Understanding your SEO visibility reports

Visibility Report

Your visibility report shows the detailed performance of your web site in the search engines, by keyword and by engine.

Summary

A summary of the overall visibility statistics. Unlike our weighted trend report (see below), the keyword visibility index simply gives an indication of the overall number of keywords that are returned in the report, and makes no allowances for placement.

Visibility

This shows search engine saturation (how many of your pages each search engine has in its index) and the number of inbound links.

These are perhaps the least precise and helpful statistics in the report, not least because the search engines filter both pages and links from the results, and the various search engine datacentres may contain significantly different data, so the counts can vary considerably between each report.

Engine

This is perhaps the most important report page. It shows the position of each keyword in each search engine, and the change from the previous report.

Keyword

If you have particularly important keywords you want to track, this is a useful report, as it groups the search engine results by keyword.

Trend

The trend report shows the historical trend for each keyword in each of the search engines.

Competitive

If you have selected a competitor to check, this report shows how your competitor compares in the results against you.

Trend Report

Trend reports are available to SEO Watch and SEO Watch Plus clients.

Our trend report shows the overall weighted trend of your search engine results. The results are weighted based on page and position. The weightings are calculated based on industry metrics for click through data based on page and position on the page.

This results in a far more realistic visibility scoring system that reflects the relative importance of results on the first pages in the results, and in particular page 1.

The trend data shows the results for:

• The position bands: #1, 2-5, 6-10, Page 2, Page 3, and results below Page 3 (these do not count towards weighting).
• The number of Page 1, 2, and 3 results. These are also displayed in the graph area.
• Visibility Score - this is the weighted score for results on pages 1-3.
• The number of search engines and the number of terms in the report
• Adjusted Visibility Score - this is the final score for the report and is calculated by dividing the Visibility Score by the maximum number of positions available based on the number of engines and terms searched. This helps reduce any distortion of the trend caused by changes to the search engines included and the addition or removal of search terms between reports.
• The remaining columns show the change from the benchmark (1st) report, and month by month.

The graphs show the the total results for pages 1, 2, and 3; the overall trend month-on-month; and a 3 month moving average.

These last two trends are particularly important as they are the key indicators of change that highlight the need for SEO adjustment.

Trend reports are not created automatically - on the SEO Watch and SEO Watch Plus service, we review each monthly visibility report and create the trend reports manually - this monitoring and reporting process ensures we remain aware of any changes that are taking place.

For this reason, trend reports are normally available to view the working day after the completion of your Visibility Report.

PPC Reports

As a minimum your PPC reports include details of search impressions, clicks and costs.

Where we have access to visitor data (web stats, sales, and registrations etc) the report will also show traffic figures, proportion of PPC traffic, cost per visitor stats, cost per action, sales data and ROI figures.

Custom Reporting

Where required we can create sophisticated reporting models to suit your specific requirements. Please ask us for details.