I recently decided that our monthly SEO and conversion strategy reports were kind of weak, so Brian (one of our SEO/conversion strategists) and I set out to redevelop our report template. We came up with some fairly concise, direct principles to follow, so I thought I’d include them here in case anyone can make use of our efforts or can add to what we’ve done:

1. Lead with what’s important

   I’ve seen a lot of reports that start with very basic, dashboard-style metrics that provide an overview of site traffic, visitors, bounce rate, etc. Those metrics are useful (in the right context – more on that below), but if you’re really looking to do well by your clients, you’re looking at conversion, conversion, conversion.

   As a result, we decided to start the report with two things: goal completion metrics (as compared to the previous month), and an executive summary of the status of the campaign. The summary outlines very concisely how our efforts fared that month, our assessment of strengths and weaknesses (e.g. why some things worked and others didn’t), and plans for moving forward into the next monthly cycle.

2. Put the data in context

   Another issue I’ve seen with SEO reports is that they’ll give information such as “the site received 10,000 visits this month”. The problem is that, by itself, there’s no way of knowing if 10,000 visits is good or bad. This is true for any metric: if you don’t compare it to some kind of benchmark, it doesn’t provide any actionable information to anyone. An easy way to give the data a reason to exist is to simply compare it to the previous month’s data.

3. Don’t include useless data

   There’s probably no reason to include your top 100 keywords or top 100 content pages in a monthly report. If the data isn’t directly actionable – if it doesn’t spur you to tweak your campaign – it’s probably not really relevant enough to include in the report.

   Depending on the size of the site, we’ll take a subset of the top (or the most important) keywords and content, and make some decisions based on the metrics around that subset. For example, we recently noticed that the media page for one of our clients was their top content right beneath their home page, so we included a media player widget on the home page. Eliminating that one click actually increased the number of qualified leads generated through the site.  Instead of listing out the top x content pages, we included that decision in the report, which I think is much more compelling than a generic export of top content.

4. Don’t include graphs for the sake of having graphs

   Graphs look pretty, but I’ve seen reports where the graph serves no function other than eye candy, because they were too small or pixilated to actually read. Resist the urge to fill the report with fancy graphs instead of filling it with concise but complete textual content that outlines your findings and details how they will affect your campaign moving forward.

5. Use your own words

   The report should read like a summary of a meeting where your team outlined what was done during the previous month, analyzed the metrics, then decided what the next course of action should be. If something you previously implemented didn’t work out as well as you had hoped, include that in the report, then follow it up with what you’ll be doing to fix or replace the failed strategy. Be candid, as if the client was in front of you asking you to give them the nitty gritty of what’s happening with the campaign.

In the end, the new report format came out looking like the outline below. I’m sure we’ll continually revise it, but I’m much happier with what we have now as compared to what we were doing previously.

• Conversion & goal metrics (as compared to previous month – includes graph)
• Executive summary / overview of campaign status
• Visitor stats overview (as compared to previous month – includes graph)
• Search Engine rank
  • a list of where we’re currently ranking in Google, Yahoo, and Bing for our target keywords and phrases. We’re now using Raven to track these for us.
  • Also includes a brief analysis of what we can do to improve or maintain ranking, or branch into new keywords & phrases
• Traffic sources overview (as compared to previous month)
  • direct traffic vs. referring sites vs. search engine traffic
  • Brief analysis of what we can do to bolster traffic sources we might be lacking in, or how we might generally increase referred or search traffic
• Top Keywords (as compared to previous month)
  • Brief analysis of the good, the bad, and the ugly here as well – what we can do to further penetrate the keywords we’re doing well on, and where else we can look to target traffic
  • References exported list of top 10 keywords, which is included as an appendix after the main report
• Top Content (as compared to previous month)
  • Same as above, references exported list of top 10 content pages, again included as an appendix after the main report

Tags: seo

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 22nd, 2009 at 10:23 pm and is filed under Helpful Tips, Search Engine Optimization. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.