Last week I shared a quick 3 question survey asking what metrics SEOs are reporting to their clients. I started this to help me with another article I’m writing, and this is just a quick report of the results to say thank you to all those that took part, and particularly to the SEO Hangout Panel and to Eric Wu for sharing on the Technical SEO Community.
If you want to participate, it’s not to late, and it’d be great to get a more data, which I’ll update here.
From the respondents we got the following data, which for your viewing pleasure, I’ve put into some lovely Google charts.
Disclaimer: This wasn’t a particularly scientific survey. The form design changed during the process. However, this shouldn’t really impact on the responses, as respondents were encouraged to add anything not included in the list, and they did. There were also relatively few respondents. More people filling in this short, 3 question survey would really help.
The chart below shows how many respondents indicated including various metrics in their reports.
This shows that the top 6 metrics (Position 5 is tied) used were:
- Conversion Rates
- Organic Traffic
- Rankings
- Engagement Metrics (from Google Analytics)
- Sales
- Search Visibility
I’ll be honest, I was a little surprised (and delighted) to find real business metrics so high on the list. I was expecting more of the links and rankings and less of the conversions and sales.
The table below just shows this count out of table form, for ease of viewing.
The chart below shows the number of metrics included in reports by respondents.
So what did we learn from this? Well, that we’re actually reporting on a surprising range of metrics, including some key business measures, and surprisingly little on the hours worked. Really the data is there to make your own conclusions.
Since it started the survey no includes questions about position and tools used. At the moment there is too little data to come up with any significant conclusions, though it does give us a bit of insight into how we’re working as an industry.
If you’ve got some time and you haven’t already, take the quiz, and help us get a better understanding of SEO and digital marketing reporting. All the information will be made publicly available and I’ll update the charts here.
You can view the raw response data here.
Dan Petrovic, the managing director of DEJAN, is Australia’s best-known name in the field of search engine optimisation. Dan is a web author, innovator and a highly regarded search industry event speaker.
ORCID iD: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6886-3211