What should an SEO agency be delivering every month?

[macmacman]

I saw this mentioned on the forum a few days ago, but can't find the thread. What list of things should an ecommerce website owner be asking an SEO agency that charge a monthly fee? Every month....

> Increase in organic traffic
> GA goals reached (Checkout Sales / Contact Forms completed)
> Keyword ranks
> New terms now ranking
> On page changes including any content and meta changes
> Inlinks gained

 

[sirearl]

Where are my extra profits.

 

[macmacman]

Yes, that would come under increased Sales / Contact and where the obvious Return On Investment shows.

 

[OldWelshGuy]

Reports can be as in depth as you want them (and the company is willing to provide), just keep in mind that the more reporting you want, the less work will be done

You should agree the KPI's and provided they are hit plan the next month.

 

[welshtrekker]

Sensible SEO firms will not guarantee rankings. No way. Not with today's Google landscape reshaping faster than anyone can keep up. That list though is accurate, though include content marketing: blogs, social, PR and customer service.

 

[macmacman]

Thanks welshtrekker but just sticking with SEO at the moment. So that would exclude PR, and customer service in my opinion.

So what KPI's can you set down? I understand its not great to put strict figures on ranks, but you can certainly say you want to see them heading more north every month.

 

[OldWelshGuy]

SEO has to worked on short, medium & long term. so you should have KPI's for all of those.

With regard rankings, if you take the Webmasters tools traffic keywords and changes as a guide, that will be a good place, as that takes into account personalisation the lot.

Traffic is great, but you could currently be getting traffic to pages that will never convert. I worked with a client that was getting 30,000+ visits, but they were all to 'information' pages that didn't convert. A bit of work on the busiest pages to capture and push them into the commercial area meant a large increase in conversions, but not traffic.

I know it sounds odd but the bottom line is what matters. solid targets are great, but unless they are set properly you could end up with the SEO chasing your targets rather than improving your business bottom line.

I would say you need to keep track on conversion rates (to prevent poor quality traffic) and/or more traffic.

KW rankings, new terms ranking can be gained from the WMT account easily and quickly.

On page changes, (but not too much detail as this will seriously cut down on the actual work carried out. remember it takes just as long to report in detail on page changes than it does to change them. so you are cutting down productivity by 50% minimum.

Inlinks is an easy one to report. so yes ideally.

The thing is that you will have different needs each month and should focus on specifics. if you focus on user experience then conversions should go up, so this means investigating your exit pages and improving them, look at your landing pages with the highest bounce rates and improve them also.

All of these things will improve (or should improve) conversion rates, and thus make you more money.

 

[Christopher Ian Moulvi]

Coming from someone that owns a SEO Company WE NEVER GUARANTEE FIRST PAGE RESULTS.

We provide a Live Ranking Panel so our customer can see their ranking in Live time the system also provides stats from the time the SEO Campaign ... They can go back days,weeks,month,years to see the improvement they can also export the data ..

 

[sirearl]

Coming from someone that owns a SEO Company WE NEVER GUARANTEE FIRST PAGE RESULTS.

.

Well you should do.

Not much traffic on page 2.Probably better to go PPC than be on any other page than 1.

 

[Christopher Ian Moulvi]

Hi,

Sirearl that was meant to say first page position i have been up working nights so im just very tired oops !

Chris

 

[Louis Porter]

You meant First Place Positions Christopher?

We always discuss our clients aims first, and make sure they're specific. Too often we get, "we want more sales" or "more traffic". We try to make sure they're specific and measurable, that way we can report on the KPIs that we agreed upon at the beginning of the partnership.

That being said, the original list covers most KPIs. However, we also measure social and referral traffic (assuming we've got control over their social platforms) in order to track offsite promotions.

We also ask them what they would like us to include in the report (for clients with a little bit more of an understanding of digital marketing and SEO) This often includes CRO metrics such as time on site, pages viewed, bounce rate etc. This is good for identifying and monitoring the value of the traffic we send to their site.

 

[SEO Specialist London]

What is the time-frame it would take you rank my business for my keywords?
How much traffic should i expect to see afterwards?
how much does your services cost?
List of previous success stories, ranking keywords and contact details?

Also just check the exact ranking position of their company for a few seo keywords?
If you can't rank yourself, how do you expect to rank me...

 

[Rene Vatz]

Ask them for pdf's reports from google analitycs/adwords. There is few specification like traffice (paid/organic), GA goals reached, searched keywords, target audience, devices used etc.

 

[NickGrogan]

Too often we get, "we want more sales" or "more traffic". We try to make sure they're specific and measurable,

Seems pretty specific and measurable to me. My site gets x,000 unique hits per day/week/month and converts to sales at x%. I want more traffic, or a better conversion rate, or both.

A good SEO company should be able to improve on either/both. Anything else is just noise.

especially things like "CRO metrics such as time on site, pages viewed, bounce rate etc. " and "searched keywords, target audience, devices used etc."

 

[Louis Porter]

Seems pretty specific and measurable to me. My site gets x,000 unique hits per day/week/month and converts to sales at x%. I want more traffic, or a better conversion rate, or both.

A good SEO company should be able to improve on either/both. Anything else is just noise.

especially things like "CRO metrics such as time on site, pages viewed, bounce rate etc. " and "searched keywords, target audience, devices used etc."

I agree, after all, the primary goal of SEO is to increase organic search traffic to a site. But when they just say "We want more sales", without quantifying it, it makes it difficult to measure and report progress against their expectations. It would be easier if they said we would like to see an increase of X% in traffic by the end of the year and a rise in conversions by Y%.

You think that measuring the quality of traffic is "just noise"? Say you're selling energy solutions to business owners, what's the point in targeting mothers or teenagers that will never purchase your product? Even if your triple the amount of traffic to the site, you won't see an increase in sales unless you're targeting the correct audience.

 

[ZEROMOQ]

Well you should do.

Not much traffic on page 2.Probably better to go PPC than be on any other page than 1.

Couldn't agree more PPC is a very effective approach, it's a traditional method of advertising and it works, SEO is good and well but you can have a million visitors a month and if they're all landing on a crappy website the conversion will be zero.

• Build a good website
• Advertise on a PPC basis
• Understand your conversions
• Tweak content to improve conversion
• Then focus on making your way up the slippery slope

 

[NickGrogan]

You think that measuring the quality of traffic is "just noise"? Say you're selling energy solutions to business owners, what's the point in targeting mothers or teenagers that will never purchase your product? Even if your triple the amount of traffic to the site, you won't see an increase in sales unless you're targeting the correct audience.

Yes, the only measure of the quality is the sales conversion rate. Bounce rate, devices used, time on page etc, are all noise.

Sometimes you might want a high bounce rate, other times low, time on page doesn't mean they are looking at it (yesterday a research company spent 3 hours on 1 page of my website, unless they read very, very, very slowly, it was just a window left open) and so on.

Targeting should be part of a plan, for example I have pages aimed at home energy users, a market we don't cover. But the pages bring in links from energy suppliers, local authorities, etc, etc which boosts the site's status.

 

[Steve_g]

I genuinely believe that too much is expected from SEO firms, this is a big factor for rouge firms using bad techniques to get instant / quick results and thus giving those legitimate in the industry a pretty hard time!

We have been using an SEO firm for many years, for the first 2/3 months i expected results and wasn't seeing much, myself and the firm had a spat but we continued using them as the process was better explained to me and the guy who runs the company clearly know what he was doing and the right way about doing it.

Woking with this company our organic traffic has grown hugely, we have worked together to see what works and what doesn't (PPC, shopping feeds etc), i don't fear Google algorithm changes and know that the foundations for our site are solidly built around good SEO practices - they have also been extremely anal and helpful with out move from out old platform to our new Magento store, often cussing problems with our developers to get things done the way they know works for us!

Since hiring I have gone from being a 1 man band trading from my spare bedroom to having a profitable company turning over 2.5m with 5 staff and a 3000sf dedicated warehouse, of course i don't attribute this purely to our SEO firm but i doubt i would be in this position without such good visibility.

Fact is, you should concentrate on long term organic results and not demand or expect instant results.

Steve

 

[Laurentb]

If you are using something like Moz.com, you should have access to reports that show growth in traffic per keyword and your SERP for these keywords should jump up aswell. THere is some setting up to do in Moz, but once that is done you'll get these reports sent to you automatically each week.

 

[altonroot]

A great blog on same topic is here on Moz http://moz.com/blog/seo-day-to-day-work-whiteboard-friday. More of that, discussion in the comments is exactly the same as we are discussing here.

 

[altonroot]

KW rankings, new terms ranking can be gained from the WMT account easily and quickly.

Here the term inbound marketing coined for same purpose. Keywords in webmaster tools are important but if you want more then just chase the current trend in market through communities like this one and see what people asking for or discussing and then define a content strategy to target relevant keywords. This ensures people who are finding will get what they want and you will able to convert them.

 

[stevebrownlie]

Thanks welshtrekker but just sticking with SEO at the moment. So that would exclude PR, and customer service in my opinion.

So what KPI's can you set down? I understand its not great to put strict figures on ranks, but you can certainly say you want to see them heading more north every month.

This is largely incorrect these days. SEO used to be an 'in the box' activity an agency could undertake by simply adding content, and building links. You'd move up, make more money, whaoo.

Google is definitely more brand conscious now so real press coverage and activities in the real world that are driving online coverage and a 'buzz' will definitely help your brand with 'SEO'. In addition if you're any kind of local business, then your reviews (driven by your customer service) will have a huge impact on where you show up in the local box etc and how customers react to seeing your listing.

Don't restrict your agency with a narrow view of what is or isn't SEO as that will have a negative impact on your performance in some cases.

 

[OldWelshGuy]

Here the term inbound marketing coined for same purpose. Keywords in webmaster tools are important but if you want more then just chase the current trend in market through communities like this one and see what people asking for or discussing and then define a content strategy to target relevant keywords. This ensures people who are finding will get what they want and you will able to convert them.

I understand that, but that doesn't answer the original question. Google trends is great, and the beauty about webmaster tools is that it shows you terms GOOGLE believe are relevant to your site, .

I didn't for one second say that using it for ranking was ALL it can do, I mentioned it in the context of the original question, rather than muddying the waters

 

[Andrew Beardlsey]

One key strategy fro any seo campagin, is that whatever your niche and whoever you employ to do seo, you pick a phrase that you KNOW for a fact, converts into sales.
You can find this out by running a short ppc campaign and test out various words/phrases.
Then when you start spending cash on an seo, you are more likely to get extra sales.