Checking an SEO Report Across Virginia Service Areas

A monthly SEO report should let you check the work yourself. At a minimum it lists every link placed that month with its live URL, the page on your site it points to and the anchor text, then shows where your target keywords rank, which pages gained or lost search traffic, how many leads you can trace to search, and what happens next month. A report that can't show those things is a description of effort, and effort is hard to audit.

For a business covering several Virginia localities, start by separating the places in the report. A county-wide total can hide a useful page in one community and a weak page in another. Keep the service, ranking page and checking location together when comparing months.

The link list comes first

Links are the part of SEO you can't see from your own website, so they're the part a report most needs to prove. Each line in the list should give you:

• the live URL of the page where the link sits
• the page on your site it points to
• the anchor text (the clickable words)
• the kind of placement: a guest post on someone else's site, a Web 2.0 page on a publishing platform, or a second-tier amplification link
• the date it was found live

With that, you can click any line and see the link for yourself. Do it. Pick three at random each month and check that the page loads, the link is there, and the site has some reason to be talking about your kind of business. It takes ten minutes and tells you more than any chart in the report.

One thing that confuses people: amplification links don't point at your site. They point at the guest posts and Web 2.0 pages that do, to strengthen those pages and get them indexed. So for those lines, the target column will show another site's URL, and that's correct. What you're checking is that the chain ends at a page of yours.

Read the anchor text column as a whole, too. If nearly every anchor is the same phrase, say "roofer Richmond VA" forty times over, ask why. A mix of your business name, plain page titles and descriptive phrases looks like the way people actually link to a business.

The counts should match what you bought. Every package on our SEO pricing page states how many guest posts, Web 2.0 properties and amplification links it includes, and each of those links appears in our monthly report with its live URL, target page and anchor text. Whoever you hire, hold them to the same standard: if the proposal promised ten guest posts, the report should list ten URLs you can open.

Compare the same service in each locality

You agreed on target keywords at the start. The report should list each one with this month's position, last month's position, and the page on your site that ranks for it. If the ranking page is the wrong one, such as your home page showing up for a service that has its own page, that deserves a note and a fix.

Local results depend on where the searcher is standing, so the report should say what location the rankings were checked from. A plumber's position for "water heater repair" can differ between Short Pump and Midlothian, and a report checked from one point downtown can make you look better or worse than you are. Map results and the regular results below them should be reported separately, since they move for different reasons.

Don't react to a single month. Positions wobble. Look at the direction over three.

Say you run a hypothetical landscaping company in Chesterfield with ten target keywords. In month three, the report shows four of them moved from page three to page two, two held steady, one slipped, and three still aren't in the top 100. A useful report names the ranking page for each, notes that the slip came right after the service page was rewritten, and says what's planned for the three that haven't appeared. You can make decisions from that.

Pages that gained or lost

Chosen keywords are only part of the picture. Your pages also pick up traffic for searches nobody targeted. The report should name the pages whose search clicks rose or fell noticeably, taken from Google Search Console if you've given access, with a likely reason for each. When the reason is a guess, the report should say so.

This section catches problems early. A drop on your contact page after a site update, a service page that suddenly lost clicks, a blog post that started pulling visits for a question you hadn't thought about: each one is a prompt to do something. Five pages with one sentence each beats a forty-row table nobody reads.

Leads, where tracking allows

Traffic is not business. The report should count the leads that can be traced to search and say how they were counted: form submissions tagged by source, calls and website clicks from your Business Profile's performance figures, or calls through a tracking number if you use one.

Tracking has limits, and an honest report says what it can't see. Plenty of people find you on Google, then call the number on your truck or walk in the door. If you ask new customers how they found you, put those answers in the report as well. A report that turns traffic into an estimated "leads" figure using an assumed conversion rate is guessing on your behalf, and you should ask for the real count instead.

Choose next month's work by locality

The last section should be specific: which pages get changes, which keywords get links next, what content is coming, and what's needed from you, such as approvals, photos or an answer about a service you offer. "Continue optimization" is not a plan. If nothing in this section mentions something you'd recognize from your own business, ask for detail before the month starts.

What to skim past

Some charts fill pages without telling you much:

• third-party "visibility" or authority scores plotted over time
• total keywords ranked, when most of them are terms you'd never want to rank for
• impressions with no clicks attached
• traffic split by browser, device model or screen size
• screenshots of tools with no sentence explaining them

None of these is useless in the right hands, but none of them is the work. If a report is twenty pages of charts and one paragraph about what was done, ask for the proportions to be reversed.

Questions to ask if a report hides the links

Some providers report link counts without URLs, or say their link sources are private. If that's what you're getting, ask:

1. Can I see the live URL of every link placed this month?
2. Which page on my site does each one point to, and what's the anchor text?
3. Which are guest posts on other people's sites, and which are pages you published yourselves on publishing platforms?
4. If a link goes dead, will the report show that, and what happens next?
5. Can I have the full list as a spreadsheet so I can keep my own record?

Put the questions in an email and ask for the answers before you pay the next invoice. You're paying for links, so you're entitled to see each one.

If you'd like a second opinion on the report you get now, set up a call and have last month's report open when we talk. We'll go through it with you and point out anything that's missing.

Read the report against both the business case and the boundaries of your service area: Is SEO Worth It for a Small Business in Virginia?; Counties vs Independent Cities: Setting a Google Business Profile Service Area in Virginia.