Mid-sized and large companies love reports. They seem to love reports about those reports, and meetings about the reports and follow-up reports to the meetings about reports. While I agree that reports are important for various reasons such as keeping everyone up to speed, making it easy to share information and so forth, I feel like a lot of companies are in danger of reporting their SEO to death. It’s too easy to get hung up on the data of your SEO reporting and sometimes very easy to forget to actually do anything with your SEO!
Obviously you need to keep everyone involved in your SEO campaign “in the loop.” If the PR team doesn’t know what the social media manager is up to, how can they possible coordinate their campaigns for maximum exposure? If your IT director doesn’t know that your SEO provider is going into the “guts” of your site and making changes they might accidentally undo them. Of course one hand needs to know what the other is doing, but that doesn’t mean that you need everyone’s input every step of the way. It’s very easy to get hung up on the finer details of one report or another and spend hours, days or even weeks working through red tape that your in-house team created for themselves! Does the IT director need to have a say in the keyword research process? Does the CEO need to approve every tweet before it’s sent out? Reports in the wrong hands can actually stall your SEO campaign!
When working with enterprise SEO clients, I’ve noticed that the chain of command is much longer than when I’m working with small or mid-sized companies. My contact person within the company might be a marketing manager (of which there are 2 others), and they work under the Director of Marketing who answers to the VP of Marketing who answers to the CEO. Throw in an in-house PR team, copywriter, social media manager, etc and suddenly every step of the SEO process needs to be reviewed, edited and approved by 10 different people. It’s impossible to make any headway with their SEO campaign because it takes so long to get each step approved!
I’ve also worked with some SEO clients that demand forecasting reports. How many visitors can they expect to see in months 3, 6 and 12? How many sales leads should they be getting each month? When will their site rank #1 for their top 5 keywords? My answer to forecasting reports questions like these—I can’t answer that. SEO is a long term process with no “magical” formula that I can use to guarantee your website results. A white hat SEO campaign will produce great results in time, but there are too many factors that I can’t control to nail down a hard and fast final date.
It’s hard for companies that need to quickly generate a lot of revenue to strap in for the long haul that is SEO. And for companies that have investors and directors demanding proven ROI, SEO can be a frustrating process because you simply can’t hurry it! My advice to companies that seem to be in love with their reports? It’s time to put the reports aside and just do it! Stop getting in the way of your potential SEO success and start moving forward with your campaign.