Elevate Your SEO Knowledge With Reporting

 

 

Being an SEO Expert can wear you out, as learning can be stagnant after a while, and it gets challenging to move up the learning ladder because what works for others might not be a good fit for you. The one question that might always come to your mind is – How to scale your knowledge in SEO? We asked a few seasoned SEO Experts about the best practices of reporting and their experiences and this is what they had to say: Reporting is not just a picture of last month’s activities but can also help setting future goals or understand if there’s a need of altering the current strategy.

 

Here are three scenarios that could help you understand better

 

Scenario 1:

Your Traffic is Up / It’s up by a Huge % 

 

If this is the case then no doubt your SEO efforts have worked in your favor and you deserve a pat on your back. It’s important to understand if the growth was a steady which was led by the recent activities you performed, this can be analyzed by seeing the growth in –

 

• Organic Traffic
• Goal Completion
• Improvement in Keywords ranking
• Increase in Impression and CTR

 

Also, in such cases you may check for bot traffic in analytics as this has been an issue lately faced by many SEO Experts for their clients. The huge jump can also be positive, so here are things to analyze in such a case

 

• Any favorable news for your client’s industry
• Huge jump in keyword rankings & search impressions
• Latest Google Update
• Bot referral
• 00:00:00 (Traffic with this average spent time)
• SQL injection of pages

 

By going through this you can learn and understand the data which helps you reason out the changes that your campaign is undergoing.

 

Scenario 2: 

 

You’re Traffic Remained Stagnant : 

 

This can be disappointing when you have a demanding client, though this is not a bad result to get but explaining it to the client can be challenging. These results are also termed as no work done (Once said by a client.. just kidding) but that is not true.

 

Let’s look into what positives that can be taken from such reports –

 

• Increased competition in the market and we have still managed to sustain the keyword ranking for our client
• Seasonality could be the reason (Gifting sites )

 

What to check in such a case for analysis –

 

• Organic and keywords data
• Google trends
• SEO tactics (If a stagnant growth trend, changing the SEO strategy or re-optimizing the pages can be looked into)

Scenario 3:

Your Traffic is down / It’s down by a huge %:

 

(Nightmare is what we can call it) 

I won’t be surprised if as an SEO Expert one has said a few lines of prayers while opening the Google analytics on the reporting date. I won’t lie, a few prayers have slipped from my heart as well. This is the most challenging state but the best one for gaining the knowledge and understanding the reasoning of the situation. In case there is a slight drop in the performance, these are the few quick checks to be done –

 

• Keywords ranking
• Traffic flow (Check for sudden fall on any day of the month)
• Google trends
• Impression drops
• Check if the client is running paid ads campaign (if the ads are taking your share of the traffic)

 

In case of a huge drop in performance –

 

• Cross check if too many keywords have dropped their position
• Check search console (Compare last 30 days with it’s previous 30 days and filter queries by clicks and try to understand which queries have lost clicks and do further analysis to understand what cause such drop in clicks, is it because of ranking drop, or is the google trend data down for that particular period)
• Is analytics code missing from the site?
• Was your site hacked, or removed from SERPs?
• Search for any new update related to the Client’s Industry
• Any changes you made in the last month which might have impacted
• Check if you are a victim of the monster (Google Update).
• Did you lose backlinks from high authority sites?
• Check speed of your site
• Increase in spammy backlinks

 

Hope these scenarios will help you understand the performance of your clients.

 

SEO is very interesting if we can just read through the data and take actions based on results. There are plenty of reporting tools available in the market to study and understand about your performance.