Tracking SEO Changes: The Importance of Accountability in Digital Growth

Today’s digital world is fast-paced; you have a constant influx of data at your fingertips, and you need to understand how to use this detail to bring your business and your client’s business success. 

It is paramount for businesses to not only adapt to the changing digital landscape, but also to evolve. More importantly than this, though, companies need to remain accountable for their actions. 

One of the pillars of this accountability is SEO. The relationship between effective SEO management and the digital growth of a business is symbiotic and deeply intertwined. If you are not effectively managing SEO campaigns for your clients, you cannot expect them to grow effectively. 

This article will dive into how tracking SEO changes will help you remain accountable. We will talk about the value of monitoring SEO changes over time, a little bit about the makeup of accountability from an SEO perspective, why you should embrace competitive analysis, and how responsibility in SEO creates trust with your stakeholders. 

We will also discuss different SEO monitoring techniques and how SEO is just a tiny part of the journey to digital growth. 

The Value of Tracking SEO Changes Over Time

Tracking SEO changes over time is crucial for several reasons.  

In this section, we will talk about how you can use historical insights to your advantage for your clients, the importance of measuring success (whether it’s current or past achievements) and the importance of using SEO changes to anticipate trends and get ahead of the competition.

Historical Insights

Of course, you can use data to find current patterns. But you can also use your historical data to find seasonal trends, industry shifts or even global events that may impact search behaviour from your client’s customers. 

This information is vital for businesses and will allow you to effectively forecast future client strategies and allocate resources. 

One significant example of this is the Coronavirus pandemic that impacted a lot of search trends between 2020 and the end of 2021, even the beginning of 2022. For example, many businesses that sold stock online received a significant boost in search traffic due to people purchasing online after they were blocked from going into shops.  

Using data trends like this can help you craft strategies for your clients in the future. If you had an ecommerce client, for example, you could have used the boost in traffic to identify the keywords you want to retain and put more resources into content relating to these keywords to give your clients the best chance of success. 

You can also use historical search traffic to identify seasonal dips. When search volume drops for keywords, you can inform your clients that they need to do more to keep existing revenue, using PPC, for example.

Anticipating Trends

Of course, you can also use your historical data to anticipate future trends.  

For example, what trends can you see if you look at your client’s historical data from Q4 of 2022? Can you see a dip in search traffic as people started to wind down for Christmas and New Year? Can you see an increase in search traffic as businesses prepare for 2023? Data like this will be crucial to formulating your SEO strategy for the rest of the year. 

Organisations that use their clients’ historical data to anticipate trends and “get ahead of the pack” will be able to enjoy a better market position when compared to their client’s competitors.

Measuring Success

Understanding how to measure success for your clients will require a blend of qualitative and quantitative approaches. 

Beyond numbers and metrics, understanding the qualitative impact of SEO (for example, brand perception or authority within a niche) can give businesses a competitive edge. 

Almost all of your clients will have quantitative goals, whether that’s: 

• Traffic
• Impressions
• Leads 

And you can use your data to measure this success, of course. 

But your clients may also have several qualitative goals. Understanding how to pull data to measure this success is vital. Can you scrape positive social mentions? Can you remove data from a review site like Trustpilot to show your client’s brand perception?  

Using data like this, as well as numerative data, is going to be a great way to ensure you are being accountable for your clients.

The Anatomy of Accountability

We will dive into what creates accountability with your clients, including information about why specific changes need to be made and ongoing education that you must give your clients.

Understanding the ‘Why’

When discussing accountability in SEO, especially regarding your agency remaining accountable to your clients, we must understand that SEO isn’t just about changes made to client sites. Still, it’s also about why they were made. 

This will involve deep diving into customer psychology, different technological advancements and the ever-changing nature of Google’s search algorithms. 

If you, using historical data as talked about before, decide that you need to add more content to a page, you need to be able to explain to your clients exactly why you are making this change. They trust you with the digital success of their website, so if they trust you to make the necessary changes, they can be more sure that you will deliver the win they need! 

Recent Google Updates include the August 2023 Core Update and the September 2023 Helpful Content Update. Of course, it’s natural that some websites will increase traffic following updates like these, but some sites will also see a dip. If your client has seen a drop, can you use data (from external sources or your research) to understand why this dip has occurred? Using this kind of data to get ‘ahead’ of losses during Core Updates is another excellent way to build client accountability.

Ongoing Education

Digital marketing, especially SEO, can be compared to a living creature. It’s constantly changing, growing and evolving into something different. As we all know, what worked five years ago might not work today. And if it does, it won’t work to the same level. 

For that reason, you must prioritise ongoing education with every single one of your clients. You can do this in several ways, including workshops, training sessions and regular webinars. These can all be used to keep your clients ahead of the curve in terms of their knowledge and keep them informed on changes to the landscape. 

Let’s use algorithm updates as an example. Once you have analysed a recent update, such as the Helpful Content Update of September 2023, you can educate your clients about what you have observed. This will help them as they continue to create content for their business, but it will also help you stay ahead of the curve. 

Your goal as an agency shouldn’t be to ‘always’ be the SEO company for your clients. You should focus on educating them on what they should be doing so they can eventually replace you with their own team.

Embracing Competitive Analysis

Another key to building accountability with your clients, especially as an SEO agency, is to embrace competitive analysis. We generally do Competitive analysis well as SEO professionals, so this step should be easy for most agencies.

Find Hidden Opportunities

Competitive analysis is a great way to find the strategies and tactics used by your client’s industry rivals. This will help you reveal gaps and opportunities that may have been overlooked. By identifying these hidden SEO opportunities, agencies can provide actionable insights and recommendations to their clients, which will help them showcase a proactive approach to outperforming competitors. This will not only help in prioritising SEO efforts but will also aid in setting clear benchmarks against industry standards. 

By using competitive analysis, SEO agencies can set realistic expectations and KPIs based on the performance of industry leaders. This transparency during the goal-setting and strategy-creation phase will foster trust and accountability between your agency and your client. Clients can see where they stand within the competitive landscape and understand the reasoning behind different SEO tasks. This will ensure both parties are aligned in their objectives and their measures of success.

Understand your Audience Better

Competitive analysis will also offer your agency insights into the content and strategies that resonate most with your client’s target audience by examining what their competitors are doing successfully.  

Your agency can find audience preferences and behaviours by analysing keywords, backlink profiles and content themes that competitors prioritise. Sharing these insights with your clients will help create a more effective SEO strategy and establish a transparent foundation.  

This transparency creates trust, as clients can see the rationale behind different SEO decisions and how they align with industry trends. This ensures mutual understanding and accountability in the pursuit of shared KPIs.

How Accountability in SEO Creates Trust with Stakeholders

We’re now going to look at exactly how accountability within SEO will create trust with your stakeholders, specifically how feedback loops can be created and how accurate reporting will help, too.
Feedback Loops

When you think of how some agencies work, how often do you feel feedback loops are created between the agency and the clients? Encouraging feedback from stakeholders, whether the business owner, marketers within the organisation or anyone involved in the sales process, is a game changer for SEO agencies. 

This constant two-way communication can provide invaluable insights because stakeholders often bring a fresh perspective.  

Business owners, sales staff and other marketers within your client business will see and talk to customers daily. With this, they can offer industry insights you cannot see by looking at competitors or search trends. Considering this feedback when building an SEO strategy is an excellent way of getting your clients ahead of their competitors.

Responsibility in Reporting

Regarding SEO, accurate reporting is the true cornerstone of success. Any misrepresented data can ruin strategies, waste client resources and ultimately erode trust between you and your stakeholders. 

On the other hand, emphasising accuracy and integrity with your SEO reporting will ensure an effective strategy and create transparency and consistency. This approach solidifies trust, enables businesses to make informed decisions, and creates a long-term, trust-based relationship between their company and your agency. 

Strategies based on flawed data can lead to many missed opportunities and diminished trust among stakeholders. By prioritising accuracy and transparency (whether the results are good or bad) in SEO reporting, your agency can ensure it’s effective at making decisions, building a reliable reputation and creating long-lasting client relationships.

Techniques for Effective SEO Monitoring

Effective SEO monitoring involves several tools and practices to track your client’s website performance, keyword rankings and user engagement. Regularly analysing your client’s website analytics, such as: 

• Traffic sources.
• Bounce rates.
• Conversion rates.
• And more. 

It will provide valuable insights into how well your client’s website performs in search results. Additionally, keyword tracking tools such as Ahrefs, Semrush and SERanking can be used to monitor the rankings of targeted keywords, whilst backlink analysis will help you understand your client’s website authority and the quality of its inbound links. It’s also essential to monitor site speed, mobile-friendliness, and any crawl errors that might affect your client’s website being indexed. 

Establishing these monitoring techniques will help foster more accountability between your agency and your client. Regular and transparent reporting, based on these metrics, will ensure that both parties are aligned on goals and expectations. When clients can see tangible data on their website’s performance and the impact of the SEO strategies implemented, it builds trust in your expertise and methods.  

Furthermore, if any issues (or areas of improvement) are identified, you and your client can collaboratively address them. This ensures that your client’s SEO campaign remains on track and continues to deliver exceptional results.

The Bigger Picture: SEO is Just a Part of the Digital Growth Journey

Whilst SEO is an undeniably important part of a business’s online success, it’s also essential to recognise that it’s just one piece of a much larger puzzle. This is precisely what we’re going to explore in this final section!

Links with Other Digital Strategies

SEO is fundamentally about optimising websites for higher search engine rankings. We all know that. But it’s linked with a myriad of other digital strategies. Compared with SEO’s organic approach, PPC focuses on paid traffic, yet both aim for website visibility. 

Content marketing, essential for SEO, ensures content is both ‘rank-worthy’ and engaging, whilst a robust social media presence, though not directly impacting SEO, can boost website traffic and content reach. 

In the ever-changing digital landscape, businesses must look beyond immediate metrics and settle for long-term milestones aligned with broader objectives to ensure a unified and effective growth strategy. 

That’s why digital agencies are crucial. They can help businesses with all areas of digital marketing, not just SEO! And doing this will help build trust in the long term between your agency and your client.

Long-Term Vision

We know digital marketing is a fast-paced world, and it’s easy for businesses to become wholly fixated on short-term results. Yes, immediate metrics such as monthly traffic spikes or sudden rankings jumps can be gratifying. But we need to remember that it’s equally important for businesses to adopt a forward-thinking approach to their client’s SEO strategy! 

A genuine long-term vision for SEO goes well beyond the here and the now. It’s all about anticipating future trends, understanding the evolving nature of search engine algorithms, and preparing for changes in user behaviour. As an agency, you can work with your clients to set 3-year or even 5-year milestones and create a roadmap that will aim for sustained growth and adapt to the shifting digital landscape. These milestones will serve as checkpoints, allowing your clients to assess their progress with you, recalibrate tactics, and ensure you are both on the right path. 

Furthermore, SEO should not be viewed in isolation, as previously discussed. It’s one component of a larger business strategy. Therefore, aligning your client’s SEO goals with their broader business objectives will ensure that the efforts invested in SEO will also contribute to their overall mission and vision. Whether expanding into new markets, building brand loyalty, or increasing sales, a well-integrated SEO strategy will play a vital role in achieving those objectives for your clients.

Hopefully, this blog post has given you all the information you need on the importance of accountability within digital growth. 

We’ve explored the value of tracking SEO changes over time, the anatomy of accountability between agencies and clients, how you, as an agency, can embrace competitive analysis, and how accountability creates trust with stakeholders. 

We’ve also examined different techniques for effective SEO monitoring and how SEO is just one part of a digital growth journey. 

Tools that integrate with Google Search Console, like SEOTesting, can be invaluable for a practical approach to tracking SEO changes. 

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About the Author 

Ryan Jones – SEOTesting

Ryan has been in the SEO industry for nearly a decade and is deeply passionate about digital marketing. When he’s not busy strategising SEO campaigns and brainstorming content ideas, Ryan loves nothing more than relaxing with his family while watching a football game or cheering on his favourite NBA team, the Warriors.