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SEO reports are an essential part of SEO management, and providing data as a visual representation of performance becomes more important than ever.

As part of a two-post series, we continue to go over best practices and tips to ensure your SEO reporting is in tip-top shape to present. If you haven’t read our first post on effectively engaging performance and insights through your SEO reports, you should do so to get the overall scope.

Now let’s dive into part two and get you on your way towards creating killer SEO reports.

Engagement

As mentioned in the section above, Engagement metrics are helpful to gauge the quality of traffic. Understanding the concept of these two principal KPIs is how you can understand audience behavior with your website when it relates to user experience.

Bounce Rate

Seen as the percentage of all sessions on your site in which users viewed only a single page and triggered only a single request to the Analytics server.

In other words, it represents every time that a user went to your site thinking that it would have the information they were seeking but consequently left because they did not find it relevant to their query.

Pro-Tip: Contrary to the majority of metrics, decreasing the percentage of this metric is the target. A lower rate means that the content and user experience are optimal for your audience’s expectations when visiting your website.

Average Session Duration

Knowing how long a user remains on your site is crucial to analyzing engagement. This metric is labeled “average session duration” within the Google Analytics platform.

The longer users stay, the higher engagement it denotes, meaning more users have found your site’s content useful for their search. An increase in average session duration is part of what Google considers in its algorithm for ranking.

Pro-Tip: To improve this metric, we recommend including engaging content for your website, such as blog articles, videos, infographics, and prioritizing internal linking optimizations.

Conversions

This is the favorite part every stakeholder likes to hear. Despite the common belief that SEO serves only to improve organic ranking, it’s crucial to keep a close eye on the relationship between organic traffic and conversions.

If you set your goals properly in Google Analytics for your SEO strategy from the get-go, it will be easier to attribute the volume of conversions to organic efforts. The most common goals that are frequently set are lead generation actions (forms filled, call tracking, etc.) and sales/purchases.

Exceed Expectation Through Recap and Ongoing Steps

The advantage of standing out from the rest of standard reporting is going the extra mile to include something unique and engaging for your SEO reports. From our end, we strongly suggest that including key points within an optimization performed and areas of opportunities will blow your client away and build confidence in your management capabilities due to the proactiveness shown. It gives them perspective on where they started, what is being worked on, and how these efforts have improved.

Examples of this include:

• On-site Optimizations
• Authority Building
• Technical Optimizations
• Quality Content Creation

Take Your SEO Reports To The Next Level

In addition to the structure that we previously covered, take note of the following suggestions that can boost your SEO reports.

1. Longer timeframes are your best bet when selecting a time period to show in SEO reports. Try showing data from at least the past three months. The six months to a year data range will fit perfectly for a deeper analysis.

2. Take external factors and seasonalities into account: the more qualitative context you can give, the better. We suggest reviewing a YoY comparison for seasonality to double-check if the site behaves the same way in certain months.

3. If the SEO report’s audience is not digital marketing savvy, consider including concepts, articles as references, and examples for better understanding.

4. To keep data accurate, make sure all necessary filters are applied. Some elemental filters are the country, language, and traffic source.

Take Action and Give Your SEO Reports a Spin

By now, you should better understand how to give your SEO reports the boost they need. You must take enough time to fully understand the data and show it as simply and concisely as possible to continue gaining your audience trusting the SEO strategy you provide.

If you are still hesitant about how to start preparing a report deck or obtaining more in-depth guidance into the KPIs for your business, feel free to sit down with one of our SEO experts.