This post is related to SEO Progress and Strategies Reporting. Everyone knows SEO about generating huge traffic and sales for businesses by improving the ranking of the website. SEO is changing at a jet speed with the release of new algorithms by Google very often. Interestingly, Google is updating the algorithm over 500 times a year.
There are various blogging and content strategies that the company has to embrace to defeat all its competitors and stay ahead. To improve the website ranking, companies adopt link-building techniques. It is crucial for the SEO expert to conduct an SEO audit to detect the underlying issues. Especially the technical issues on the website that is taking a toll on the website ranking.
The job of SEO Expert
The expert is to present the performance of the website and the SEO audit report to the boss and tell them the areas that you want to improve in the website and how these optimizations will improve the website ranking. You need to tell in a language that is easy for them to understand. The role of SEO is to analyze the website and communicate the same to the manager or the CEO of the company.
Undoubtedly, after hiring an SEO professional, the first thing that they would ask is the number of qualified leads or inquiries that they can generate by making the website SEO friendly. How much amount they can save on promoting the product and acquiring new customers is the next question asked by the CEO or your manager.
Basically, it is challenging for the SEO experts to convince the boss who has no knowledge on why it takes time to generate leads by embracing white hat SEO techniques. Few of the bosses who are alien to the world of SEO will ask the below questions to the newly hired SEO expert is :
You need to be ready to give an explanation to all these queries
When there is a dip in the Google search engine ranking of your website due to the release of new Panda and Penguin updates and when you try to explain the same to the boss, they would not be in a position to listen to your explanation. All they expect is results.
Undeniably, it is stressful for the SEO consultants to send the SEO reports to the boss who has no knowledge of SEO. Basically, the person who has knowledge can understand the fluctuations in the SEO results every month. Undoubtedly, not every individual can understand organic traffic, domain, page authority, and other SEO terminologies.
There are three advice that you can take to get rid of headaches from the bosses who do not know anything about SEO
The only thing that a boss expects from a marketing guy, especially an SEO expert is business.
People are ready to listen to whatever you say only when it generates business. So, it is not feasible for you to communicate in SEO language that we usually need to use business terms to explain the progress of your business. You need to tell them how many inquiries you are receiving every month due to the on-page and off-page optimization of the website.
Different phases in SEO Progress and Strategies Reporting
There are different phases in SEO Progress and Strategies Reporting.
Awareness Phase
In the Awareness phase, the prospective client will get to know about your products and services. They are educated about your products through ads and promotions. There are traditional ways embraced by the companies to advertise their products including giving ads on TV, newspapers and distributing pamphlets. The amount spent on traditional advertising to acquire new customers and retain the reprising ones is called Customer Acquisition cost (CAC).
The role of SEO is to bring a sea of potential traffic to the website by getting quality backlinks to your website from industry websites to improve the website ranking on renowned search engines. When the ranking of your site increases for a specific set of industry keywords, then it gives maximum visibility of your website in organic search results. Therefore, customers can know about your brand with ease.
Consideration phase
In the Consideration phase, the customer would dive in-depth to learn about the company and why they should buy your company product over rivals. For that, you need to create an informative and appealing landing page that is embedded with rich content, images, and a call to action button that will compel the target audience who land on your website to take the desired action after reading the content on the site.
The best landing page will help you get scores of traffic and qualified leads. The content and images on the web page should inform the website visitors about your products. Moreover, the testimonials and reviews posted on the website will improve trust in your brand and motivate the potential audience to buy your product or avail of your service confidently.
Decision phase
In the Decision phase, the customer decides to buy your product or take your service. In this phase, they verify whether or not their decision is correct. The testimonials and videos uploaded on YouTube will let the customers lock the decision of buying your products. In the blog posts, you can tell how using your product will solve the problems of the customer briskly. Undeniably, this will compel the customers to take the decision of buying your product.
Sales phase
In the Sales phase, the customer will buy the product or avail of your service. Basically, the sales phase is the final phase of the marketing funnel. In this phase, the efforts put in by the marketing team to push the prospective client into a marketing funnel and convert them into potential customer will be paid off. The amount spent by the businesses in marketing their products will be gained in this phase. The higher the number of sales, the higher would be the ROI.
This helps you to identify what exactly your boss is expecting. More importantly, this person wants to know how much profit they are reaping in return for the amount invested in digital marketing.
SEO Reporting should be in line with Marketing Goals and terms
After analyzing the website thoroughly, you can tell your boss how much traffic you can improve for the website within the given time span and how many clicks you can expect, and from the clicks, how many leads you can generate and improve over the past month. You can use business terminology to gauge the success of your SEO tactics such as ROI, profits, customer acquisition cost, etc.
In SEO, you can move the website to the first page of the search engine results page where the customers will find your products with ease. This reduces the amount you spend on acquiring customers besides gaining a huge profit. Furthermore, this helps businesses to earn huge profits and each stakeholder can get a meaty share.
The answer that you can expect from an SEO expert would be Last month, the website was ranked in 8th position and in this month the website ranking has been moved to 3rd rank on the search engine results page. The SEO can also tell the client how much effort they have put to improve the ranking of the site despite fierce competition from the rivals. You need to show supporting data of how much time it took for you to increase the traffic.
There is another wonderful way to communicate the SEO Reporting results to your boss
Undeniably, it takes a lot of time for the businesses to gain the trust of the audience by promoting their business embracing traditional advertising methods such as TVs, papers, pamphlets, and other promotional ways. Conversely, SEO takes a little less time than traditional advertisements to boost the brand reputation in the online world. No business wants to earn a short-term reputation instead they want to gain a foothold in their niche and want to get continuous inquiries about their business even down the line.
SEO techniques will help you reach the target audience globally that is otherwise impossible for you to reach with the newspapers and television (traditional ads). This way, you can completely cut down the customer acquisition cost and let you earn huge profits on your investment in the long run. Every business wants to stand out from its rivals and gain a good brand reputation in the online world.
Users Advantages
You can track the SEO results and show how the SEO strategy embraced by you is reaping beneficial results for the organization. You can also show improvement in sales revenue compared to last year to your boss. If you keep optimizing the website with the target keywords, you can improve the site performance in no time. If you have integrated Google Analytics into your website, then you can generate the performance reports every month and show them to your boss. You can show the increase in traffic, leads, and the performance of ad campaigns that you have started.
You need to set a Goal tracking on the Google Analytics program to show the progress of your goals to your pesky boss. Ideally, setting up a goal is a part of an SEO campaign to count the number of qualified leads you got. Using Goal tracking you can create a personalized template that lets you measure the quantifiable results. The goal of a website could not be the number of people who have come to the shopping cart or the number of people who have filled the inquiry form and submitted it.
Create a template to report your statuses
You are publishing interesting blog posts every day with catchy headlines and informative content. Thus it is helping you to boost your brand reputation online for the industry keywords you have chosen.
You need to use the same templates that you started using every month to depict the results. No one likes to see the data in different formats every month. More importantly, if you have changed the data arranging format, you would need to explain to your boss about the new format. You need to use bullet points to tell the facts and reasoning. Try to put everything in a concise manner rather than cramming it with huge content.
How do you inform about your brand reputation for a set of keywords to your boss?
The comprehensive report will let you inform your boss about the website performance clearly. And give up-to-date about what are the steps you are taking to improve the site performance. A boss maybe your manager or the CEO of the company. Basically, the boss needs a piece of information to show how their team is putting efforts into boosting the site’s reputation and improving the sales revenue.
The SEO Strategies Reporting that is prepared properly will explain the progress of the website and SEO campaigns to the boss in an understandable manner without you explaining line by line what is in the report. You need to send this report on a regular basis to let your boss know about the site performance from time to time and avoid headaches from them.
Your report should contain the traffic of your site, Key Performance Indices (KPI) collected from Google analytics, and keyword performance.
The boss looks for the following things in SEO Reporting.
If you like to put the data in a visual format, then you need to collect the social media metrics. They are the number of tweets, re-tweets, likes, and shares you got for your post and depict the percentage in bar graphs.
Sending the reports to your boss regularly will help him/her to assimilate the status of your SEO campaigns easily. You need to explain the efforts you are putting in to make the website rank to the first page of search results to your boss in a compulsive way.