What do you put in a progress report to an SEO customer? This article will look at what "not" to worry about too much and what to consider as indices of a good SEO program. It also gives an estimated time frame and a sketch of how to outline it to a customer (or to yourself if you are a DIY person).
Scoring your SEO efforts can help for a number of reasons. If you can "grade" yourself adequately when it comes to SEO efforts, you can charge on a performance basis. You can also know when to drop a project you are not succeeding in and honestly tell the customer to get someone else to work on the project.
Working as a solo SEO practitioner, or even as an SEO analyst in a large company, can be a confusing experience. Being so dependent on the SERPs makes search engine marketing seem vague and nebulous, and sometimes you feel like you are boxing with shadows. With web development or programming there are few external variables (except management and acts of God) and with SEO the search engines themselves are pretty much the external variable. Many things can throw off your scoring, so we will have a list of things to pay attention to and what not to pay attention to. First we will have what not to pay attention to.
SEO Target Marketing
There is a special style of SEO that is "goal oriented." I ran into a site that offers tips on metrics to watch. The metrics include tips on the user side and on the keyword research side.
Keyword Research
Identify the keywords your customers are actually using to find sites like yours - not just the ones you think they might use.
Optimize your web site to achieve the business goals you want to achieve.
Monitor the best keywords for your web site, which change over time.
Monitor your site's performance to ensure you aren't missing out on any business.
Identify specific ways you can increase your site's performance.
How many new visitors come to your site every day?
How many of those visitors become customers?
How do visitors find your web site?
How can you drive highly qualified traffic to your web site?
Search Optimization 
/ 6 
