SEO management involves devising and implementing strategies to improve organic performance and traffic within search engine results pages (SERPs). Organic traffic drives 40% of revenue and achieving one of the top spots for relevant keywords is a high-stakes competition. The multifaceted SEO process requires top-notch management involving audience research, competitor analysis, website optimisation, KPI focus, and stakeholder reporting.

Successful SEO management

The foundation of successful SEO management involves SEO strategies that gain in-depth understanding of your target audience — the people searching your business services. Traditionally, marketers develop buyer personas based on demographics such as age, gender, and income.

However, getting to grips with target audiences has developed over time to include user intent analysis. You can learn much about your target audience by analysing user data from your website and any social media platforms your business uses.

Website-driven audience insights

In addition to demographics, your website can reveal other valuable insights, such as whether visitors are on your website due to organic or direct searches, social media, or referrals. You can also gauge their buying intent by adding items to a cart, downloading resources, or requesting a quote.

On-page searches and queries provide valuable insights into user needs. Data on popular blog posts and landing pages helps shape content strategy and promotion.

Google Analytics 4

Google Analytics is a free tool that helps you analyse your audience. It provides a trove of information, such as:

  • Which country visitors are browsing from.
  • What channel they use — organic or direct search, social media, paid ads, or referrals.
  • Page views, session duration, bounce rates, and conversion paths.
  • What device they use.
  • Whether they are first-time users or return customers.

Google Analytics also allows for creating various customer segments, helping you to target your marketing efforts more accurately.

Competitor analysis

Website SEO management also includes competitor analysis, as evaluating your competitors’ SEO strategies is essential. This comparison helps identify your strengths, allowing you to refine and expand successful tactics for greater impact.

You may also discover shortcomings in your SEO strategies where the competition performs better. You can learn from their tactics and adapt your own to benefit your business. To learn more about your competitors, you can compare website pages, perform a keyword gap analysis, compare and analyse competitor content, and analyse their UX (user experience).

From these comparisons, you can learn answers to the following questions:

  • Are our competitors covering topics we’re missing?
  • Is their content more in-depth?
  • Which keywords are they ranking for that we are not?
  • Is their UX superior?
  • What content formats are they using?
  • What strategies don’t work for them, that we can exploit?
  • How do they appeal to their target audience — what messaging, visuals, and tone do they use?

Website optimisation

Experts categorise website optimisation into on-page SEO, off-page SEO, and technical SEO. An SEO strategy succeeds only when all three components work together.

  • On-page SEO: Prioritises the content and structure of website pages, such as keyword optimisation, meta tags, and content.
  • Off-page SEO: Involves actions taken outside your website that impact your site rankings, such as effectively managing your online reputation, social media marketing, and online brand mentions.
  • Technical SEO: has to do with the backend aspects of a website, such as optimising site speed, ensuring mobile compatibility, and enabling search engines to crawl and index website pages efficiently. It impacts site visibility directly.

On-page SEO, also known as on-site SEO, includes actions like optimising content for search intent by:

  • Refining title tags with keywords
  • Improving URLs
  • Performing keyword research
  • Placing keywords strategically
  • Adding meta descriptions
  • Writing quality content
  • Structuring pages with headers and sub-headers
  • Optimising page URLs
  • Using images and adding alt text to them

Off-page SEO involves actions taken to build a site’s authority, relevance, and reputation through external signals such as:

  • Building external relationships and credibility
  • Brand building and online reputation management

Technical SEO concerns technical steps that determine how search engines perceive a site. When done right, it ensures the website is accessible to search engines so that they can easily crawl and index your website.

If this is not possible, your site will have no traffic, which means no business. Technical SEO also involves the loading speed of a website and its mobile friendliness. Search engines recognise fast loading speeds and mobile optimisation as ranking factors.

KPI-focused reporting

Reporting on SEO key performance indicators (KPIs) is significant in search engine optimisation management. SEO is a long-term undertaking — it does not deliver results overnight. According to Ahrefs, almost 60% of pages ranking in the top 10 Google results are three or more years old. In the meantime, how do you know if your SEO strategies will eventually deliver the desired results?

This juncture is where tracking SEO KPIs is invaluable, providing precise data on what works and what practices you might have to adjust for better results. There are many SEO KPIs. Examples of  the most pertinent SEO KPIs include:

Organic traffic

Organic traffic refers to the number of visitors who reach your site through search results. In other words, this figure indicates the success or failure of your SEO efforts. Organic traffic is traffic from all search engines, not only Google.

Keyword rankings

This KPI shows where your target keywords rank in search results, indicating competitiveness and SEO effects.

Bounce rate

This KPI shows how many site visitors leave a website without taking any action. This figure might be an indication of irrelevant content or poor user experience.

Conversion rate

Conversion rate tracks how many visitors take a desired action, such as checking out, signing up, or subscribing to a service. This KPI connects SEO directly to revenue and business health.

Dwell time

This KPI measures how long users stay on a page before leaving the page. This data point is a prominent metric that indicates user experience and content relevance.

Stakeholder reporting

One of the most challenging aspects of SEO management is presenting SEO reports and gaining stakeholder trust because it takes so long for SEO to prove its worth. Emailing SEO reports solely littered with charts, tables, and figures may not cut it. Explain your report and give your expert opinion on the results. Clarify fluctuations in any KPIs so stakeholders can see them in perspective.

The bottom line for stakeholders is whether the money they spend on SEO converts into traffic, leads, and sales. Highlight your insights and the SEO team’s next steps. At its best, SEO reporting is about storytelling — using data to narrate how your strategies drive outcomes.

Tools such as Google Analytics 4 help report purposes. By tracking essential SEO metrics, these tools provide a comprehensive view of website performance, revealing opportunities for SEO strategy adjustments.

Conclusion

SEO is a dynamic, ever-changing process influenced by algorithm updates, evolving user behavior, technical developments such as AI search, and industry movements.

This makes SEO both frustrating and exciting, depending on your outlook. It also means that the management of the website’s SEO never ends. It’s an ongoing process that requires flexibility and persistence. Get in touch to see how we can help you succeed.