Standardising the SEO Services & Reporting at Avvio

Avvio is a hospitality technology provider and digital agency offering a booking engine platform and supporting services (including digital marketing and web design) for hotels.

Avvio’s Digital Team provide digital marketing consultancy and campaign management, focusing on SEO, PPC & metasearch (i.e. advertising on hotel listing sites like TripAdvisor, Trivago or Google Hotel Ads). For many years, this team consisted of consultants who managed all of the above for their own client portfolios.

In June 2017, Avvio’s digital marketing agency went through a restructuring and business model revamping. The team was split into two functions: the client-facing eCommerce Team and the Digital Technical Team managing PPC and SEO for all clients in the background.

During this process, I was promoted from Digital Marketing Account Manager to be Avvio’s first SEO Strategist within the Technical Team. My job was to manage a small SEO team and lead the SEO function for Avvio’s entire client portfolio.

A major challenge and one of the main reasons why the restructuring happened was inconsistency.

Since the consultants had different levels of SEO expertise, the service clients received varied significantly. This was also the case for monthly and quarterly client reporting.

Since Avvio has hundreds of clients - mostly small and medium-sized businesses - to improve the services while also staying efficient, it was sensible to standardise certain SEO processes and deliverables.

Research

To kick off the project I discussed client needs and expectations with members of the Digital Team.

Following this, I gathered and reviewed the previous SEO audits and reports the consultants sent their clients.

I also reviewed the existing documentations of SEO processes and the service-level agreements to better understand our responsibilities as a service provider.

Planning

To plan the best course of action, I organised several meetings with the Digital Technical Lead and the Head of Digital.

The following project deliverables were agreed upon:

• Revised process documentation for the main SEO services
• Shared project management tracking sheet
• Standardised SEO audits for different client tiers
• Standardised monthly & quarterly reporting

Standardising the SEO Services & Reports

In addition to a lot of ad hoc duties, Avvio’s SEO team had to deal with many recurring tasks. I categorised the latter into 3 groups to be able to better project manage these activities. The three categories were:

• Website 'go-lives'/migrations
• SEO audits
• Recurring SEO tasks (mainly technical and on-page SEO)

Website go-lives

Since most new clients opted for a new Avvio-designed website and existing clients were occasionally offered a website redesign, ‘go-lives’ were frequent projects for the SEO team.

To make sure that SEOs, web designers and client-facing digital marketers are all aligned, I created detailed process documentation with a step-by-step guide for the SEO professionals to follow.

To keep track of all activities and record progress made, I created a project tracking sheet shared with all stakeholders.

SEO Audits

The majority of Avvio’s SEO clients received quarterly audits from the team. Due to the number of customers (more than 200 hotels websites at the time), I decided to implement a templated audit process.

The template acted as the framework for the SEO audit reports, but with certain levels of flexibility, so the reports can be more comprehensive and include even the more unusual SEO findings if necessary.

The audit reports contained SEO data from several resources (including Google Analytics, Google Search Console, SEMrush, Moz, Screaming Frog, etc.), covering topics such as technical SEO, on-page SEO & content, off-page SEO & link profile, rankings & search visibility, website usage & user experience.

Since most hotel clients were not SEO professionals, I had to consider the audience when creating the audit report template. It was important to avoid a ‘data dump’ and only include as much data as absolutely necessary and to also add commentary and insights to put the data into context.

The most important part of the audit report, however, was the actions & recommendations section, which listed the main activities the SEO team would be focusing on for the particular client in the next 3 months (before the next audit was due). Also, this section was used to recommend specific tasks for the clients that could help improve the search visibility of their website. It was crucial to focus on areas that could move the needle and to communicate business value.

In addition to all of the above, I included a glossary with all the SEO terms that could come up in the audit, to help non-SEOs better understand what the report is about.

Just like the website go-live, the audit process was also fully documented to ensure that standards are met and all activities were recorded and tracked in the project tracking sheet.

SEO tasks

The third section of the project tracking document was kept for recurring SEO tasks.

Most often these activities materialised during the audits and were then added to the project document to keep track of progress made.

Including such tasks, as optimising web page metadata, setting up missing redirects, fixing broken links, implementing hreflang tags or marking-up structured data (using the schema.org vocabulary).

Monthly reporting

In addition to the quarterly SEO audits, clients also received monthly marketing reports. Before the restructuring, these reports only contained very high-level data and were quite inconsistent.

Working together with management and the other teams, we standardised the monthly marketing reports as well. As part of the process, top SEO KPIs became a part of the reporting, including metrics like organic search traffic, number of bookings (conversions) from organic search, or revenue from organic search.

This project was concluded and all deliverables were implemented in June 2017. The revised processes came into effect in the following month.

The main purpose of this project was to improve both the efficiency and the value of the service provided.

The standardisation went smoothly and the team’s performance increased straight away. Using the shared project document to track all progress made also improved transparency and teamwork both within and across departments.

Improving the service and reporting was also praised by clients who began to have a better understanding of the value of SEO. This eventually increased customer satisfaction.

As a result, clients showed more interest in SEO, which lead to a series of SEO workshops I created and ran for Avvio clients during the second half of 2017.