One of the ways Organically differentiates itself from any other SEO marketing firm is the reporting we provide to our customers. Some SEO marketing companies offer basic reporting featuring a few simple dashboards that they repopulate each month with the latest figures. The most important aspect of effective reporting is customization. The reports should help with decision-making and reflect the realities of each customer’s business. They need to be concise and informative plus offer insights into opportunities for the future. Let’s take a closer look at one of these types of reports and examine why they provide value:
First Page Rankings
The greater number of first page rankings the more opportunities a company has of directing qualified traffic to its website. Our SEO marketing firm is dedicated to strategies that help our customers acquire as much page one Google real estate as possible. In our reports we compare the current rankings to the benchmark over time, so customers can see the growth in page one positions. The key phrase research we perform at campaign outset forms the backbone of all of the activities our SEO marketing firm conducts for you. Tracking the positions of those keywords will help us analyze the effectiveness of our marketing strategy, and allow us to make adjustments over time to improve your search engine rankings.
Organic Traffic Growth
When customers first come to our SEO marketing firm they often do not possess the organic traffic they need to keep their businesses growing at the rate they would like. It is our SEO marketing company’s job to create a campaign that develops their organic traffic. This is traffic they do not have to bid to acquire. It builds over time through the systematic work we do via content marketing, link development, social media marketing and more. Our SEO marketing firm reports on this via Google Analytics and we review Search Console to tell us the keyword queries that drove the traffic to our customers’ websites. Our customers are able to see the total number of sessions on their website, and they can view the Sessions on a per day basis, if they wish. The report also shows the number of new users, pages per session, and session duration. Our marketing performance is only partially successful if we get users to click through to a website. Our organic traffic data allows us to determine if the website content is helping to convert these users. If we see increases in our monthly traffic numbers, we will take these into account and weigh how our strategies helped drive these increases, so we can steadily build upon them. Likewise if the numbers decrease, we want to examine our recent campaign activities, competitor actions and other factors to discern how we may wish to respond, and plan for the future.
Bounce Rate
This is one of the most important metrics to track because it allows us to know how website pages are performing. Understanding the significance of a high bounce rate can drive positive change, including pointing to a need for A/B testing page designs to alleviate the problems causing people to leave a page. Copy, code and design changes can be applied and tracked to determine users’ reactions. Improved calls to action and other conversion optimization improvements can also be deployed to help alleviate high bounce rates.
We’ll discuss bounce rate with you as it relates to your goals and the design of your website. Analyzing bounce rate is about determining if qualified users are visiting your website; i.e., are the people you want visiting and converting, or are people coming to your site and then leaving abruptly? Sometimes bounce rate is less of an issue if you are getting a lot of people filling out your contact form or calling you. Our SEO marketing firm will compare your conversions (see more about this below) with your bounce rate and let you know how your site’s bounce rate affects you.
Conversions
For most clients tracking conversions means that we report on their monthly sales figures occurring on their website. For some customers we may track additional goals, such as newsletter signups, or e-book downloads. A good rule of thumb to remember when tracking conversions is to look for the entire conversion path. Few customers will visit a website once and make a purchase, unless a company offers a highly exclusive and desirable product, or unless the product has come highly recommended by someone the customer knows. In many cases a customer will visit a site multiple times and perform other actions; sometimes signing up for an email list, then perhaps downloading a free report. Over time trust is built and soon a sale may result from the relationship built through several interactions.
We hope describing the types of reports we offer has illustrated more than our reporting philosophy. Tracking campaign progress doesn’t have to be an exhaustive exercise to be effective. Reports that inform and cut through data clutter will always be the most valuable to the customer.