There’s no point in doing work for clients if you can’t prove that you are doing it.

We’re constantly reviewing our tracking and reporting processes, to keep up with developments in SEO – and satisfy our very demanding clients (and quite right that they are demanding).

Especially with the credit crunch, value for money is incredibly important, so how do we prove that we are worth it.

If only we could add tracking code to every story that is distributed, but that is never going to happen and our clients know that they are never going to get neat statistics on conversions for PR campaigns, as they do for PPC. But, we can provide a lot of information on keyword rankings for our press releases on the different sites that they appear.

We use Advanced Web Ranking reports, customising them to track a set of important keywords in the releases.

How do we know which sites to track? Well, there are loads of tools out there Google Alerts being the most famous, that promise to send you notification of results for any search you want. You can set it to search for the exact wording of an extract of a story.

Sadly I’ve not been impressed with these automated results – they often miss blog posts and are not very friendly to languages other than English…

So, back to square one, we manually search for unique phrases in the release on the main search engines and record the domains.

Some of our clients are only interested in the number of links published on the release and so we can provide them with that. This isn’t necessarily the best way to judge a release’s success. If you are lucky enough to get your story on the BBC (yeah, good luck with that), then there will 0 (zero) links included – and your company name may well even be removed!

I’m currently checking out Trackur – hoping this might add an extra dimension to our reporting.

What would you like to see in an SEO-PR report?