.

Strategic SEO Reports Start with Business Objectives

Before you can register progress toward a goal, you must first know what that goal is. What business objectives do you want to accomplish through SEO? For most companies, generating conversions, leads, and/or sales is the desired result. However, other firms might have slightly different goals, such as directing visitors to offline distributors for their products.

Start by defining the actions you want users to take when they visit your website, then rank them based on the impact of those actions on revenue. Email newsletter signups are definitely good, but purchases or demo requests are much closer to the bottom line.

Then set up consistent, accurate tracking with metrics selected for their relevance to business success, not just basic traffic/engagement success. Every major analytics platform has a “Goals” feature for tracking completions of the desired action steps, and setting up goals isn’t difficult once you’ve determined what those goals should be.

Segmenting Data Makes for More Strategic SEO Reports

“All traffic is not created equal” has been a fundamental truth of digital marketing and SEO for years now. Data segmented in different relevant ways gives you insight into the actions taken by site visitors based on their original searcher intent, additional on-site searches, level of engagement, and many other potential dimensions. Even demographic data can be a way of segmenting site visitors and users as long as none of it is personally identifying and visitors have agreed to tracking.

Here are just a few of the segments we do for one client:

• Engagement levels of visitors based on what type of queries they originally submitted (product-based, information-based, company-based, etc.)
• Company size of visitors who convert (sign up for a demo, fill out a contact form, or sign up for an email newsletter), further broken out by organic and non-organic traffic
• Country of visitors who take one of the three conversion actions above, broken into tiers based on the client’s preferred markets

Context and Insights from Analysts Give Data Meaning

Even if goals have been identified and tracked, and data segments set up to capture all the relevant dimensions, you could still get a report filled with numbers, charts, and graphs that doesn’t impart any useful information. The most important element for strategic SEO reports is the analysis from a trained expert that answers the all-important question “Yes, but what does this mean?“

(un)Common SEO reports never present data without an accompanying analysis of what the data indicates and what we recommend based on those indications. We also note the data’s source, for the sake of transparency and accountability and to help spot any inconsistencies or conflicts in data.

Context is another important component of strategic SEO reports; whenever data is reported on a time scale, we note any developments that might have occurred in that time, from algorithm updates to changes we made in the site’s code. Nothing happens in a vacuum in SEO, and a good report will show that.

Telling the Story, Guiding the Future

Strategic SEO reports cut through all the jargon, minutiae, and inside-baseball data that matters to the people who perform SEO tasks but not to the leaders and decision-makers who determine marketing strategy:

• They tell the story of how SEO has progressed thus far without getting bogged down in too much history
• They give you a full understanding of your site’s present performance as it relates to revenue and other mission-critical business objectives
• They provide a path toward even greater improvements in the future

We recommend that you demand better SEO reporting. Demand (un)Common SEO reports.