Keyword Ranking Reports of the Future

The first of the month always has our team busy getting together client's monthly reports. These include looking at a variety of KPI's but one of the items that always generates the most discussion is the keyword ranking report. Each client is uniquely fascinated by how they stack-up on Google, Yahoo!, MSN and Ask.com for their most important keywords.

While this is a good indication of how a site is performing, translating this ranking into actual customers is what good SEOs do. But how do you get a client, particulary non-web savvy clients, to take the time to understand web analytics is where the good data lies? Web analytics packages have come a long way in terms of user friendliness, but they are still daunting to navigate for the novice. And a keyword ranking report is not, its nice and easy to understand and provides at-a-glance performance metrics.

But what about in the future, where search is truly local? We may not be able to generate keyword ranking reports for clients based in other cities, or for clients looking to monitor a keyword in cities across the country.

One answer to this questions is timing and training. With time web analtyics will become more and more mainstream. And with training good agencies can teach clients the importance of measuring keywords by the amount of traffic and conversions they drive, not where they rank on search engines.

But wouldn't it be nice if there was a tool that could replicate search engine results uniquely by city or state across the country, or communities around the world?