You’re about to launch an update to a site or a blog and you know, you just know, that this upgrade is going to totally kick ass and create huge traffic gains. You’re just so excited that you don’t really think about proving your success – you have visions of charts spiking straight to the moon.

…and then reality calls…

You probably should have done the SEO report and analysis to justify project approval, but when management knows that something sucks and needs improvement they can approve a project without formalities.

So now, don’t be a newb, do it right – create an SEO report that you can send out with your launch announcement and show your team that you’ve got it all together.

On to the report – let’s get it done.

Metrics

Run on over to your web reporting application and create a search engine traffic report. This report shows the keywords people search on to find the individual pages on your site, and the quality of that traffic to your pages.

Create a spreadsheet with the following columns and get data from your reporting application that matches:

• Keywords
• Average Visit Duration
• Visits
• Views
• Pageviews per Visit (or Views to Visit Ratio)
• Bounce Rate (Google Analytics provides this)

SEO Report Screenshot

Now let’s assume that your site is supported by paid traffic, whether it’s Google Adwords, and advertising network or some other non-organic sources. I’ve got good reporting tools, so I like to run reports that measure the following – and think about it, this report is VERY powerful as it shows the quality of ORGANIC traffic compared to PAID traffic:

• Keywords
• Visits – Organic Search
• Percent Visits – Organic Search
• Visits – Paid Search
• Percent Visits – Paid Search
• Visits – Delta
• Views per Visit – Organic Search
• Views per Visit – Paid Search
• Views per Visit – Delta
• Bounce Rate – Organic Search
• Bounce Rate – Paid Search
• Bounce Rate – Delta
• Average Visit Duration – Organic Search
• Average Visit Duration – Paid Search
• Average Visit Duration – Delta

The Reports

You need reports for the portion(s) of the site you’re updating, or for the entire site if that’s appropriate. You’ll need reports for the Past 30 Days, the Past 90 Days and then, ideally, reports by month, quarter and year for at least the past year.

(Yeah, I know it’s a lot of reports, but you want to do this right, and these reports will REALLY help you.)

And then you need to run reports AFTER the launch, and these are critical. You absolutely need reports after 24, 48 and 72 hours, and you need to publish those within your company. After that you need to run weekly reports, and then monthly, for the year following your launch.

Why do you need to run all these reports and then keep the results? That’s easy – for your REVIEW and RAISE in a year when we’ve all forgotten about this project!!

Seriously, you need to have this data so you can show the parts of your project that were successful, and yes, so you can show the areas that still need work.

You need to demonstrate that your planning and ideas resulted in MEASURABLE improvement.

You also need the data to track the project long-term so you can look back at the ideas you tried and how they’ve evolved over time. And it really takes at least one year to go through the complete business cycle.

A Little Story

Here’s a perfect example – let’s say you work for a site whose business model is to get and sell education leads. The site has a lot of content about going back to college, technical schools, scholarships and so on.

This site is very seasonal – everyone is HOT to get into school and get funding between April and July, and August traffic spikes in frantic peaks.

And September traffic dies.

So, you have your site update scheduled for launch at midnight on August 31. You bust your butt, you work nights and weekends, miss out on Fantasy Football signups, and pour your soul into this launch.

The launch itself goes off perfectly, and you walk into the office on Sep. 1 expecting fanfare and accolades – instead you see that half the office is on vacation…because the Education season is over and done with.

And despite your brilliant optimizations and features, September traffic absolutely craters.

…craters so bad that not even Jack Daniels can help you through it.

You look at September traffic for the preceding three years and realize that
your launch came at a dead time – and you can call that good planning!

So now you want to see if there are any measurable differences in this very slow period. Use it as a testing period for the high traffic months that will follow. If you can show a 10% gain when traffic is not supported by ads, then you’ve really accomplished something.

And even more importantly, if you can get your ORGANIC traffic to the same levels that your PAID traffic got you to a year ago, then you’ve been VERY successful and SAVED your company a lot of money.

So remember to plan your SEO reports to justify new projects, to give yourself a baseline for new launches, and to show measurable results after launch. And pay attention to your reporting – your site will benefit if you spend a few hours each week understanding how visitors find and interact with it.

charlie

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