8 replies to this topic

[Alok Jain]

Hi

I studied many articles about seo and collected lots of data about many keywords and a long list of keywords relevent to my company's website.

Now I am really confused how to make a presentable format for a keyword research report.

I mean what fields i am supposed to consider and what to ignore in the report.

Thanks

[FP_Guy]

I would add how many times the keyword phrase shows up in title tags, anchor text links, and in URL's as the most important.

[storyspinner]

Hi Alok :wave:

Perhaps understanding what your point needs to be to the audience would help you out? Is it to show where the opportunity is, or is it to prove your entering a tough market?

There's a lot of ways a report can be formatted, but we tailor our reports to whom our audience is. Some we can be pretty technical with - others, they just want to know what the opportunity represents.

Perhaps, asking whom you are presenting too, what matters to them, what do they want to see - might help you better to scope out how to build the report?

[Alok Jain]

Hi

Thanks for the reply.

I keep studying about SEO to keep myself updated about the market. but this is my first SEO project and as storyspinner says this is my first step into a tough market.

I found following fields are important while creating a keyword report.

• Number of searches (overture, word tracker, keyword discovery)
• Number of results for google search
• Number of results for yahoo search
• Number of results for allintitle search
• Number of results for intitle/inanchor search
• Top 10 pages in the search result
• Pagerank of top 10 pages

Any other suggestions ?

I did not found anything about SEO reports format on google.
Can you suggest me any readable material for the same. And if there is not any it's a good topic to start writing

Thanks

[bragadocchio]

Hi Alok,

I'm sure that if you looked at the keyword research processes for 20 different SEO/SEM firms that you would find 20 different methods and accompanying reports.

Following are some things to keep in mind as you create a report.

1. You want to make it as easy for a client to understand as possible. The names for what you are comparing may not be easily understood and obvious to your clients. You may want to create a legend page that uses layman terms to explain what they mean.

2. Your choice of keywords is going to be related to the structure of your website, with the main pages tied to more general and competitive keyword phrases, and deeper level and more specific pages tied to more specific and less general keyword phrases.

I like to address that by creating categories to find keyword phrases within, and an information architecture for the site that reflects those categories. Breaking the report into categories can help make sure that a site, and the research for keywords has covered all of the categories used on a site.

If the site is an existing one where you aren't changing pages, you may want to show which page goes with which keywords, and indicate which category the page falls within, and how competitive a phrase within a page needs to be.

3. You want to be able to show an estimate of how competitive a phrase might be in an easy to understand manner.

4. You want to show in the report that you are comparing choices of keyword phrases for specific pages. For instance, a page about classes for engineers could use the following phrases:

engineering workshops
engineering seminars
engineering training.

The report should do some grouping like that, and show that alternatives have been considered, and why one may be a better choice than the others, with the best choice marked (and a reason why it's the best choice something that you can easily articulate).

[storyspinner]

Everything Bill says is great - I'd like to add a bit to it too.

If you're using Keyword Discovery (KWD) - utilize their graphs! They are great tool to show clients who are not too sure about the industry just how keywords can differ from engine to engine.

I'd also like to point out - using overture data is really difficult, because it only shows you the last month of data. It cannot show you seasonality. It's a great tool to do a spot check but here's the thing to think about - if you are researching "christmas gifts" on overture's tool in December of January, you'll have numbers through the roof, but do that research in May - and its the complete opposite. You wouldn't get that with Overture, but KWD you would.

Also, Becareful of stating the results from each engine, that can be data that you just don't need to show. The only time I show that is if there's only less than maybe 500 results and whoever is ranking isn't really relevant at all.

Hope this all helps!

[rubia126]

I found one tool online at getquickseo.com/tools/kwpagerank.aspx
It allows you to find out your ranking on Yahoo, MSN, and Google on any URL you specify, for any key-word. If anybody is aware of any other such online tools that lead towards an effective search engine marketing strategy, please let me know.

rubia

[SEOcritique]

I run two types of keyword reports, shotgun and focused. The shotgun approach is typically my first pass when I want to gather as many legitimate possibilities as possible. With shotgun reports I include general measurements, most of which are listed above.

What I really want to contribute to this thread is my perspective on focused keyword reports. When I am considering the suitability of a particular keyword or phrase I add specific information about websites that rank for that word or phrase. For example, if I am trying to get a top 10 ranking I will list the 10 ten results from the target search engine, usually Google, and list statistics for each. If I am gunning for a 2nd page result I will typically list statistics for the 1,2, 5, 10, and 11-20 ranking websites. I then add a statement that summarizes the document strength necessary to achieve a specific ranking. I will also note any anomalies such as an apparently weak document ranking well and try to determine what is boosting or supporting that document's rank.

The reason to do this is so the reader of the report will be able to understand and evaluate my recommendations.

You can get a good starter-list of web document statistics from Aaron Wall's SEO For Firefox addon/plug-in.

[AndySEO]

When focussing on keywords, for the keyword report etc is it best to focus on a small amount of keywords, or a greater amount, or is this up to your client at the end of the day?