SEO reporting questions.

[dub713]

what would be the best response to a question like this?

What would be your strategy for reporting on SEO progress?

i've had this question posed to me, and although i am familiar with the basics of reporting and all the tools available for it, i need to be able to answer this question in a way that will allow me to put it all together and install some faith in those looking at me. SEO isn't my primary skill set, and i'm doing lots of reading to get up to par, but i could use some help.

also, i know there are tons of opinions on the matter, but i'd like some input on a strategy... if i were to take on the seo role, i know that i would want to start out with a lot of reporting and analyzing of data, and there are plenty of small things that could be cleaned up in the code, and some copy modified, but what would be a good starting process to take it all on? clean code first? report and analyzefirst? deal with copy editing first?

like i said, i'm new to learning these skills, and while i'm doing my homework, i could use some feedback on these specific questions to help me in sounding solid in wanting to take on more responsiblity in this area.

thanks,

[huebdoo]

"What would be your strategy for reporting on SEO progress?"

To have a clear and concise explanation on where you are standing in SEO progress you will need to have quantifiable data on

a) Where you rank within Organic Search Engine queries
b) Define how the user is finding your site
c) Define how the competition is doing in relation to your site

Where you rank within Organic Search Engine queries>
Well I don’t like promoting software (unless they pay me) so I would like to say you will need search engine ranking positioning software. What is that?

"Search engine ranking software automatically queries a given number of keywords on a selected set of search engine. The software will then locate your URLs in the retrieved search engine answer pages and calculate their respective ranks or positions"

This will give you baseline data (before your SEO techniques are put into place) this way you can measure the gains / losses within the various search engines.

Define how the user is finding your site >
This can be accomplished by using in-depth web analytics tools (once again I will not promote) but I am sure that you can see one or more of their ad banners on either side of the Search Engine Watch web pages.

This will give you a clear indication on where / when and how people are visiting your site. This will help you chart the success of any (paid or organic) online initiative.

Define how the competition is doing in relation to your site >
This is the hardest of the three to accomplish... normally I will take say the top 10 ranking keywords for conversion & placement (data gathered from above mentioned tools) then do a manual search to see where the competition resides during those searches within the big three search engines (Google, MSN & Yahoo)

There are also sites that will show you competitive Search Engine saturation and other vital tid-bits of information for free. This data added to your data collected from the above tools would give you a solid strategy for reporting on SEO. Then you can then create charts and graphs for the executive so they can clearly see how well you are doing...

Good Luck