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They Never Show You Where You Are Winning or Losing
Most SEO reports show a few rankings, a traffic graph, or the number of visitors to your website. That doesn't tell you where your opportunities are.
A good reporting system should answer questions like these:
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Which cities are we strongest in?
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Which cities do our competitors dominate?
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Which products or services need more attention?
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Where do we have the best opportunity to gain market share?
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Which competitors are improving, and which are losing ground?
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There are two types of SEO reports I like to see. The first is what I call a Master Report. It gives you a broad view of your visibility throughout your market area.
I like to compare it to flying over a city at 30,000 feet. Looking out the window, you can see the streets, buildings, neighborhoods, and traffic patterns, but you can't see the people, flowers, or street signs. That's exactly what a Master Report does. It gives you the big picture.
A good Master Report should test up to 150 search terms across 10 target market areas. That creates approximately 1,500 individual search tests. It should also compare your website against as many as 30 competitors. The report should show how many first-place rankings each website has, how many rankings fall between positions 2 through 5, how many are between positions 6 through 10, and an overall visibility score for every competitor.
The second report is what I call a GEO Location Report.
This report drills down into the details. Instead of giving you the big picture, it shows how individual products or services perform in each target market. This report can be a real eye-opener. You may discover that 60% of your products have outstanding visibility while the other 40% are practically invisible.
Without this type of reporting, you would never know where your weaknesses are. As a result, your SEO company may spend time improving areas that are already performing well while ignoring the products and markets that actually need attention.
This type of report removes the guesswork from SEO and GEO. It also makes it easy to see when a competitor is targeting your products or expanding into your market areas.
These reports require a tremendous amount of processing power and data collection. Don't expect hundreds of products and dozens of markets to be tested at once.
However, if your marketing company cannot provide detailed reporting that clearly shows where you're winning, where you're losing, and what should be targeted next, they're making decisions based on assumptions instead of data.