Enterprise SEO can seem slow, expensive, and burdensome. This is especially true in reports, where workflows and deliverables can be very detailed and nuanced.
Whether you provide physical reports or have online reports, dashboards or presentations, there are many topics to discuss.
As SEO professionals, we’re never short of metrics, segments, and ways to populate pages of paper or data.
We tend to throw the kitchen sink out there to justify our efforts, explain the intricacies of SEO, and get support.
Despite our best efforts, many of us report bugs that can actually hinder our enterprise SEO strategy and how others perceive it.
In this article, you’ll learn more about nine common enterprise SEO reporting mistakes that can devalue your data and rob you of the vital opportunity you have to use reporting as a positive way to enhance your strategy and overall efforts.
What’s more, you’ll also learn how to address and avoid them.
1. Does not align with broader KPIs and goals
A lot of my articles start with goals, and that’s because without them, SEO can go off track from the start.
Worse yet, SEO may end up doing some unnecessary extra work, or have to give up anyway.
Investing in any area without a clear goal or understanding of how your SEO efforts drive your ultimate marketing or business goals will set you and your team to failure.
Enterprise SEO can include reporting to many different types of stakeholders. Implementing technical and page updates can be slow — especially if you need to deploy new content.
Many clients, managers, and executives don’t know or care about the ins and outs of SEO.
They care what it drives. What it needs to drive is a goal they understand and you want to connect the dots from the start.
solution: Spend time inside SEO and with other channels or stakeholders Define specific KPIs This is tied to broader business goals.
2. Lack of baselines and benchmarks
Most reports compare one time frame to another.
Even when comparisons are made, stakeholders often ask, “Is this good?” The context in which we start and the impact of a particular optimization is essential.
This means you need to find meaningful milestones in your reports to compare against.
Whether that means year-to-date compared to the same time frame of the previous year, or month-to-month comparisons, there are reasons and reasons.
See exactly what the data shows in terms of your own organization’s trends and performance – and how it compares to the overall market.
SEO reports and data are meaningless if they are in a vacuum and lack context.
Is 1000% traffic growth good? perhaps. But isn’t it bad to begin with and we’re still below the industry average? Not so impressive.
solution: Collaborate with key stakeholders to agree and support meaningful milestones, baselines and benchmarks for future (and backwards) use Search Engine Optimization Report to be objective.
3. Missing the customer journey
When we’re talking about enterprise SEO, we’re most likely managing a large website that’s driving lead capture, sales deals, and maybe even massive page views (for a publisher, for example).
Yes, some visitors will come here on their first visit and convert within a click or two. However, focusing only on these visitors limits your potential.
In an enterprise organization or enterprise-level SEO strategy, others in the organization may have access to a wealth of untapped customer journey and conversion funnel data.
Find the right brand, product, sales or marketing manager to get it.
This will greatly help you organize reports showing how SEO is contributing at each stage (or possibly in the future).
If you’re simply aggregating average rankings, traffic, and conversion rates, you’re missing an opportunity to tell a bigger story, gain a deeper understanding of what’s going on, and justify the need for an SEO strategy for others.
solution: Organize your SEO reports in a known way customer journey.
Build funnels around keywords, topics, and conversion paths to objectively measure SEO compared to other channels and sources.
4. Don’t separate keywords by type
One of the biggest mistakes in enterprise SEO reporting is mixing all keyword and intent signals into one metric.
Of course, I’m a big fan of executive-summary, streamlined KPI reports.
Just don’t stop there.
If there are no SEO issues, the brand term itself should rank well.
As SEOs, we often don’t have a good handle on demand and search volume for branded terms.
Why do we provide reports that are mixed with generic terms in our specific optimization strategies and plans?
The ups and downs in brand traffic can be related to PR, seasonality and other demand drivers beyond our control.
Mixing them with generic and focused SEO strategy terms can tell a falsely exaggerated or impressive story in your report.
solution: Performance data between segments Brand and generic keywords, at the lowest limit.
Get as deep as possible into specific focus topics and align with the customer journey that is relevant to your strategy.
5. Too much focus on metrics
I learned early in my career that I didn’t want to hear a client or manager say, “This is great, so is there an ROI?”
We definitely need to track keyword performance, rankings, traffic and conversions.
However, this alone is not good enough for an enterprise SEO strategy. What is conversion? What is the ROI? Can we justify this level of investment in SEO?
These questions have to be answered or no one wants to hear about average position, impressions, or traffic.
Start at the end – the most important metric or business driver that SEO can influence.
Take this first. Then, where relevant in other pages, tabs, or deeper conversations, move into SEO-specific metrics.
This is how you can keep your executive-level audience engaged.
solution: Provide an executive summary or describe the results of your amazing solution.
Learn more about the “how” you achieved that result in an appendix or separate section of the report.
6. Too many nerds
I love hearing how implementing a database-driven canonical strategy on 100,000 product pages solved a year-long problem.
I could spend hours talking about these types of successes. But that’s what I did.
If your report is full of our SEO language and your primary audience doesn’t understand or care about it, they’ll miss the point entirely.
Be results-driven, read your audience, and structure your reports and communications around what resonates most with them.
Be sure to take credit for the wins; just make sure to really understand those wins and how SEO drives them.
solution: Let others give you feedback and suggestions on how deep they want you to be in reporting techniques. You can always adjust what you’re already doing with helpful feedback.
get help Translate terms and indicators If they don’t resonate with your audience.
7. Lack of linkage to broader strategy
Large organizations have large marketing teams, content efforts, PR, and more.
This is usually good news for enterprise SEO campaigns.
That means we don’t get hurt by content, relationships to drive inbound links, and resources to help us with funnel, modeling, and customer engagement data.
It’s easy to just stick to core SEO metrics — reporting what we control.
However, your report is a great opportunity to show how content, links, and technical aspects of your site are helping or hindering your overall SEO performance.
If you want more resources, support, or support from content creators, IT, developers, PR, and others, then show the connection between those efforts and your own.
For example, if the PR campaign is over and we have fewer links now, please bring it up!
If for months we’ve been asking for new or optimized web copy and the content writer is focusing on other priorities, please explain the cost of missing out on the opportunity.
Reporting can be a great way to draw attention to an opportunity to justify a resource.
At the end of the day, SEO is not an island. Showing the data and the actual impact of not collaborating would be helpful.
solution: Find areas where you have a lot of support or need and highlight them in your report.
link cause and effect your narrative (written or verbal) and emphasize that SEO does not work in silos.
8. Simply provide a “report”
Does your enterprise-grade SEO reporting platform include a plethora of default KPIs and metrics?
Templates and automation are great.
Whether you’re an agency extending reporting across clients or building your own in-house, having a starting point and data aggregated from multiple sources is key.
The challenge is that without tailoring and tailoring your reports to your company, your specific baseline/benchmark, and the only KPI that matters, what you’re delivering looks and feels generic.
If your strategy is tailored to the brand, then make sure your online or brick-and-mortar reporting reflects this.
Don’t make it look like you just swapped out a logo and inserted some data sources, that’s all.
solution: invest time Custom Deliverables Therefore, it is a tool for communication, not a burden or task to be accomplished.
This might mean customizing the look of the report, changing metrics, or considering other ways to share information.
9. All data, no insight
This is one of the worst mistakes when stakeholders have access to a real-time reporting dashboard, or when we email them a report without having a meeting to review it.
Going further than avoiding simple or generic reported errors — Make sure you’re telling a story!
Data is just data. It can be explained or frustrated without context.
frame context. Link strategies to outcomes. For better or worse, you need to be able to articulate what your data means and inspire others to really care.
Grab a few key insights and ideas to stay one step ahead and make reporting time productive.
When things are doing well, it’s easy to show a few percent growth and move on.
However, for better or worse, detail what drives performance, what works well and what doesn’t, and how we can continue or stop doing something to affect future performance.
Reporting should not be disconnected from conversations around strategy and collaboration.
solution: Create a space within a document, presentation or conversation to share insights and bright ideas. Put insights first in your presentation.
Maybe you don’t even have to show the data or report details behind them. It’s a huge win because what you’re talking about is more important than the raw numbers that got you there.
in conclusion
Enterprise SEO requires a lot of effort, collaboration, time, and investment. Reporting a bug that could have serious consequences could make it all go bad.
Without showing the organization the right value of SEO, it may get cut, or the resources you need may be hard to come by.
When you lack context, insight, and take advantage of reporting to your audience, you can lose their focus and make your own work more difficult or scrutinized in ways you don’t want.
Work towards a tailored reporting focus that makes it a powerful tool to tie into your strategy and gain insight into the greater impact of SEO on your brand.
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