Reporting for Content, Keywords, and Rankings

Analyze keywords, SERPs, and content marketing efforts in an effective way that leads to better reporting.

Now that we've covered the basics of SEO reporting and how it can help forge strong professional relationships with your clients and stakeholders, it's time to venture into verticals.

SEO reporting encapsulates an endless number of details. For almost anything you can think to optimize or tweak, there's a metric or graph that supports it. The dangerous result is overview reports that overwhelm readers and gloss over or misrepresent your efforts, in addition to being an inefficient use of your time. When you'd rather dig deep into a particular aspect of SEO, it's useful to build separate reports for niche areas, such as link building and technical SEO tracking. Going into more detail about the findings and data for a subset of tasks helps you provide sharper clarity and better insight than if you were to present an overview report without many specifics.

This chapter will cover the best things to include when you're reporting on content, keywords, and rankings. We'll go over other SEO subtopics in the next two chapters as well, then show you how to bring it all together at the end.

This section should go at the beginning and serve as a TL;DR for recipients who just want to get a good overall view of the report and what’s to come. This section should comprise at-a-glance findings that let everyone know instantly where they stand.

You can include bullet points like:

• Which goals were met
• Which goals missed the mark
• Any discrepancies that need to be considered while reading the rest of the report
• A one-sentence explanation of the most important finding for the reporting period

What makes up this section greatly depends on the month you have and the type of data available to share. Be sure to include both positive and negative news. Leading with the positive and burying the negative is a poor way to build trust, and it also can lead to unrealistic expectations. If you only talk about what’s good, then when a big decrease happens, it is more of a surprise. Strive to keep your data balanced to keep expectations in check.

A user’s intent varies greatly among their searches. Knowing what they mean when they search for different phrases or add specific adjectives or pronouns can make all the difference. An SEO report should include all applicable analysis of keywords that have been found through the reporting period, as well their intent. As SEOs, it can be easy to get bogged down by the black-and-white keywords we report on and not think creatively about what a user actually meant by their searches. Looking at the entire phrase itself, not just the main keywords, provides a lot more color and acceptance than it’s often given credit for. This translation is an important skill. If you haven't already, you'll doubtless find yourself at the hands of a clueless client who simply wants to know why they aren’t ranking #1 for a specific keyword or why rankings have continued to fluctuate.

When it comes to the report, include elaboration on keyword intent, as well as proposed new keyword targets going into the next reporting period. It might also be helpful to separate the keywords you’re tracking into the different types of intent: informational, commercial, or transactional. Seeing how these related keywords work together is important because it can help you better understand users’ behavior and thought processes.

The data also needs to be analyzed to determine relevancy, competition, difficulty, and search volume. These can be tracked over time and regular analysis can help you decide what is worth targeting and what isn’t.

SERP features, liked featured snippets and the Knowledge Graph, are becoming more and more prevalent, and you'll find that many clients are savvy enough to ask questions about them — including how they can show up in those coveted positions. It’s important to acknowledge that while winning different SERP features is important, they can be tough to hold on to.

Don't panic if your client has lost a SERP feature. If you've communicated the volatile nature of things like featured snippets, you've built a strong foundation for understanding already. You should absolutely report lost SERP features, as there can be correlations to decreased CTR and site traffic. It’s not fun to deliver bad news, but when things go wrong, your clients deserve to know why something happened. Negative results will land more softly when they're accompanied by a thorough explanation and an action plan for improvement. Use your reporting to set expectations accordingly and tell the story of the work you've done for the client.

In this area (and others), you can use reporting as a way to outline and address future plans, not just what's been accomplished already. Try including an opportunity section that details where competitors are winning SERP features and what action you'll take to contend for those positions. Ongoing competitive research can keep your reports fresh and let your clients know that you're constantly looking for opportunities to usurp current position or featured sites.

Many clients are also keenly aware that a drop or rise in keyword rankings can correlate to profit increases and decreases. This makes keyword ranking a high-value metric to track because it allows us to correlate it to expected revenue. One way to calculate keyword ROI is to multiply keyword search volume, CTR, conversion rate, and conversion value. Once clients know how keyword rankings can directly affect their bottom line, they'll develop a stronger understanding of just how your work can impact profit and which SEO improvements will lead to an increase in search rankings.

Content marketing and SEO are two peas in a pod: one heavily affects the other in a multitude of ways. Developing a smart content strategy will inevitably help you optimize the sites you market, and optimizing those sites helps the content you create become seen. Even if you have a separate team that handles the editorial development or content marketing side of things, it's crucial to work with them on consistent reporting and tracking content success.

Here are some of the areas to track and consider content-wise that have heavy SEO implications. Consider which of the following you'll want to include in an impactful content and keyword report for your clients, and how you'll explain each:

Highly trafficked pages

• Which pages are getting the most traffic overall and what were their keywords?
• Which pages are getting the most organic search traffic?
• Which pages have the highest conversion rate?

Page optimization

This ties into UX (user experience) and CRO (conversion rate optimization) very closely.

• Do on-page SEO improvements correlate with an increase in organic search traffic?
• Which recently updated pages are seeing a change in traffic and keyword rankings?
• How does adding or modifying the call-to-action improve CTR or conversion rates?

Rankings for core keywords

• Which pages consistently rank for high-value, high-importance keywords?
• Which keywords have the most conversion rate value?
• Which new keywords have pages begun ranking for that need to be focused on more?

Suggestions to fuel future content

• Which page topics generate the most high-value metrics (traffic, time on page, lower bounce rate, etc)?
• What high search volume related keywords come up in SEO dashboard tools that your business hasn’t written content on?
• Which pages have too-similar content that we can consolidate into one page? (This is a big part of running a content audit!)

Content and keyword reports present the opportunity to ask questions about the data you’ve found, both on a competitor side and internally. Don’t rely on just presenting the data and moving on to the next thing — it's the analysis component of a report that's most crucial. Without it, you have no plan to move forward. Telling a compelling story with data means you craft a beginning, middle, and end.

We've covered reporting for content, keywords, and rankings, but how about content's best friend — link building? Head to Chapter 4 for another topic deep-dive!