Received your SEO report but it looks like gibberish? Don’t know how to make sense of all the numbers and graphs? Take a breath because we have got you covered with this comprehensive guide to understanding your personalised SEO report.
There are four elements to your SEO report:
- Performance Metrics
- Competitive Metrics
- Organic Keyword Performance
- Link Earning
Understanding each of these aspects will ensure that you are making the most of the data available to you and benefit your website moving forward as you craft new campaigns. We’ve detailed each section of your SEO report below so you can learn to understand your website’s data and what it means.
Performance Metrics
Performance metrics are the numbers that tell you how well your site is performing. These numbers are what you use to gage whether or not you are on track to reaching your desired goals.
Data is sourced from Google Analytics to report the following six figures:
- Sessions: The number of times any number of users visited your site (during the date range).
- New Page Sessions: An estimate of the percentage of first time visits.
- Pages per Session: The average number of pages a user viewed per session.
- Bounce Rate: The percentage of single-page visits. This is when a user leaves your websites landing page without browsing the site any further.
- Average Session Duration: The average length of a session.
- Goal Completions: The total number of conversions i.e. how many times someone made an enquiry using the contact form or bought a product from your online store.
Google Analytics produce these figures over a 90 day reporting period. These metrics detail the quality of user interactions with your website not just quantity. Ultimately, the goal is to see growth in each of these areas. If your metrics are decreasing this could be a sign that your current strategies are not working and something needs to change. If you aren’t seeing enough growth, you may want to increase your efforts or look into other avenues in your attempt to increase these figures.
Additional metrics provided by Google Analytics include:
- Estimated Keywords:The estimated number of keywords bringing users to the website via Google’s top 100 organic search results.
- Estimated Traffic:The number of users expected to visit the website in the following month based on condition that average monthly traffic stays relatively the same.
- Estimated Traffic Cost:Estimated price of organic keywords in Google Adwords
These figures are based on search engine performance over the past 12 months. These metrics are useful in determining what keywords have been successful in driving traffic to your website as well as monitoring the number of eyes that are on your site.
The Organic Search: Traffic Chart records estimated traffic per month over that 12 month period. It is useful in identifying changes and trends in your organic traffic and determining what caused them.
Competition Metrics
Competition metrics measure how well your website performs in relation to those that are competing for the same keywords as you. An Organic Search: Competitive Position Map is produced by the data Google Analytics collects to position your site in relation to your online competitors, revealing how well you are performing alongside them.
A Top Competitors list also details the major competitors along with data such as the number of keywords you have in common with them, how many keywords they are being found for by search engines, and competition level as a percentage.
Organic Keyword Performance
Keywords are incredibly important to SEO strategy so being able to measure the performance of your organic keywords and reflect on that data is not something to neglect. Your SEO report will provide an extremely useful Keyword Position Distribution chart which allows you to track how many of your keywords are appearing in what pages of Google search as well as how much traffic they are expected to send to your website. Measuring which keywords appear within the first few pages of Google is invaluable as it allows you to consider targeting these more visible keywords specifically moving forward.
A detailed breakdown of your top 100 keywords are listed in order of how much traffic they drive to your site. Looking at the relationship between the percentage of traffic they produce and the page number it is listed on in Google search can be valuable when choosing which keywords to target in future campaigns.
Link Earning
Quality links are a vital part of SEO strategy. This last section of the SEO report, measures your websites link earning performance in terms of the number of spontaneously created links to your site. A backlink from an external website is like receiving a vote of confidence and the more you have the better your web pages can rank in organic search.
Your SEO report will provide a breakdown of the backlinks your website has received over a period of 12 months. It is important to understand that not all backlinks are quality backlinks and this can impact the value they have for your website. You want to avoid “spammy” links which can act negatively on your site’s ranking. You also want to repair broken backlinks if they are coming from trustworthy and authoritative sources. To audit your backlinks you can use a third party metrics tools such as Check My Links, Linkbird and Pitchbox.
There you have it. A complete rundown on reading (and understanding) your SEO report. Hopefully you’re feeling more confident about approaching your own now. If you still have questions about understanding your SEO report or would like advice on how to use your report to improve your SEO campaigns do not hesitate to get in touch with us or leave a comment below!
