Introduction

It’s fair to say that if you employed 10 different SEO companies, that all 10 businesses may generate a different SEO report for you.

Some of these SEO reports your business may find useful, informing you how well your companies SEO is doing, yet some others may well be confusing and not offer any information that you business finds useful.

And we say confusing with good reason and that’s because some marketing agencies may not being doing that much SEO work, so the reports may just be so detailed, so confusing that the business owner doesn’t really get a good sense of whether their SEO is improving or not.

And as we are an established marketing company, well, we thought we would help you by explaining what information we think should be written in any SEO report.

Users

This figure simply states the number of individuals that have visited your website. Yet, your marketing agency should explain this as well, it’s all well and good bringing say 1000 people to a website, but if only 2% of those 1000 people go on to make a purchase, well, you may be thinking why are so few customers making a purchase?

And there’s a simple reason for this, it’s easy to bring loads of people to a website that wont purchase something.

So, let’s think about a divorce solicitor, the marketing agency may write a blog post about a high-profile divorce, then promote the article on social media.

You may then have 1 million people reading about what this solicitors practice has to say on this divorce, but are a high-number of those readers likely to be paying customers?

No, probably not.

So, the marketing company may well be much better off writing an article about how to go about starting the divorce process, this article may only attract say 2000 readers, but these readers are more likely to become customers, as they are looking for advice on how to start the divorce process.

Bounce rate

The bounce rate simply means this, it’s the percentage of people leaving your website from the same page that they entered, so this means that they are not then moving onto another page on your website.

And this is important, as let’s say you run a construction business, and your homepage has a very high bounce rate, well, the SEO consultant or SEO company has to work out why this is so.

As if they were interested in loft conversions, home extensions, having a garden wall built or let’s say a new home built, why are not visiting those pages as well? Why are they just leaving the website on the homepage?

So, another way we explain the bounce rate to our customers is this, let’s say you set up a shop in a busy arcade, and your selling let’s say candles.

And people move into the front of the shop, near the sales counter, they have a look around the shop, then leave without stepping further than 3 steps into the shop, why is this?

Is it because the shop is not stocking the right candles, are the items too expensive? Is the name of the business misleading, so people do not know it’s a candle shop, and may think it’s a shop that sells clothing instead?

Well, these are all questions to ask a marketing company, but equally if your website has a high bounce rate, you should talk to a digital marketing company like us.

Number of organic visitor’s vs number of paid visitors

Okay, so you’ve just started a new business, that business is a car dealership let’s say, and you want to get as many customers as you can.

So, your spending money on organic SEO, as well as PPC, you therefore need to see how many visitors are coming to your company’s website via PPC compared to SEO, then evaluate which method is working best for your business.

Number of backlinks

Did you know that a lot of digital marketing agencies, including ours believe that backlinks are one of the most important ranking signals.

And do you think that Google’s algorithm works out how strong your businesses SEO is just on a few factors?

Nope, that’s because most online marketing agencies now believe that there are over 200 factors which Google’s algorithm takes into account when working out how good a businesses SEO actually is.

So, if backlinks are one of the more important factors, then as you can imagine your SEO report should tell you how many backlinks that your business has, also your digital marketing agency should be telling you if these links are good quality.

It’s really important that your business only obtains quality backlinks, otherwise your business could incur a penalty, such as a Google Penguin penalty.

Number of organic visitors compared with previous months

So, your website got 1 million visitors last month, but is that good?

Well it may sound it, but if you compare it with the last three months, where each month on average you got 3 million visitors, well the month where you got 1 million visitors, well that’s not very good.

So your SEO agency should detail the number of visitors you received last month, then compare this with say the last 6 months.

 

Time spent on site

It’s all well and good having a high number of visitors, but how long are they spending on your company’s website.

So let’s say you sell running shoes, and your SEO company has provided to you stats for January, February and March.

The figures are 1000, 1200 and then 3000 visitors in March, great so the visitor numbers are going up right?

Well, that’s good the SEO agency is doing their job, their bringing more visitors to the website, right?

Well, wait for just one second, you have to keep the average time spent by each visitor in mind, so let’s say in January you had 1000 visitors that month, but the visitor spent let’s say on average 4 minutes on the website.

But in March you got 3000 visitors, and the average visitor spent just 30 seconds on the website, well this means that average visitor spent less.

So, some businesses will view this that these shoppers were less interested in making a purchase, which means that although visitor numbers have gone up, the time that the average visitor spends on the site has drastically decreased as well, so most companies would not consider this as the businesses SEO is not improving.

How we can help:

If your business would like help improving it’s SEO then why not call us?