Google has dropped support for job training structured data and rich results in Google Search. Google said based on its initial tests, the search company “found that it wasn’t useful for the ecosystem at scale.”
Not useful. Google posted about this saying “We initially tested this markup with a group of site owners, and ultimately found that it wasn’t useful for the ecosystem at scale.” Google did not say how large its tests were but just said it did test this in Google Search.
Other job rich results not impacted. Google added that this does not affect any other features that may use Job training markup. Plus, Google said you are welcome to “leave the markup on your site so that search engines can better understand your web page.” Although, I am not sure which other search engines use this this markup.
Why we care. If you were using job training structured data, Google will no longer show them as rich results in Google Search. You may notice click through rate changes on those pages, as the rich results no longer will be displayed in Google Search.
Digital marketing agency NP Digital announced today that it has acquired AnswerThePublic, a popular freemium keyword research tool. Terms of the deal were not revealed.
NP Digital, which was co-founded by marketing influencer and entrepreneur Neil Patel, is also the owner of another popular freemium keyword research tool, UberSuggest.
What this means for AnswerThePublic users. All the tool’s existing features will remain. Users can continue to access the tool via its website or app.
There are a couple of noticeable changes so far, including the addition of “by UberSuggest” under AnswerThePublic’s logo in the main navigation and Patel’s face on a dancing robot’s body on the homepage.
AnswerThePublic has approximately 1 million monthly users and has been a favorite among search marketers for years. NP Digital said it is working on new free features for marketers.
However, the tool hasn’t gotten any significant updates or improvements lately. That’s because the owners weren’t focusing on it (they had another software company).
What it means for UberSuggest users. UberSuggest has approximately 3 million monthly users who will now be able to access the features and data through either platform. Users can soon expect to see new features related to keyword visualizations.
NP Digital said Ubersuggest now spans over 30 billion keywords and 50 trillion backlinks across 249 countries.
Why NP Digital acquired AnswerthePublic. Both platforms leverage the same data sets. But each had its unique features, functions and visualizations.
NP Digital CEO Mike Gullaksen told me: “This platform allows marketers to leverage the data from the largest focus group in the world – Google search users. Being able to mine massive data sets to identify consumer interest around needs and wants is one of the most powerful yet underused strategies for content and search marketers. Layering on top of these data insights allows marketers to both look back and see real-time trends with powerful visualizations and quickly move their content initiatives forward while staying on the pulse of the consumer mindset.”
Why we care. NP Digital says this acquisition will mean more new free capabilities for both platforms – and that you can access these insights from either platform. So both tools will continue to help marketers find inspiration and insights that can help shape SEO and content marketing strategies.
A year of acquisitions. This has been a big year of change in the SEO tools space and we’re not even halfway through 2022. Below are links to coverage of the other big acquisitions we’ve seen so far:
Google Search Console’s News performance report had a logging error which may have resulted in displaying a drop in impression and clicks from Google News.
Google said this was just a reporting glitch and it had no real impact on how your site was ranking or serving in Google News.
The notice. Google posted this notice here stating “Because of a logging error, site owners might see a drop in their Google News data during this period. This is just a logging error and not a real drop in Google News performance.”
Timeframe impacted. The timeframe where Google had this logging error was between May 12, 2022 through May 26, 2022.
Why we care. If you have or will provide clients with reporting, keep in mind the News performance report had logging issues for about half of the month of May. Make sure to annotate this logging error and communicate this to your clients and stakeholders.
On May 25, 2022, Google began rolling out the May 2022 core update, this update came over six months after the November 2021 core update, whereas there was about four and a half months span between the November update and the July 2021 core update. This was the the first update we had in 2022, in contrast, in 2021, we had a total of three core updates.
Historically, we have waited longer to report on the impact of these core updates but honestly, after writing several of these core update impact stories, generally the vast majority of the impact is realized within the first few days of the update (although there have been outliers to this). With this update, the impact was felt super quickly, within 24 hours of the announcement, so we feel it is now safe to report on the impact of this May 2022 core update.
Data providers on the May 2022 core update:
Generally the data providers, which have consistently been Semrush and RankRanger for these reports, have agreed on how volatile these updates have been but with this update – they seem to disagree, that is until you dig into the data.
Semrush. Semrush data showed that the May 2022 core update hit pretty quickly after the announcement. In terms of its volatility tracker, as shown below (or you can view live at the Semrush Sensor tool).
In terms of the speed for these core updates to roll out, “This is already the 3rd core update in a row where the initial roll-out saw a very short burst of initial rank volatility,” Mordy Oberstein, Semrush Communication Advisor, told us. He added that “this seems to be a new pattern” with the rollout of these core updates.
When you compare the May 2022 core update to the November 2021 core update, at first glance, it seems the May update was less volatile than the November update. This is with the exception of the real estate niche, “which seemed to undergo a significant shakeup,” the company shared. Here is this chart comparing the May 2022 core update to the November 2021 core update by vertical:
The issue is that the average level of volatility prior to the May 2022 core update was higher than that of the volatility seen before the November 2021 core update, Semrush explained. In fact, Semrush said the overall increase in rank volatility compare to the baseline level of before the core update volatility was 19% less during the initial release of the May 2022 update compared to the November 2021 core update on desktop, and 24% on mobile.
So if you plot the peak volatility, you see things differently:
So this might mean that even with Semrush data, May 2022 might have been more volatile than the November 2021 core update? Again, it is all about how you process and interpret the data.
This chart below shows you that 17% of the new top 20 ranked results in Google post May 2022 core update came from position 20 or beyond, which is not far off from the previous November 2021 core update:
RankRanger. The RankRanger team also analyzed the Google search results after this May 2022 core update rollout and here you can see how quickly there tool also picked it up (you can also see this live at the Rank Risk Index tool). RankRanger did say the May 2022 core update was a “significant update.”
The folks at RankRanger did compare the May 2022 core update to the November 2021 core update for us as well. RankRanger found that in its data the May 2022 update’s average position changes were higher than the November 2021 update.
When you dive in and compare by position, the volatility does seem more similar across positions:
Retail seemed to be most impacted according to RankRanger data, as you can see by these charts below:
SISTRIX. SISTRIX, another data provider that tracks the changes in the Google search results, sent their top 20 winners and losers for the May 2022 core update. These are US based sites from Sistrix’s data set.
Sistrix added “In our example, we saw that the visibility of the domain was 25.84 points on Thursday, then increased to 27.95 on Friday and as of now (Monday 30th May 08:55) the Visibility Index is 31.98.”
More on the May 2022 core update
The SEO community. The May 2022 core update to the community seems much more significant than the November 2021 core update. Unlike the November 2021 core update, where the timing for that update was not the best, i.e. right during the busiest online shopping season, this update was scheduled a lot better for retailers. I was able to cover the community reaction in one blog post on the Search Engine Roundtable early on. It includes some of the early chatter, ranking charts and social shares from some SEOs.
On Twitter you can find plenty of examples of SEOs sharing charts from their clients – mostly showing winners but also showing losers – with this update.
What to do if you are hit. Google has given advice on what to consider if you are negatively impacted by a core update in the past. There aren’t specific actions to take to recover, and in fact, a negative rankings impact may not signal anything is wrong with your pages. However, Google has offered a list of questions to consider if your site is hit by a core update. Google did say you can see a bit of a recovery between core updates but the biggest change you would see would be after another core update.
Why we care. It is often hard to isolate what you need to do to reverse any algorithmic hit your site may have seen. When it comes to Google core updates, it is even harder to do so. What this data and previous experience and advice has shown us is that these core updates are broad, wide and cover a lot of overall quality issues. The data above has reinforced this to be true. So, if your site was hit by a core update, it is often recommended to step back from it all, take a wider view of your overall website and see what you can do to improve the site overall.
We hope you, your company and your clients did well with this update.
Throughout the history of SEO, people have debated the pros and cons of relying on technical SEO tools. Relying on the hints from auditing tools isn’t the same thing as a true SEO strategy, but we’d be nowhere without them. It’s just not feasible to manually check dozen of issues page per page.
To the benefit of the SEO industry, many new auditing tools have been created in the past decade, and a few of them stand strong as industry leaders. These few technical auditing tools have done us a great service by continuing to improve their capabilities, which has helped us better serve our clients, bosses and other stakeholders.
However, even the best auditing tools cannot find four important technical SEO issues that could potentially damage your SEO efforts:
Canonical to redirect loop
Hacked pages
Identifying JS Links
Content hidden by JS
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Some of these issues could be detected by tools, but they’re just not common enough to come across their desk. Other issues would be impossible for tools to detect.
As with many cases in SEO, some issues may affect sites differently, and it all depends on the context. That’s why most tools won’t highlight these in summary reports.
Required tools to uncover these issues
Before we dive into the specific issues, there are two specific requirements to help us find these issues.
Your web crawling tool of choice
Even though most tools won’t uncover these issues by default, in most cases, we can make some modifications to help us detect them at scale.
Some tools that you could use include:
Screaming Frog
Sitebulb
OnCrawl
DeepCrawl
The most important thing we need from these tools is the ability to:
Crawl the entire website, sitemaps and URL list
Ability to have custom search/extraction features
Google Search Console
This should be a given, but if you don’t have access, make sure you acquire Google Search Console access for your technical SEO audits. You will need to be able to tap into a few historic reports to help us uncover potential issues.
Issue 1: Canonical to redirect loop
A canonical to redirect loop is when a webpage has a canonical tag pointing to a different URL that then redirects to the first URL.
This can be a rare issue, but it’s one that I’ve seen cause serious damage to a large brand’s traffic.
Why this matters
Canonicals provide the preferred URL for Google to index and rank. When Google discovers a canonical URL different from the current page, it may start to crawl the current page less frequently.
This means that Google will start to crawl the webpage that 301 redirects more frequently, sending a type of loop signal to their Googlebot.
I’ve seen this happen to some large brands. One recently came to me asking to investigate why one of their key pages hasn’t been driving the traffic they were hoping for. They had invested a lot of money into SEO and had a well-optimized page. But this one issue was the sore thumb that stuck out.
How to detect canonical redirect loops
Even though this issue will not appear in any default summary reports in standard auditing tools, it’s quite easy to find.
Run a standard crawl with your preferred technical SEO auditing tool. Make sure to crawl sitemaps as well as a standard spider crawl.
Go to your canonical report and export all of the canonicalized URLs. Not the URLs the tool crawled, but what the URL in the canonical tag is.
Run a new crawl with that URL list and look at the response codes report with this list of canonicals. All response codes should return a status 200 response code.
Issue 2: Hacked pages
Hacked websites for profit is not a new topic. Most seasoned SEOs have come across websites that have been hacked somehow, and the hackers have conducted malicious activities to either cause harm or generate profit for another website.
Some common website hacking that happens in SEO includes:
Site search manipulation: This occurs when a website’s search pages are indexable. A malicious person then sends a ton of backlinks to their search results page with irrelevant searches. This is common with gambling and pharma search terms.
301 redirect manipulation: This happens when someone gains access to the site, creates pages relevant to their business and gets those indexed. Then they 301 redirect them to their own websites.
Site takedowns: This is the most straightforward attack when a hacker manipulates your code to make your website unusable or at least non-indexable.
There are dozens of types of site hacking that can affect SEO, but what’s important is that you maintain proper site security and conduct daily backups of your website.
Why this matters
The most important reason that hacking is bad for your website is that if Google detects that your website might have malware or is conducting social engineering, you could receive a manual action.
How to detect hacked pages
Luckily, there are many tools out there to not only mitigate hacking threats and attempts but there are also tools to detect if your website gets hacked.
However, most of those tools only look for malware. Many hackers are good at covering their tracks, but there are ways to see if a website has been hacked in the past for financial gain.
Use Google Search Console
Check manual actions report. This will tell you if there are any current penalties against the site.
Check the performance report. Look for any big spikes in performance. This can indicate when a change may have happened. Most importantly, check the URL list in the performance report. Hacked URLs can stick out! Many of them have irrelevant topics or may even be written in a different language.
Check the coverage report. Look for any big changes in each sub-report here.
Check website login accounts
Take a look at all users to find any unusual accounts.
If your website has an activity log, check for recent activity.
Make sure all accounts have 2FA enabled.
Use online scanning tools
Several tools will scan your website for malware, but that may not tell you if your website has been hacked in the past. A more thorough option would be to look at https://haveibeenpwned.com/ and scan all website admin email addresses.
This website will tell you if those emails have been exposed to data breaches. Too many people use the same passwords for everything. It’s common for large organizations to use weak passwords, and your website can be vulnerable.
By now, we’d think that our SEO auditing tools should be better at detecting internal links generated by JavaScript. Historically, we’ve had to rely on manually discovering JS links by clicking through websites or looking at link depths on reports.
Why this matters
Googlebot does not crawl JavaScript links on web pages.
How to find JavaScript links at scale
While most SEO auditing tools can’t detect JavaScript links by default, we can make some slight configurations to help us out. Most common technical SEO auditing tools can provide us with custom search tools.
Unfortunately, browsers don’t really display the original code in the DOM, so we can’t just search for “onclick” or anything simple like that. But there are a few common types of code that we can search for. Just make sure to manually verify that these actually are JS links.
<button>: Most developers use the button tag to trigger JS events. Don’t assume all buttons are JS links, but identifying these could help narrow down the issue.
data-source: This pulls in a file to use the code to execute an action. It’s commonly used within the JS link and can help narrow down the issues.
.js: Much like the data-source attribute, some HTML tags will pull in an external JavaScript file to find directions to execute an action.
Issue 4: Content hidden by JavaScript
This is one of the most unfortunate issues websites fall victim to. They have so much fantastic content to share, but they want to consolidate it to display only when a user interacts with it.
In general, it’s best practice to marry good content with good UX, but not if SEO suffers. There’s usually a workaround for issues like this.
Why this matters
Google doesn’t actually click on anything on webpages. So if the content is hidden behind a user action and not present in the DOM, then Google won’t discover it.
How to find content hidden by JavaScript
This can be a bit more tricky and requires a lot more manual review. Much like any technical audit generated from a tool, you need to manually verify all issues that have been found. The tips below must be manually verified.
To verify, all you need to do is check the DOM on the webpage and see if you can find any of the hidden content.
To find hidden content at scale:
Run a new crawl with custom search: Use the techniques I discussed in finding JS links.
Check word counts at scale: Look through all pages with low word counts. See if it checks out or if the webpage looks like it should have a larger word count.
Growing beyond the tools
With experience, we learn to use tools as they are: tools.
Tools are not meant to drive our strategy but instead to help us find issues at scale.
As you discover more uncommon issues like these, add them to your audit list and look for them in your future audits.
Every week, we feature fresh job listings for search marketers, so make sure to bookmark this page and check back every Friday. If you’re looking to hire, please submit your listing here — please note that we will not post listings without a salary range.
Adding structure to engagements as an “owner” of SEO strategy for the client team.
Assessing and developing complex, multi-faceted strategies on behalf of clients that translate to tactical quarterly deliverables to drive business benefit and client buy-in.
Execute email marketing campaigns to garner expert commentary and coverage for MoneyGeek.
Build and execute the processes around outreach to build new and maintain existing relationships with experts and the organizations they represent including the identification of new experts and expert audiences.
Manage the strategic and tactical components within integrated Search Engine Marketing (SEM) campaigns, also known as Paid Search, or Pay-per-Click (PPC).
Work closely with brand managers and key stakeholders to ensure program goals and creative are strategically aligned and quality levels are maintained.
Develop and grow a high performing, metrics-driven, digital marketing team obsessed with outperforming daily/weekly expectations.
Lead strategic development of multi-channel direct and channel acquisition campaigns including but not limited to search, display, paid social, and video.
Lead paid media strategy and work alongside agency partners in the creation and implementation of paid media campaigns across search, social, display, pre-roll, programmatic, site-direct buys, native and sponsored content, with a special focus on leading in the search space.
Proactively recommend ways to better plan, execute, optimize and measure investments in the ever-evolving data privacy landscape.
Form an informed opinion on how we should curate and organize thousands of published editorial and programmatically produced articles into content hubs. Own long-term content strategy, measurement, and roadmap.
Take the reins of editorial content operations and manage an existing team of writers to continuously produce highly relevant articles with high conversion potential.
Become the go-to expert in customer and prospect marketing campaigns, developing customer loyalty, and creating effective marketing assets in partnership with the brand team.
Develop customer lifecycle campaigns that educate customers and prospects about the value of Formstack and nurture growth.
Perform keyword research and competitor analysis to identify opportunities to create unique, highly engaging content that answers user questions, drives brand awareness, and increases ranking on Google.
Develop content roadmaps, from ideation to production to promotion, and supported by data-based decision making.
“When we think about [SEO] success, we often think about ranking on the first page of Google,” said Jon Lightfoot, founder and CEO of Strategic SEO Solutions, in a recent webinar. “But beyond ranking [at the top], there’s something more [important], which is ranking for the right keywords.”
Ranking for the topics your target audience is searching for doesn’t come from keyword stuffing or overemphasizing keyword density. Success in this area relies on crafting quality content that audiences love and search engines recognize as authoritative.
Here are three effective content strategies Lightfoot recommends marketers enact to support SEO success.
1. Identify user intent
“Intent is the purpose behind the [user’s] search,” Lightfoot said. “There are four buckets to understand and nurture when it comes to your strategy.”
The four areas of user intent he identified relate to specific content or services searchers are looking for. They are as follows:
Informational: Searchers looking for information, such as an answer to a question.
Navigational: Users looking for a specific website.
Commercial: People researching a product or service.
Transactional: Those who are searching for products or services to purchase.
Source: Jon Lightfoot
“How do we harness this and use it in a way that’s effective for our companies? The first step is to perform keyword analysis,” he said. “The epicenter of this is understanding what people want to receive from these queries so you can then create the content that serves them.”
Analyzing keyword data to glean user intent means looking at more than just volume. It requires a thorough analysis of the types of content those words and phrases bring up in the search results and getting a sense of what audiences want from these searches.
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“If you rank at the top of search, that’s only part of the battle,” Lightfoot said. “The real battle is staying there. You have to be mindful of content quality signals.”
Metrics such as bounce rate, time spent on page, number of page views, while telling little by themselves, can give marketers more context into user behavior when analyzed together. They can show how engaged readers are with your content, letting you know which pieces need to be reworked or scrapped altogether.
“It’s about [optimizing] in a qualitative way so that we nurture the core metrics and Google rewards us by maintaining our rankings,” Lightfoot said.
Instead of focusing on pushing out loads of articles, marketers should spend more time improving the quality of the content they’re already producing. This means making the most important on-page elements as well-written and user-centric as possible.
Here’s how SEOs can improve the content quality in a few of these areas.
Page titles: Use target keywords in the title element, placing the primary terms in the front. Craft them in ways similar to competitors that are performing well in search.
Heading tags: This element defines your page’s body text, so make it specific to that information.
Internal linking: Use descriptive, keyword-rich anchor text to prompt readers to explore relevant pages on your site.
3. Focus on E-A-T through external linking and footnotes
“E-A-T – building expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness – is going to come from not only the things you say but the areas that can support what you’re saying,” Lightfoot said. “If you use external linking to provide more information to users, it shows that what you’re saying is validated by other sources.”
“Linking to trustworthy sites proves your value and credentials,” he added.
Source: Jon Lightfoot
Linking to authoritative external sources shows readers you took the time to make your content the best it can be, especially when that content is linked with relevant anchor text. But more than that, this process helps improve your own content’s credentials.
Lightfoot also recommends providing additional information with footnotes, which many sites fail to include. Incorporating these resources adds more contextual content to your articles and shows that the data is coming from trustworthy sources.
Source: Jon Lightfoot
“Footnotes are great ways to fortify your content, building that expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness, and Google certainly celebrates it,” he said.
It feels like going from Windows to Mac. You just have to know what you’re looking at.
Universal Analytics is going away
You really need to install GA4 on your website and set up goals.
I cannot stress enough how important it is to install GA4 now, even if you’re going to wait until July 2023 to fully learn how to use it.
In July 2023, UA will go away. You will need to be able to compare year-over-year data. You can’t do that if you haven’t installed GA4 on your website this year.
You will have to export reports from UA and GA4 and somehow combine them. You can do that in Data Studio, but it is a huge hassle.
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GA4 uses an event-based model as opposed to the old session-based model that UA uses. This allows for a lot more data to be sent to your analytics.
The GA4 tag can send up to 25 event parameters. UA could only send four per event.
GA4 can have up to 500 distinctly named events. The 500 event limit is only for events you set up. This limit does not count toward GA4 events that come by default like page_view, click or video_start.
I’m not going to go into detail on how to install GA4 because lots of people have already done that.
One thing you should do is turn on Enhanced Measurement.
You do that by going to Admin > Data Streams of the property you are working on. Click on the Web tab and make sure the slider for Enhanced measurement is on.
If you click on the gear icon on the far right you will see all the different things to measure like Scrolls and Outbound clicks.
Setting up conversions
If you already have goals set up in Universal Analytics, Google has rolled out a tool to move your conversions over to GA4. If you don’t have this you will need to use Google Tag Manager to set up a Custom HTML tag to push your conversion data to the data layer.
Some plugins and third-party services may already do this for you. Once the events exist, all you have to do is go to the main menu and click on Configure and the first thing you will see is Events.
Always check here first when you want to create a conversion. What you want to count as conversion may already be in here. Just find your event and click the slider to activate.
New concepts
One of the main concepts of GA4 is differentiating between user engagement and session engagement. The main difference is that user engagement statistics can span more than one session.
A session engagement includes data for each session. GA4 is all about engagement.
The biggest difference you will notice in GA4 is that the bounce rate is gone. It has been replaced with “Engaged Sessions.” A session is either engaged or not.
To be counted as engaged, the user must stay on the website for more than 10 seconds, trigger a conversion or have 2 or more page views.
Instead of Average Session Duration, we now have Average Engagement Time per Session. If what you are looking for is not available in GA4, and there are a lot of things not available, you can go to the Explore tab and create a custom report. Custom reports are a lot like Data Studio or the Analysis Hub in Universal Analytics.
Google Ads
The first thing that you will notice in GA4 is that the menu on the left is much smaller and there are fewer sub menus and many things are missing or buried.
Another thing I noticed is that not all sections have the ability to change the time period you are viewing. Specifically, if you are running a custom report in the library, you can’t change the time period for that report.
The solution is to navigate to another section like the Report main menu that has the ability to change the time period. Then go back to your report and it will reflect the change.
For paid search, we are missing the Google Ads section. The Google Ads section can be found in the Acquisition Overview submenu under Report > Acquisition on the second row, the third box on the bottom right.
One of the biggest problems with GA4 is that it no longer allows you to easily see reports that show tables that you can click on and drill down to see more detail. If you go to the Google Ads report that I mentioned above, it defaults to show statistics about your campaigns.
You can no longer click on them and see Ad Groups. You have to change the pull-down menu to see Ad Groups, Keywords or other Google Ads items.
If you select Ad Groups it will just show you all Ad Groups. There is no way to see just Ad Groups from a specific campaign.
It is the same with any dimension you pick. If you want to filter the table there is a very simple search box at the top. It does not allow regex or have the nice visual filter that you have in Universal Analytics.
This functionality, or lack thereof, is on all table reports. You will notice that every table has a little blue plus sign that lets you add an additional dimension like browser or city.
For some reason, this is not available in the Google Ads report. To see this information you have to go over to Report > Acquisition > User Acquisition and look at the table on the second row of the report. You only have access to the Ad Groups dimension here. Now you can use the secondary dimension dropdown.
Advanced reporting is extremely limited
The default GA4 seems to be designed for novice users to get overview information quickly.
Many of the detailed reports that were easy to get to and easy to use are no longer available without advanced knowledge of GA4. The custom reports that you can build under the Explore menu are extremely powerful if you know how to set them up.
There is a gallery of pre-made reports, but not many at this time. Once GA4 has been around longer there will be more custom reports and articles on how to create specific reports.
However, decision-makers care a lot about reporting as it’s how we communicate and they assess the SEO process investment and overall success. In fact, the effectiveness of SEO reports can end up being the difference between getting fired rather than more SEO support or a raise by decision-makers.
Despite this, many SEO reports are broken as they’re just a compilation of dashboards automated via tools featuring SEO metrics. I asked over Twitter and 41% of SEOs who answered said to only use a dashboard with data for SEO reporting.
Data from our SEO dashboards can be included in reports but they can’t replace them as a whole: an SEO dashboard is a visualization resource that contains the most important, latest status of all metrics we want to follow up from our SEO process, to easily monitor its progress at any time.
On the other hand, an SEO report is a document featuring a collection of key performance indicators from a certain time period along with an analysis and conclusions, to be used for periodic analysis and assessment of the SEO process towards the achievement of its goals.
Using only automated SEO dashboards as reports can end up harming more than helping. They are filled with information that the audience – often non-technical stakeholders or decision-makers – won’t understand or care about, with no prioritization, insights, analysis, or outcome actions. This only generates more questions than providing answers.
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Communicate SEO results: The SEO process evolution towards the established goals (what has been achieved vs. what was expected?)
Explain the cause of SEO results: Why the different areas are or aren’t evolving as expected.
Drive actions to achieve SEO results: Establish SEO-related activities and request support for the next steps to achieve goals.
The biggest challenge to developing personalized SEO reports is caused by timing restrictions as we tend to feel the pressure to develop reports fast to get back to “SEO execution,” but SEO reporting is also in most cases only a monthly effort too.
Ready to help effectively tackle your SEO reporting goals while accelerating the process? Here are three principles to follow.
1. Use only meaningful KPIs that communicate your results
Cut the noise and minimize doubts with the data you include in SEO reports.
Avoid using confusing proprietary metrics, as they’re unreliable and difficult to connect with your actual SEO goals.
Don’t add everything you monitor to reports either, only Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that show the progress towards those SEO goals the audience is actually interested in.
This is why the KPIs to include in each case should be personalized based on the audience profile and interests: the SEO related goals the CEO and CMO care about will be different (eg. SEO activities ROI, revenue and organic search market share) than those the head of SEO is interested in following up with (eg. SEO activities ROI, revenue and organic search market share along with other more technical related ones like non-branded commercial search traffic growth, top-ranked targeted queries, key pages crawlability and indexability, etc.).
Because of this, the KPIs used in the reports targeted to the former will be different than the latter, as well as the metrics to calculate them.
Here are a few steps and criteria to help you select relevant KPIs to include in your SEO reports:
Start by establishing your SEO reports audience: Who will you report? Each audience will want to answer different questions about the SEO process’s progress. Ask each stakeholder about the SEO goals achievement they want to be informed of. Make sure these are actual goals that have been set for the SEO process and there are actions to be executed that are connected to their achievement.
These should be “SMARTER” SEO goals (specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, time-bound, evaluated, reviewed), connecting SEO efforts with business objectives. Depending on the stakeholder role, they can be operational or business-related: Agree on which goals progress questions should be answered with SEO reports. Once you have these questions, it will be easier to establish the KPIs to report, as well as the metrics to obtain and measure to calculate the KPIs. If you can’t establish meaningful metrics to calculate KPIs and answer goal progress questions, then the goal might not be a SMARTER one.
Ensure metrics data sources are reliable and stakeholders trust them and establish a couple of methods to gather the same data for consistency check. If it’s difficult to ensure accuracy for some KPIs, ensure precision (its consistency over time).
Confirm the scope, frequency and format to present the SEO report to ensure you use a medium to facilitate its consumption (Google Slides, Google Docs, etc.). Set expectations about timing to avoid unnecessarily too-frequent reporting (e.g., there’s no point in doing weekly reports if there won’t be meaningful changes during this period due to SEO nature and frequency of releases).
2. Ensure clear KPIs presentation to facilitate progress understanding
Your SEO reports KPI presentation efforts shouldn’t be about “creating a pretty document with beautiful charts” but about making the featured data easy to understand and achieving SEO reporting communication goals.
Sometimes a simpler scorecard will make it easier to understand goals achievement than a fancy time series.
This is why it’s fundamental to follow certain data presentation and visualization best practices when selecting how to feature your KPIs:
Identify the best data visualization format for each KPI by asking a few questions, as described here and here, the most important being:
What’s the story your data is trying to deliver?
Who will you present your results to?
How many data categories and points do you have?
Should you display values over time or among groups?
Test with real data to see if each KPI goal progress question can be answered.
Communicate one major KPI in each chart to avoid confusing the audience.
Remove pointless decorations and chart information that won’t help to answer the relevant KPI goal question.
Add the relevant data source to each chart to establish trust and avoid potential doubts.
Always label chart elements clearly and directly to facilitate fast understanding.
Add the question to be answered with each KPI as a chart headline to facilitate storytelling.
Use color with intent to facilitate KPIs progression understanding.
3. Leverage data storytelling to explain and drive action with your SEO reports
Data storytelling creates compelling narratives to help audiences understand and drive action from your data analysis.
As explained by PPCexpo, stories attract and maintain people’s attention for longer, numbers without stories can quickly become boring, and stories communicate insights with higher clarity. As a consequence, storytelling should help to communicate the value of the data you’re showing.
However, it’s fundamental to avoid misrepresenting the data and bringing it to the wrong conclusions when leveraging storytelling.
For this, it’s recommended to avoid cherry-picking data or manipulating scale. Always show the whole picture, giving full visual context and keeping visuals and language consistent across the report.
SEO reporting storytelling should explain and drive action from the data without misleading. Even if the results are not positive, otherwise, you will lose trust.
For this, craft a compelling narrative for each KPI using the three-act structure, asking the following questions:
Setup: What happened? Describe “what happened” with each KPI result vs. expected goal progress, taking the audience into account.
Conflict: Why did it happen? Explain the why behind the result, whether positive or negative and describe the cause of the results
Resolution: How to proceed? What to do next to achieve the expected goal given the current results? Summarize top-recommended actions
Then to effectively structure your SEO report:
Include a page or slide per KPI by organizing the pages to begin with, the most important KPIs to the audience.
Add a data appendix at the end with additional evidence to refer to from the KPIs pages.
Include an executive summary at the start, highlighting the main KPIs results and actions: It should be concise but include enough to stand by itself as a report overview.
It’s also important to remember that there’s nothing like presenting the SEO report yourself to facilitate understanding and get feedback to improve.
SEO reporting is critical for SEO success, and you should prioritize it accordingly. I hope these principles, guidelines and templates can help you with it as they’ve helped me.
