SEO reporting

While reporting and statistics should play their part in any mid-to-large scale SEO campaign, I often feel that SEO companies often get the emphasis wrong here, between getting stuck in and doing the work and providing SEO progress reports and measuarables.

The pressure for this comes from both sides. SEO customers feel that they are getting value for money when they recieve reports almost as much as they do when they get results. On the other hand SEO companies know that they can charge big for reports and compared to the actual work involved in an SEO campaign itself, these often provide a really good Return on Investment (ROI).

Somewhere in the midst of all this it sometimes gets forgotten that the objective of the campaign is to achieve good search engine results and not the reporting itself. In fact, good SEO results really stand out - you don't need statistics and reporting to tell you how successful your campaign is.

The lesson of the day is then, “You don't fatten a pig by weighing it” or rather, you don't create a successful SEO campaign by measuring it. Results are achieved by getting stuck in and doing the work.

It is also the case that some disreputable SEO companies have even been known to dress up their SEO reporting to try and show success where none actually exists. Its easy to guess who some of these might be without even having dealt with them - you know the ones that offer to get you in the top ten places for utterly worthless terms such as “three-legged saddleback pig farmers in Swindon on a Tuesday”.

Its is also worth mentioning finally, that if a customer wants to know the progress, then there are many free tools out there which can help to give them a really good impression of how things are going: tools such as Google Analytics, Google Webmaster Tools, AWStats and SEO for Firefox, are all free, and can be used to get an overall feel for how a campaign is progressing. If the customer is comfortable with using these then, the SEO consultant or SEO professional is left free to get on with the job at hand, and will probably be able to bring in the bacon faster and better as a consequence.