SEO is one of the most widely used online marketing strategies among all types and sizes of businesses. This online marketing strategy keeps delivering exceptional results. ROI tends to be much higher than paid media. The increasing popularity of SEO has intrigued interest among companies to use this strategy for growing their business.
However, identifying and implementing the most effective SEO strategies has turned out to be a big challenge for many companies. Most of them find it tough to perfectly present the work they have done for clients and choose the SEO metrics to highlight their success.
Want to know what are the top SEO metrics your clients truly want to see? Find them below:
1. Organic Traffic
SEO has an ample number of vanity metrics. However, organic traffic is not one such metric. Your client’s organic traffic should be increasing consistently every month. You should let your clients know that they can’t expect fruitful results after doing SEO and content marketing only for a month.
They can expect a steady increase in organic traffic after working 2 to 3 months on SEO and content marketing. You should always add traffic boost as a KPI to your reports. A significant increase in website visitors depending on your industry can make a large impact on your client’s profits. You don’t need to hire a marketing expert to learn that more people on your client’s website tend to convert to higher profits.
2. Organic Traffic Conversions
Tracking organic traffic conversions always helps if you set up an SEO reporting tool. Clients wish to learn the immediate effect of SEO strategies on their bottom line and it is one of the simplest ways to show them that. You can show your clients the precise value and potential of SEO as an online marketing strategy with every new conversion.
You only require two things. First, set up a good attribution so you and your clients have the same requirements when it comes to organic traffic conversions. Second, create a baseline so you can compare organic traffic conversions with social media, PPC, and other channels.
3. Keyword Rankings
Keywords, which rank high on SERPs, can also help your clients to boost their ranking. They know quite well which keywords they want to rank for and which of them can attract new customers without hiring an SEO expert. First, ensure to track keyword movements for present keywords, mainly the profitable keywords that attract conversions.
Your clients will want to know about keyword movements if there are any. Plus, you should update your clients about the total number of keywords they rank for. If they rank high for an increasing number of keywords, it proves that your SEO and content marketing efforts are working well. Ranking for several keywords may not be the ultimate but a vital SEO metric.
4. New and Lost Backlinks
Clients need to understand the benefits of backlinks for their websites and SEO campaigns. So, you should educate your client base about a backlink, how it influences search engine results and what are the differences between a good and bad backlink. The common issue with backlinks is that they cost a huge amount of money for getting correct.
White hat link building needs much hands-on work. Hidden costs are involved many times in white link building. You need to pay writers, editors, and professionals working on outreach. Ensure to add both new and lost backlinks to your report, mainly those related to new pages that are ranking when you want to report om backlinks. It is an effective way to convince any client regarding the importance of backlinks for SEO and business growth.
5. Bounce Rates from Organic Growth
A bounce occurs when a user visits a page and leaves it without going anywhere else or taking an action. A bounce in itself is not a poor thing but it tends to indicate that a visitor got no value on the web page and decided to leave. A bounce rate is a positive signal that you require to improve your content and deliver an engaging and worthwhile experience to visitors.
Draft your content well with many internal links to help them visit other pages on your website. A high bounce rate is a ranking signal for search engines, like Google. Your clients should know that a high bounce rate can largely affect not only their rankings but also their revenues. It is a metric, which is included in all SEO reports.
6. Page Load Speed
You don’t need to spend much time learning why a fast website works well this year and beyond. A website, which loads quickly, delivers an excellent UX and makes visitors stay longer and click through. Your web page’s slow loading speed is mainly a technical website issue but you should include it in your weekly or monthly SEO report.
A sudden decline in the page load speed means the client’s website has a technical issue. So, you should fix them as and when required to improve your client’s website ranking. Page load speed is one of the most vital ranking factors for Google and other search engines. The visitor will bounce quickly after opening a link if a website takes extremely long to load. As the visitors bounce back, it increases bounce rates and decreases session duration. The outcome will be a poor UX and a drop in search engine ranking.
The Bottom Line
As SEO keeps evolving with so many emerging trends and concepts, it gets tough to choose the elements on which to focus the most. The above are the key SEO metrics that your clients genuinely want to see. When dealing with clients who have less knowledge of internet marketing, you should be proactive and pick the metrics that are easy to understand and can make a huge impact.