September 26, 2024 • 17 mins
In this episode, Lumar host (& Senior Technical SEO) Chris Spann discusses SEO reporting best practices with Natasha Burtenshaw-deVries, Director of Organic Growth at Flywheel Digital.
Better SEO reporting isn't necessarily about complex math but about aligning with client goals and simplifying the process. Natasha discusses the importance of focusing on what truly matters for clients or stakeholders — and how to educate them on interpreting SEO data correctly.
Tune in to hear Natasha's insights on building better SEO reports and the importance of being a strategic partner to clients.
About Human-First Digital:
In this podcast series, SEO expert Chris Spann speaks to the brightest minds in the world of website optimization. The HFD podcast is brought to you by Lumar. Learn more about Lumar’s full suite of SEO, web accessibility, and site speed tools at lumar.io
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Episode Links:
Follow Natasha Burtenshaw-deVries on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/natashaburtenshawdevries/
Follow Chris Spann on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrisspann/
Follow Lumar on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/lumarhq/
Explore Lumar’s website optimization platform: lumar.io
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Episode Timestamps:
00:00:07 – Introduction to Human-First Digital
00:03:28 – The Essence of Better SEO Reporting
00:08:06 – Understanding Client Needs for SEO Reports
00:10:28 – Simplifying SEO Reports for Better Insights
00:13:55 – Building Stronger Client Relationships
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Music.
(00:07):
Hello, and welcome to Human First Digital, a Lumar podcast.
My name is Chris Spann, and I'm here to present some one-on-one conversations
with some of the brightest minds in SEO.
Today, I'm talking to Natasha Burton-Shaw-DeVry, the Director of Organic Growth
at Flywheel Digital, about her
accidental entry into the SEO field and her thoughts on good reporting.
(00:29):
So, Natasha, thanks for joining me. So I'm going to start off,
you're here at Brighton talking about reporting. But before we get into that,
I've been asking everybody, in one sentence, what is it that you do?
I would say I help my team and clients maximize our clients' website visibility through holistic SEO.
Cool. How did you get into SEO?
(00:51):
Like all people, accidentally. My initial career started out working towards
being a teacher or social worker. I grew up in a family of like mental health
professionals, child protection workers.
So I always initially was headed towards that field.
I knew I wanted to help people, which funnily enough, I very much do in my job
just a very different way than I thought I would.
(01:13):
So after a few years of just working in like different youth and community roles,
I wasn't really finding like full time opportunities. The future wasn't looking so great.
So I kind of discovered marketing, particularly like blogging and website stuff.
You know, I was a really cool kid. it. I learned HTML when I was like 10.
Yeah, we all did. That's cool. Yeah. And just like volunteer work too.
(01:33):
So I kind of just started to discover the marketing stuff that way and realized
that I had a bit of a knack for it.
And it was actually, I spent a summer working in a remote part of Canada in
indigenous communities.
And I remember being up there. I was just like, I don't want to go back to my old life.
So I applied for some marketing programs, ended up doing a one-year postgraduate
program, discovered SEO through a co-op I did there that was initially supposed
(01:57):
supposed to be more like social media focused, but it was for a home health
care agency. So you don't really...
Build traditional brand awareness and stuff there. It's like,
you have to be in Google because someone needed help yesterday because their
mom fell and broke her hip and she needs help at home.
So that was my chance to just kind of discover it hands-on. I discovered I liked it.
Frankly, it was a kind of a field in marketing where there were a lot more opportunities.
(02:21):
You're not fighting against all the other 50 students in your class who want
to become social media people.
So yeah, so I just kind of discovered I had a knack for it. It was a good field of opportunity.
Opportunity got my first agency job out of right out
of school and just continued on it's interesting
because i so i've been so i've been doing seo for 15 years now and speaking
(02:42):
to i sort of assumed when i started recording some of these that i'd speak to
some younger people who would be like oh i always wanted to do it i went to
uni and did a you know digital marketing degree and but now turns out everybody
still was just like well i thought i was going to be a lawyer or i I thought I was going to,
I don't know, work in a bare reservation or something.
And then, no, accidentally I ended up, and again, it's always the same thing.
(03:02):
I ended up doing marketing for a company that makes pipes or something, you know what I mean?
And then, yeah, weird, weird, weird journey.
I got a job in SEO. I was saying to somebody before, my thing is music technology,
which is why I've ended up doing this.
And I got a job that would pay the bills while I was building my music technology
(03:23):
career. and I'm still not on the tour with Metallica. So I guess that's not happening anymore.
So your talk today is about better reporting doesn't necessarily mean better math.
And I'm sort of obsessed with this, particularly the phrase better math and not for the...
British pernickety reason. I know it should be maths. So I'm just,
(03:45):
I'm really interested in what better maths is.
Yeah. I feel like the title is almost a little bit misleading in terms of better.
I think it should really just be like more.
So it's really diving into just the idea that like good reporting doesn't have
to be complicated. You don't necessarily need good technical skills to do it.
What really makes a good report is being, you know, focused on who it's for,
(04:06):
aligning it with the right goals.
And of course, the technical element has to be part of it, especially if you're
dealing with like bigger enterprise sites, that's where a lot of the more technical stuff comes in.
And you do need to actually be able to do some math there.
And so that's what it's all about. It's just a lot of it is just like the focus
and framework, not the actual numbers.
And where this idea really came to me was back in September,
(04:29):
I took over as director of my team and reporting was one of the things we had
identified as a pain point that we needed to fix.
So diving into the process and so we needed to fix it
but also a lot of people are obsessed with this idea that we need to
make it faster so i don't know if
we've quite accomplished the faster goal yet although i've kind of put
my foot down and told people like the goal here is not necessarily speed it's
(04:50):
quality but yeah so i submitted this idea to brighton at that time where i was
really diving deep into that of just like what does a good report actually look
like and what do we need to do to get there yeah and none of it was the numbers
no it's it's funny Actually, now you say it.
So I was in-house for a very long time before I went to... So I'm in the professional
services team, so we're almost a mini-agency within the business.
(05:12):
But when I was in-house, when we were shopping for agencies.
I was the only tech SEO in the building.
We had a lot of migration stuff going on, so my focus was all on tomorrow,
big stuff, what the dev team was doing over there.
And so I wasn't getting the chance to look at the site today.
And one of the main things we said
when we were RFPing was, I don't want a 200-page PDF. I won't read it.
(05:39):
I know what a canonical tag is. Tell me which ones are broken.
If all you ever give me is Excel sheets, great. I can work with them. I know what I'm doing.
I don't want you wasting your time because that's what it will be if you make
me a nice depth or anything like that. I'll never get it used.
But then at the same time, a thing that I've really struggled to learn is that
I have to be very careful when I word this.
(06:01):
C-suite people don't want complicated ever.
They don't care about the majority of what you do. what they
want is the line with the dollars next to it
or the pounds next to it to go up into the right that's that's
what they want and so you can report them about issues
fixed or things like that and they they simply they don't
want it yeah and it's tough because part of our job is to educate them that
(06:24):
sometimes they do have to care about the other stuff yeah but i think something
i've also realized is like we we call it a report but you know especially in
the agency world maybe it's actually multiple reports maybe you have the report
that goes to the c-suite and you have the one that goes to the marketing manager you work with.
I was talking about this on the analytics panel this morning about this idea of KPIs.
And it's like, there's not necessarily just one or two KPIs.
(06:47):
A lot of people will say, the only ones you should care about are revenue.
And it's like, yes, but organic traffic matters too.
So it's like we have the business KPIs and the channel KPIs,
and they both matter in their own ways.
I think it's interesting, actually. So the way we tend to work with a lot of
clients is when they come on board,
the entire relationship is based around fortnightly or
(07:07):
monthly calls where we discuss scrolls and
things like that but what i found recently is that
for some clients that just doesn't work so again it's great
if you are reporting to somebody who's a little bit more hands off
so you can say we found this we found this we
found this you need to go and fix this but for one
for one client we've moved totally or we're moving totally away
(07:27):
from that now and into like a 20 minute steering call
each week just have a conversation and make sure that everything's
the same as it was on friday and actually for them the best reporting is
kind of no reporting yeah slash the tools
they need to put together decks to then present up
because it's and it's so much nicer because it means that before every every
other week i was stressing all day about the call because they would sometimes
(07:50):
ask for some work that was they needed two days before a call but then there's
a an hour blocking your calendar like i've got to go and report something to
them yeah but i've just spent 20 hours working on this, and I gave it to them on Tuesday,
they said, great, that's perfect. What do I do?
So for them, actually, the best report is nothing, right? So I guess.
(08:13):
And this is going to vary enormously, but I guess how do you go about then taking,
so if you would get dropped into a new business tomorrow and they just went,
we think our report, well, we want you to look at the reporting.
How do you start, I guess, trimming the fat, for want of a better way to put it? Good question.
I think the first thing is just asking them what they're focused on and what they care about.
(08:34):
I think it's important here to recognize that just because the client wants
something doesn't mean that's what they should be focused on.
But that's always the first point is just like, you know, what are you reporting on?
You know, from that agency perspective, ask people like, what is your boss judging you on?
Like, what do you have to do? Like, that's a lot of my job is just making my
client contacts look good and make their job easier.
(08:56):
So understand like their internal reporting contacts are just what matters to them.
And I think it's almost just kind of reverse engineering your way back to how
do we do good reporting on that?
So maybe it's you know maybe
they just weren't reporting on certain things before so you need
to pull those numbers maybe there's tracking issues that we
need to fix i know attribution is a big thing
(09:17):
that we're all worried about these days so sometimes there's issues to fix there
so there's always that technical component so start start with what they care
about figure out how we get those numbers and then i think that's also where
there's the room to maybe educate them on you're focused on this but maybe we
should also be focused on this as well so So, yeah,
it's always evolving process.
(09:38):
You know, KPIs always have to evolve too. Yeah. No, I love what you said about
having to sometimes explain to clients why they don't actually want what they think they do.
And so obviously, again, we're a big enterprise crawler, right?
So we onboard a client and the first thing that they always say is,
oh, we want a crawl of everything.
And immediately I go, I can almost guarantee you, you don't. Yeah.
(10:01):
Because we can do a crawl of everything and 80% of it is going to be junk or
it's going to be useless or I'm going to do it and you're going to go,
oh, well, that bit of the website's handled by somebody else.
We can't touch that. Yeah.
Or we're going to find some weird thing where we can infinitely generate parameters
on the end of your URLs and we'll just crawl it forever.
No. You don't want. No.
(10:22):
What you actually, again, same thing. What can we fix? What can you actually
work on and what can you do?
Yeah. There's definitely times where you just got to give the client what they
want, but it's like you're actually a better partner if you don't always say yes.
Yeah. I think, yeah, for me, weirdly, if any of my clients are listening to
this, I'm not talking about you.
You i think sometimes like with my three-year-old you
(10:44):
just have to show them they don't want it you know what i mean yeah well you
can climb up on there but let's see what there we go you fell off
it didn't you okay and what
did we learn don't climb up it again yeah there we go i think
as well so funnily enough i was talking to voychek this
morning about looker studio i think as
well another thing and it's he he brought it up as well the thing with simplified reporting
(11:06):
things like looker especially if your
reports are simple they are not nightmares
to work with they don't crash all the time they don't use seven
gigs of ram while you're working with them right yeah so what's
what what what do you tend to use as
a reporting thing because i'm i'm fascinated by the the the choice between looker
(11:26):
and something proper like bigquery tableau etc and but there's a weird line
in the middle that a lot of companies seem to land in so i'm interested in like
what your standards set it looks like?
Yeah, so our standard is just using Looker Studio, often just using like the
native data connectors, sometimes using something like Supermetrics to pull stuff in.
(11:47):
We're not dealing with enterprise clients, so we don't necessarily need to be
using other, especially like database stuff. Yeah.
Yeah, that's kind of our main hub. One thing we've actually done recently was
we did a big overhaul of the kind of standard reporting templates for our organic team.
And that was a big part of it was just removing so much old crap.
Partially because with GA4, I know they've made some fixes to the data connector,
(12:11):
but there was just like the query limits and whatnot.
There's also just like so much of the stuff in here doesn't matter.
It was also, those templates were also made in a time where we were working
with much smaller clients who were much less sophisticated.
So it's like now our clients are asking different questions,
so we need to show them the data differently.
Yeah. I'm so very glad had again because i'm an old
man now back in the day where reporting was excel
(12:33):
sheets and it was a team excel sheet so you
would have that thing where you'd be like right who's in the sheet and then
you'd have nine different people in the same document with varying different
ideas about what you could put in you know what colors you could make things
and what constituted a note yeah i don't miss those days at all you know you
(12:53):
try and run some actual proper reporting at the at the end of the thing and
find out that somebody had put,
just accidentally copy and pasted an email into.
All sorts of things. I really, really, really don't miss those days whatsoever. No.
So I guess, what do you find are the benefits? Obviously, we've talked about
kind of better lines up to CEOs, etc.
(13:16):
What do you find are the other benefits of making these reports simpler?
I would say a big thing is internally. Because, you know, we have our looker
studio, but then we still do some sort of written report.
Because, you know, you can't just give people numbers. You have to give them
insight into it. you have to interpret it for them.
I'm giving a few spoilers for my talk here. But one thing is like,
(13:37):
a lot of people believe that, you know, the numbers are the truth,
they can't be misinterpreted. It's like, oh, they can be misinterpreted, especially with SEO.
So it's our job to, you know, show clients how they should be reading these
numbers, you know, what the story they're telling is.
So that's really our job with that.
I also find when my team is compiling those reports,
(13:58):
reports having a really simplified and
structured dashboard can really help with that obviously we're
not necessarily only pulling from the dashboard you just do
still have to use you know ga4 search console
all that but since we did that overhaul i've definitely found an improvement
in people just reported focusing on some more of those core kpis they're not
(14:19):
just getting lost in things that don't actually matter so it's important for
clients but even internally it's made huge changes and just keeping us focused on what matters most.
Yeah, yeah. No, because we quite often, obviously being more tech focused,
we end up writing a lot of tickets for devs.
And it's a very, very similar thing is that you sort of have to learn what makes
that particular dev or team tick, if you know what I mean.
(14:42):
And again, just providing the correct
context, providing the actual decent instructions, et cetera, et cetera.
We found that when we overhaul stuff like this, again, going back to clients and.
Change in the format of how we present them with things it immediately
means that we get more we get more out of the relationship they get
more done and then that means that things get renewed right
(15:03):
and then everybody's happy 100 yeah i mean
we don't we don't do like super formal presentations for our reports but
you know we walk through them with clients and i find the best
ones where are where it just becomes a conversation it shouldn't just
be that one way dump of data and insight you know
that's often where we're like okay well like what do you guys see on other channels or
you know what are you what are you doing um just gives us that
(15:24):
bigger understanding and also helps us not just
be the seo partner but really be that like strategic partner
to help them grow their business yeah yeah no i'm
i'm quite bad for that i will quite often present things to clients and then
sort of go what do you think about that like you know is
there any why do you know why this has
happened because you know sometimes again we see strange things
all the time yeah some sometimes it will literally be like
(15:47):
oh no that that is broken we need to go and fix that sometimes it is
again so we've had oh well the data source that
we use has changed how they present that data now so
that's what that issue is or things like that natasha thank
you very much this has been great yeah thanks for having me and yeah i'll catch
you the listeners very very soon well it'll be instant for you uh for the next
one thank you the human first digital podcast is brought to you by luma the
(16:10):
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Music.
(00:07):
Hello, and welcome to Human First Digital, a Lumar podcast.
My name is Chris Spann, and I'm here to present some one-on-one conversations
with some of the brightest minds in SEO.
Today, I'm talking to Natasha Burton-Shaw-DeVry, the Director of Organic Growth
at Flywheel Digital, about her
accidental entry into the SEO field and her thoughts on good reporting.
(00:29):
So, Natasha, thanks for joining me. So I'm going to start off,
you're here at Brighton talking about reporting. But before we get into that,
I've been asking everybody, in one sentence, what is it that you do?
I would say I help my team and clients maximize our clients' website visibility through holistic SEO.
Cool. How did you get into SEO?
(00:51):
Like all people, accidentally. My initial career started out working towards
being a teacher or social worker. I grew up in a family of like mental health
professionals, child protection workers.
So I always initially was headed towards that field.
I knew I wanted to help people, which funnily enough, I very much do in my job
just a very different way than I thought I would.
(01:13):
So after a few years of just working in like different youth and community roles,
I wasn't really finding like full time opportunities. The future wasn't looking so great.
So I kind of discovered marketing, particularly like blogging and website stuff.
You know, I was a really cool kid. it. I learned HTML when I was like 10.
Yeah, we all did. That's cool. Yeah. And just like volunteer work too.
(01:33):
So I kind of just started to discover the marketing stuff that way and realized
that I had a bit of a knack for it.
And it was actually, I spent a summer working in a remote part of Canada in
indigenous communities.
And I remember being up there. I was just like, I don't want to go back to my old life.
So I applied for some marketing programs, ended up doing a one-year postgraduate
program, discovered SEO through a co-op I did there that was initially supposed
(01:57):
supposed to be more like social media focused, but it was for a home health
care agency. So you don't really...
Build traditional brand awareness and stuff there. It's like,
you have to be in Google because someone needed help yesterday because their
mom fell and broke her hip and she needs help at home.
So that was my chance to just kind of discover it hands-on. I discovered I liked it.
Frankly, it was a kind of a field in marketing where there were a lot more opportunities.
(02:21):
You're not fighting against all the other 50 students in your class who want
to become social media people.
So yeah, so I just kind of discovered I had a knack for it. It was a good field of opportunity.
Opportunity got my first agency job out of right out
of school and just continued on it's interesting
because i so i've been so i've been doing seo for 15 years now and speaking
(02:42):
to i sort of assumed when i started recording some of these that i'd speak to
some younger people who would be like oh i always wanted to do it i went to
uni and did a you know digital marketing degree and but now turns out everybody
still was just like well i thought i was going to be a lawyer or i I thought I was going to,
I don't know, work in a bare reservation or something.
And then, no, accidentally I ended up, and again, it's always the same thing.
(03:02):
I ended up doing marketing for a company that makes pipes or something, you know what I mean?
And then, yeah, weird, weird, weird journey.
I got a job in SEO. I was saying to somebody before, my thing is music technology,
which is why I've ended up doing this.
And I got a job that would pay the bills while I was building my music technology
(03:23):
career. and I'm still not on the tour with Metallica. So I guess that's not happening anymore.
So your talk today is about better reporting doesn't necessarily mean better math.
And I'm sort of obsessed with this, particularly the phrase better math and not for the...
British pernickety reason. I know it should be maths. So I'm just,
(03:45):
I'm really interested in what better maths is.
Yeah. I feel like the title is almost a little bit misleading in terms of better.
I think it should really just be like more.
So it's really diving into just the idea that like good reporting doesn't have
to be complicated. You don't necessarily need good technical skills to do it.
What really makes a good report is being, you know, focused on who it's for,
(04:06):
aligning it with the right goals.
And of course, the technical element has to be part of it, especially if you're
dealing with like bigger enterprise sites, that's where a lot of the more technical stuff comes in.
And you do need to actually be able to do some math there.
And so that's what it's all about. It's just a lot of it is just like the focus
and framework, not the actual numbers.
And where this idea really came to me was back in September,
(04:29):
I took over as director of my team and reporting was one of the things we had
identified as a pain point that we needed to fix.
So diving into the process and so we needed to fix it
but also a lot of people are obsessed with this idea that we need to
make it faster so i don't know if
we've quite accomplished the faster goal yet although i've kind of put
my foot down and told people like the goal here is not necessarily speed it's
(04:50):
quality but yeah so i submitted this idea to brighton at that time where i was
really diving deep into that of just like what does a good report actually look
like and what do we need to do to get there yeah and none of it was the numbers
no it's it's funny Actually, now you say it.
So I was in-house for a very long time before I went to... So I'm in the professional
services team, so we're almost a mini-agency within the business.
(05:12):
But when I was in-house, when we were shopping for agencies.
I was the only tech SEO in the building.
We had a lot of migration stuff going on, so my focus was all on tomorrow,
big stuff, what the dev team was doing over there.
And so I wasn't getting the chance to look at the site today.
And one of the main things we said
when we were RFPing was, I don't want a 200-page PDF. I won't read it.
(05:39):
I know what a canonical tag is. Tell me which ones are broken.
If all you ever give me is Excel sheets, great. I can work with them. I know what I'm doing.
I don't want you wasting your time because that's what it will be if you make
me a nice depth or anything like that. I'll never get it used.
But then at the same time, a thing that I've really struggled to learn is that
I have to be very careful when I word this.
(06:01):
C-suite people don't want complicated ever.
They don't care about the majority of what you do. what they
want is the line with the dollars next to it
or the pounds next to it to go up into the right that's that's
what they want and so you can report them about issues
fixed or things like that and they they simply they don't
want it yeah and it's tough because part of our job is to educate them that
(06:24):
sometimes they do have to care about the other stuff yeah but i think something
i've also realized is like we we call it a report but you know especially in
the agency world maybe it's actually multiple reports maybe you have the report
that goes to the c-suite and you have the one that goes to the marketing manager you work with.
I was talking about this on the analytics panel this morning about this idea of KPIs.
And it's like, there's not necessarily just one or two KPIs.
(06:47):
A lot of people will say, the only ones you should care about are revenue.
And it's like, yes, but organic traffic matters too.
So it's like we have the business KPIs and the channel KPIs,
and they both matter in their own ways.
I think it's interesting, actually. So the way we tend to work with a lot of
clients is when they come on board,
the entire relationship is based around fortnightly or
(07:07):
monthly calls where we discuss scrolls and
things like that but what i found recently is that
for some clients that just doesn't work so again it's great
if you are reporting to somebody who's a little bit more hands off
so you can say we found this we found this we
found this you need to go and fix this but for one
for one client we've moved totally or we're moving totally away
(07:27):
from that now and into like a 20 minute steering call
each week just have a conversation and make sure that everything's
the same as it was on friday and actually for them the best reporting is
kind of no reporting yeah slash the tools
they need to put together decks to then present up
because it's and it's so much nicer because it means that before every every
other week i was stressing all day about the call because they would sometimes
(07:50):
ask for some work that was they needed two days before a call but then there's
a an hour blocking your calendar like i've got to go and report something to
them yeah but i've just spent 20 hours working on this, and I gave it to them on Tuesday,
they said, great, that's perfect. What do I do?
So for them, actually, the best report is nothing, right? So I guess.
(08:13):
And this is going to vary enormously, but I guess how do you go about then taking,
so if you would get dropped into a new business tomorrow and they just went,
we think our report, well, we want you to look at the reporting.
How do you start, I guess, trimming the fat, for want of a better way to put it? Good question.
I think the first thing is just asking them what they're focused on and what they care about.
(08:34):
I think it's important here to recognize that just because the client wants
something doesn't mean that's what they should be focused on.
But that's always the first point is just like, you know, what are you reporting on?
You know, from that agency perspective, ask people like, what is your boss judging you on?
Like, what do you have to do? Like, that's a lot of my job is just making my
client contacts look good and make their job easier.
(08:56):
So understand like their internal reporting contacts are just what matters to them.
And I think it's almost just kind of reverse engineering your way back to how
do we do good reporting on that?
So maybe it's you know maybe
they just weren't reporting on certain things before so you need
to pull those numbers maybe there's tracking issues that we
need to fix i know attribution is a big thing
(09:17):
that we're all worried about these days so sometimes there's issues to fix there
so there's always that technical component so start start with what they care
about figure out how we get those numbers and then i think that's also where
there's the room to maybe educate them on you're focused on this but maybe we
should also be focused on this as well so So, yeah,
it's always evolving process.
(09:38):
You know, KPIs always have to evolve too. Yeah. No, I love what you said about
having to sometimes explain to clients why they don't actually want what they think they do.
And so obviously, again, we're a big enterprise crawler, right?
So we onboard a client and the first thing that they always say is,
oh, we want a crawl of everything.
And immediately I go, I can almost guarantee you, you don't. Yeah.
(10:01):
Because we can do a crawl of everything and 80% of it is going to be junk or
it's going to be useless or I'm going to do it and you're going to go,
oh, well, that bit of the website's handled by somebody else.
We can't touch that. Yeah.
Or we're going to find some weird thing where we can infinitely generate parameters
on the end of your URLs and we'll just crawl it forever.
No. You don't want. No.
(10:22):
What you actually, again, same thing. What can we fix? What can you actually
work on and what can you do?
Yeah. There's definitely times where you just got to give the client what they
want, but it's like you're actually a better partner if you don't always say yes.
Yeah. I think, yeah, for me, weirdly, if any of my clients are listening to
this, I'm not talking about you.
You i think sometimes like with my three-year-old you
(10:44):
just have to show them they don't want it you know what i mean yeah well you
can climb up on there but let's see what there we go you fell off
it didn't you okay and what
did we learn don't climb up it again yeah there we go i think
as well so funnily enough i was talking to voychek this
morning about looker studio i think as
well another thing and it's he he brought it up as well the thing with simplified reporting
(11:06):
things like looker especially if your
reports are simple they are not nightmares
to work with they don't crash all the time they don't use seven
gigs of ram while you're working with them right yeah so what's
what what what do you tend to use as
a reporting thing because i'm i'm fascinated by the the the choice between looker
(11:26):
and something proper like bigquery tableau etc and but there's a weird line
in the middle that a lot of companies seem to land in so i'm interested in like
what your standards set it looks like?
Yeah, so our standard is just using Looker Studio, often just using like the
native data connectors, sometimes using something like Supermetrics to pull stuff in.
(11:47):
We're not dealing with enterprise clients, so we don't necessarily need to be
using other, especially like database stuff. Yeah.
Yeah, that's kind of our main hub. One thing we've actually done recently was
we did a big overhaul of the kind of standard reporting templates for our organic team.
And that was a big part of it was just removing so much old crap.
Partially because with GA4, I know they've made some fixes to the data connector,
(12:11):
but there was just like the query limits and whatnot.
There's also just like so much of the stuff in here doesn't matter.
It was also, those templates were also made in a time where we were working
with much smaller clients who were much less sophisticated.
So it's like now our clients are asking different questions,
so we need to show them the data differently.
Yeah. I'm so very glad had again because i'm an old
man now back in the day where reporting was excel
(12:33):
sheets and it was a team excel sheet so you
would have that thing where you'd be like right who's in the sheet and then
you'd have nine different people in the same document with varying different
ideas about what you could put in you know what colors you could make things
and what constituted a note yeah i don't miss those days at all you know you
(12:53):
try and run some actual proper reporting at the at the end of the thing and
find out that somebody had put,
just accidentally copy and pasted an email into.
All sorts of things. I really, really, really don't miss those days whatsoever. No.
So I guess, what do you find are the benefits? Obviously, we've talked about
kind of better lines up to CEOs, etc.
(13:16):
What do you find are the other benefits of making these reports simpler?
I would say a big thing is internally. Because, you know, we have our looker
studio, but then we still do some sort of written report.
Because, you know, you can't just give people numbers. You have to give them
insight into it. you have to interpret it for them.
I'm giving a few spoilers for my talk here. But one thing is like,
(13:37):
a lot of people believe that, you know, the numbers are the truth,
they can't be misinterpreted. It's like, oh, they can be misinterpreted, especially with SEO.
So it's our job to, you know, show clients how they should be reading these
numbers, you know, what the story they're telling is.
So that's really our job with that.
I also find when my team is compiling those reports,
(13:58):
reports having a really simplified and
structured dashboard can really help with that obviously we're
not necessarily only pulling from the dashboard you just do
still have to use you know ga4 search console
all that but since we did that overhaul i've definitely found an improvement
in people just reported focusing on some more of those core kpis they're not
(14:19):
just getting lost in things that don't actually matter so it's important for
clients but even internally it's made huge changes and just keeping us focused on what matters most.
Yeah, yeah. No, because we quite often, obviously being more tech focused,
we end up writing a lot of tickets for devs.
And it's a very, very similar thing is that you sort of have to learn what makes
that particular dev or team tick, if you know what I mean.
(14:42):
And again, just providing the correct
context, providing the actual decent instructions, et cetera, et cetera.
We found that when we overhaul stuff like this, again, going back to clients and.
Change in the format of how we present them with things it immediately
means that we get more we get more out of the relationship they get
more done and then that means that things get renewed right
(15:03):
and then everybody's happy 100 yeah i mean
we don't we don't do like super formal presentations for our reports but
you know we walk through them with clients and i find the best
ones where are where it just becomes a conversation it shouldn't just
be that one way dump of data and insight you know
that's often where we're like okay well like what do you guys see on other channels or
you know what are you what are you doing um just gives us that
(15:24):
bigger understanding and also helps us not just
be the seo partner but really be that like strategic partner
to help them grow their business yeah yeah no i'm
i'm quite bad for that i will quite often present things to clients and then
sort of go what do you think about that like you know is
there any why do you know why this has
happened because you know sometimes again we see strange things
all the time yeah some sometimes it will literally be like
(15:47):
oh no that that is broken we need to go and fix that sometimes it is
again so we've had oh well the data source that
we use has changed how they present that data now so
that's what that issue is or things like that natasha thank
you very much this has been great yeah thanks for having me and yeah i'll catch
you the listeners very very soon well it'll be instant for you uh for the next
one thank you the human first digital podcast is brought to you by luma the
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