What A SEO Performance Report Card Should Have?

Thousands of articles and books have been written on SEO, all talking about best SEO practices, how to achieve SEO and many more. But lemme tell you one thing, there’s no such thing as Good or Bad SEO. It’s either a performing or a non-performing SEO. So, how would one know if their SEO efforts performing That’s where metrics for your SEO Performance comes in.

Generally, a good SEO metric would be the one that scores the maximum against Domain Authority and Page Rankings. But on a micro-level, these parameters don’t always give a measurable impact of a performing SEO and so it’ll be wrong to judge marketing outcomes entirely on these metrics.

It’s the same mistake we are making that our Indian Cricket Team makes in a losing game. They focus on player rather than a team. A streak of sixes could save your over but not necessarily your total team score. In short, we all make the mistake of digging deeper in the performance and focus on the big-picture. Likewise, we only take a higher page ranking as a positive sign for SEO and stay merry. In the process, we are missing a whole lot of parameters to improve overalls.

Here are some suggestions to consider while you fabricate an SEO Report Card:

• Your data must reflect the real picture.

Usually, a report on a PageRank7 link for a site is a reason to be disappointing, especially for someone who’s a fan of 10 on 10 PageRank (most likely your client will be that person). But that’s utterly wrong to base your SEO on this parameter. Link volume or any other surface level SEO metrics should never be a stand-alone measure. Firstly, explain your client that since these parameters are core KPIs based only around revenue and sales, and it may not be giving the right SEO performance report.

The best way to handle such a session is by quoting real- life, aptly measurable outcomes. Throw some light on the inputs and efforts you’ve put in previously with a awesome content marketing campaign or the outcomes in the past that surpassed the targets be it the revenue, sales, sales enquiries, newsletter sign-ups, and many more anecdotes you can share to pacify your client.

• Sketch up a Marketing Activity Matrix

Hands down, half of world problems can be solved with a nicely done Matrix. Similarly, as SEO is a part of your Marketing efforts place it well in an Activity Matrix and see where it works perfectly with the dynamics of rankings, traffic, conversions and linkings.

Outreach, as a matter of fact, is the most underestimated strategy for SEO. Your mention on a top blog can change results overnight and your targeting can well be on-point.

• Link Growth can work magically!

Link growth and the math behind a multiplied link-on-link can increase page traffic incredibly. Not only this, the quality of your visitors matters too, which can always be taken care of with by associating your site content with the right audience and right evangelists of your industry. You just need to knock at the right door!

Have you ever thought of monitoring the rate a URL attracts links Definitely, not much.

Link acquisition delta is also amost underrated effort in SEO. They greatly attract your new links to your content or your competitors. Why not explore it more!

While you’re at it, if you’re penalized or managing your link profile to tease out better SEO performance, you could do a lot worse than to monitor your link removal rate. So be careful of what you’re measuring of and where’s it impacting on your SEO.

• Is your SEO content fulfilling User Intent?

Ah! User intent- the very purpose of every effort. Ponder over what your visitor usually do when they land on your page. Is it of their interest or not General rule, if it’s of their interest they spend more time or leave page soon. It’s hard to do the extreme. You will mostly lie in the middle of the two- do business and go. But engagement is utmost important. Holding onto visitors attention span is an art in itself.

You can easily find out an average of the overall time spent on-page for your site from the Audience Overview section. In addition to this, you should dig -deeper to find out how much time visitors are spending on each page from behavior option, under overview there’s an option to view the full SEO performance report which’ll bring up all your pages in the order of traffic volume. Check out the Avg. Time on Page column for each page and improve the content in-line with your results.

• Track your usability

Your usefulness quotient in SEO goes up when you make your visitors to continue to read other content on your site after they visit the initial landing page. It’s best to test your internal linking practices (both in content and navigation) and track pages per visitor date wise to track easily.

If you lack in your numbers try the following:

1. link more within your content
2. add more enticing links in your sidebar or after the post
3. look for the average time spent on each landing page and add appropriate links

Your richness in content is directly linked to how worthy you mean to your visitor.

• Are your leaving a lasting impression

The number of returning visitors your website gets is a measure of how engaging your content is. They are of a valuable element of your site traffic.

Are your visitors returning to your website is a sign of how good of an impression you are making. Golden rule: Make your content engaging. Make them want to sign-up for your emails and see them keep coming back to you.

No matter how you’re monetizing the site, having visitors who don’t come back is a bad thing. Here’s how you can be check this. Under Audience Overview, look for percentage of new and returning visitors separately. Improve and make sure returning traffic is making atleast 20% of total traffic because returning visitors know who you are and are more likely to buy from you.

• Make sure you are not scaring off your visitors.

A bad page speed, a high bounce rate and a poorly done optimization can always bring all that brilliant SEO down the drain. Never try to frustrate your visitor by not being able to give the answer he’s looking for and disrupting his experience.

A bounce is when a user lands on your page but doesn’t interact on it i.e., either close it or click back button. Interestingly, closing page isn’t as bad as clicking back. Look for bounce rate in behavior under overview. if your website is relatively new, a handful of visitors will not give accurate picture.

Reduce pop-ups, write compelling content that demand a call-to- action and many more ways to improve your bounce rate.

• Goes without saying Your search engine visibility

No article on SEO is complete without the mention of this metric. High converting traffic, oodles of visitors, topping ranking score- you all know the drill! The only thing which goes hand-in-hand with this is the organic traffic- that works like a charm, every single time!

Block all you’ve been doing in SEO til now. Draw up an SEO activity matrix and see whether you’ll be receiving that renewal call from the client or not!