Katie says: “My number one SEO tip for 2026 is to report on the metrics that actually matter to you. This is about moving away slightly from historical metrics or vanity metrics that we might be reporting on. There's still a space for them, but it's about thinking about being intentional with your reporting, really tuning in to what is meaningful for your business, for your website.

We tend to think that there are so many reports that we can produce. We have so many tools now, but it's how we can cut out all of the noise and begin to create a set of reports that can drive meaningful action for our business.

There's a few ways that we can do this. I really like the old school way of grabbing a pen and paper and starting to think about how we can jot down working backwards all the way from who's going to be seeing our reports to lastly ending up with the metrics and making the metrics almost the last thing that you identify when thinking about your reporting.”

How do you really know that you have selected the right metric?

“Like I said, I'm still a pen and paper girl at heart. I like to just get my notebook, get my pen, and I decide first, who is this report for? Start thinking about who's going to be reading this report. Think about what questions they might have about performance or user behaviour.

Try to figure out exactly what the core question of that report is. Who's going to be viewing it? Is it somebody who's in an SEO team? Is it somebody who's a brand manager for a particular project?

Work out who it's for. Once we know that, we can work backwards from there. Maybe they've identified in the first step that it's somebody on a marketing team and they're trying to see how much their marketing channel contributes to revenue and sales. So then the questions they're going to be asking are which channels are contributing and how is that journey appearing for a user who might be using a website or an app?

We then take it back from who the report is for to the behaviours that we want our customers to take. Then we can identify a list of potential issues such as consumers trying to add a product to cart. Perhaps there’s an issue with another stage of the checkout process.

We want to identify those really important behaviours that contribute to this main question. of how and which marketing channels are affecting sales. And then we go on to take it to the metrics finally, and this should almost be the last thing that you look at. Once you know who the report's for, what questions they're asking, what behaviours need to happen on the site to draw into those questions, then we can look at metrics.

Then we can ask other questions such as does bounce rate actually show something meaningful and useful in this context of who's seeing the report, what questions it's asking? And quite often the answer is no, that's not actually meaningful for what we're trying to get out of this report. In which case you say, that's just noise and we can cut that one out.

It's really thinking about every metric you put into a report and not putting any metrics in until you've put it through those filters of who's the report for, what are we asking, what behaviours do we want information.”

What are some other examples of how you would personalise reports for other job titles?

“Quite a lot of time, as an agency SEO, you're working with someone whose job is in-house, in a company, where they need a little bit of extra tracking support. What they're going to want from a report is going to be very different than somebody who's in general marketing, because somebody who's in SEO is focused specifically on the channels they're working on, i.e. organic traffic. Whereas if we're looking at somebody who's on the social team or somebody who's on the paid team, all three of those reports look very different.

We might be working with somebody who's not in digital marketing at all, so you have those main stakeholder reports where they want to know how things are working across different markets. In which case, that needs to be a very different report where we're not adding in all of the detail about individual campaigns. This is a key aspect about creating intentional reports.

You need to talk to your clients about what information they need to see on a regular basis and then provide them with a report based on your discussions. But always emphasise that this is a report that needs to continue to evolve over time. Constantly encourage your clients to share the parts in the report that feel like noise, that aren’t useful to them.

After that you can then start to make your reporting more concise, delivering only what’s key for everyone. Success looks like clients wanting to devour every aspect of your report.

Success is when every single metric means something to the person who opens the report and then drives them to make meaningful action based on the reporting that's there. This whole thing is about talking to the person who's on the receiving end of the report, working with them to evolve it, to make sure every single metric has a purpose there and that it's useful to them, and then making sure that that is what can begin to drive some change.”

What do you do if you feel that the person that you're talking to aren't interested in the metrics that you feel are most beneficial to them?

“I get very excited about reports, but I also understand that not everybody feels the same way. When you have somebody who's maybe not feeling so interested about the reporting, it's often due to a barrier of them understanding exactly what the report is showing. It's a context piece really, because if you're reading through the reports and you see something like a bounce rate that has gone up or down, but you don't really know what exactly that means in terms of the context of your website.

The chances are that this isn’t interesting to somebody because they don't know what they need to do with that information. So I think a really important piece around reporting is an educational piece with the person who's receiving that report, taking the time to go through each of the metrics and think about the context. So, if we take the bounce rate example, if bounce rate for our full site goes up, then you might think, oh, this is a problem. Lots more people are beginning to bounce away from the site.

But it may be that the website has actually just had a layout change. And the whole point is that they're trying to get people to move through the website quicker, to the next action, whether it's a phone call call-to-action or a different payment place. It's really important to be able to explain what the context of each of those metrics is for the website - i.e. what each metric means.”

What are examples of a couple of default metrics that you see marketers focusing on, that you wish they should stop focusing on?

“It's probably no surprise that I'm going to say bounce rate. It's one metric that nearly every client seems to want to track. I do think it's important, but as long as it's in the context of whether you're using it site-wide or whether you're using it just for a specific page, or tracking a change on a page.

Another metric that we often get asked about is session duration. That and keyword rankings as well as traffic. All of these, I do believe, are important metrics. But again, it's putting it through those filters of who's going to see the report, what is the question they're asking, what behaviours are we specifically looking at on the website?

Because session duration doesn't mean much if you don't have a question that you're asking specifically around session duration, or if that doesn't tie into your goals. And bounce rate site-wide might not mean anything, but bounce rate on one specific page that is going through a lot of change is really important. So it's just putting them through that lens of questioning as to whether or not they’re relevant metrics to include on the report.”

What software do you favour in terms of tracking and providing reports?

“I believe that data is getting more and more complicated as time goes by. You have the typical GA4 setup where you can either get the reporting from there or bring it into Looker. We also now have BigQuery and server-side tracking as well as Google Tag Manager that can assist.

There are so many ways that you can collect data and for each business it depends on what capabilities they have, because the great thing about GA4 is that it's free and it's fairly user-friendly.

If you have more capability, being able to use things like BigQuery and server-side tracking can really help you to increase what you're able to see and how you're able to explore the data that you have available. For us, I've got a really big soft spot for bringing all of my reporting together into Looker. I could spend hours making my reports look user-friendly and that tell a story through the data there.

I find that Looker’s a really nice way to be able to share the data with our clients once we've focused on getting accurate tracking set up. But it can be really useful to present it in a visual way to help to make it make more sense to the end consumer.”

How often do you review the metrics that you should be tracking?

“I think that this is a really important one nowadays because things are moving so fast. Although the premise is still the same that we want good quality content, referring channels are changing all the time. We've seen a big shift recently in wanting to report on AI. So a lot of our reporting has changed to include that visibility of traffic that's coming in from AI sources.

This is something that has been really important for us to make sure we review and amend in our reports and not just stick to the channels that were already there and have been there for historical reasons where we have our classic organic search and paid.

It’s really important to move with the times and assess whether a report still answers the core questions. And until we added in the AI channel, we weren’t fully able to answer where our traffic was coming from.

It's really important to regularly check, asking your clients firstly, is this report still giving you what you need, but also proactively saying, we think you're missing something in your reporting here. We want to make sure that you have visibility of this metric, which now has come into play and is really important for you.”

Is your end goal to get to a stage where the reporting is set up and it's automatically generated and you have less manual input into the generation of reports?

“We want to incorporate automation as well as manual input. I think that's really important to automate where we can and use the tools available to begin to automate that storytelling a bit. But of course there is context that we have from our discussions with clients and there's context people who are within the business whose website we're looking at. that needs to be brought into this assessment.

I think that combining the two is the sweet spot, having as much generated automatically as we can, which then gives us the time to review the reports with the client and say, OK, from this, what action needs to be taken based on what you know about your business? What I can see from your data and from this report that we've already got. I think the storytelling is so key though, because numbers mean nothing if you don't understand what they're trying to tell you.

It's so important that we take that time to dive into the data and ask, what is the story that it's telling us here, rather than it just being a list of upwards arrows and outwards arrows.”

Katie, what's the key takeaway from the tip you shared today?

“The key takeaway is to be really intentional with your reporting. Use a pen and paper if necessary. Work out who your reports are for, what the questions you're trying to ask, and then look at the metrics as the very last thing, making sure you've run them through these filters. Then you're producing a report that allows for meaningful action on what matters most to you and your client.”

Katie New is Data and Analytics Manager at Varn. Find out more over at varn.co.uk.