Businesses are spending $2k+ per month on SEO services. They are also spending money on additional marketing endeavour, which soon add up and significantly increase a company’s spend. This means that agencies and marketers must create precise reports that demonstrate the value of their services and exactly what their SEO team will be doing to increase their exposure online.
SEO professionals could argue all day long on how SEO reports should be created and which templates are the best. You only have to search for the keyword “SEO report templates” to see the overwhelming number of results and the different approaches to reporting to your clients.
This can be extremely confusing, and even though using SEO templates has simplified the process of creating SEO reports, this does not mean that SEO reporting templates have improved their ineffectiveness.
If you feel that your clients don’t value your service or work, then maybe it’s down to your poor SEO reporting skills.
Templates are great – they tell you what to include in your report to let your clients know what they are getting for their money. The issue is that templates don’t tell you how to make the best SEO report, how to make it more effective, nor how to show off how valuable your services really are to your client.
Before we let you in on our tips for making your SEO report more effective – let’s start by explaining why SEO reports are so important and what they should include:
Why Are SEO Reports So Important?
Brands that get their SEO reporting in order have a much better understanding of what their customers appreciate and respond to, as well as what they don’t. The outcomes of SEO reports can clearly illustrate which aspects of SEO and which types of content attract more customers and will point out the site’s top converting pages.
Brands will be able to better utilize their limited marketing efforts as they gain a deeper understanding of what customers like and don’t like. They may devote more time and effort to crafting content that has a better probability of engaging the target audience and generating cash for the company.
Brands with good SEO reports will have an easier time detecting consumer demand trends. At different periods of the year, your brand may witness a spike in buyer engagement with certain themes or types of content. This can give you a better idea of what individuals are looking for at different times of the year. With these insights in SEO reports, businesses will be better able to predict new customer wants in the future.
What Information Should An SEO Report Contain?
- Traffic
- Conversion rate
- Goal Completion
- Website and specific page traffic
- Page speed insights
- Bounce rate
- Average time each site visitor spends on the site
- Search engine Ranking
- Backlinks
- Future Recommendations and a Timeline for Implementation
- Comparison to previous months
Our 4 Tips To Making Your SEO Reports More Effective
Here’s some inside knowledge about making your Search Engine Optimization reports more effective and how to make it easy for your clients to see how much value you bring to their company.
Go Over The Report With Your Client
Although templates outline what should be included in your SEO report, you must still discover ways to make your reports compelling, interesting and engaging to read.
Bear in mind that your clients’ levels of knowledge will vary. If you operate as a freelancer alongside an in-house team of pros, your SEO report should be on the more technical side as opposed to the reports you create for work completed for customers who lack an extensive understanding of SEO and best practices.
That stated, preparing a report and then waiting for a response from your clients will not yield the desired results.
Your clients trust that the work you will perform for them will assist them in growing their business. However, this trust is tempered by their reservations, the majority of which will be irrelevant to you. As a result, once the report is submitted, you will have little to no control over the conclusions your client reaches once they’ve read through it.
If they come upon a result in your report that they dislike, they may begin to doubt your level of expertise and the quality of your services. Suppose you are not present to put things in context and assist them in comprehending what the information they are reading means. In that case, you will likely have difficulty convincing them to continue with your recommendations.
What should you do to avoid doubt about your SEO Services?
As soon as your SEO report is ready – organize a meeting with your clients to talk them through the various report sections, go through any questions and doubts they may have and talk them through the next steps of action.
As soon as your SEO report is ready – organize a meeting with your clients to talk them through the various report sections, go through any questions and doubts they may have and talk them through the next steps of action. If you are unable to organize a meeting, use screen sharing or virtual meeting software to guide your customers through the report, assisting them in gaining a better understanding of it, so they are reassured and confident about having you as the SEO company managing their precious business.
Get To Know Your Client’s Site Optimization History
This sounds like a common-sense approach to finding out if any past optimization decisions have impacted future site optimization efforts – but we’re talking about more than conducting a site audit.
If you’re an SEO freelancer who’s recently taken on a new customer, everything they did and organized for their website before you started working with them will have an impact on the job you do for them, either directly or indirectly.
The quality of the SEO reports you provide should therefore be determined by your knowledge and understanding of your client’s previous activities.
Let’s imagine you discover while preparing your first report – that your client has lost a substantial portion of the organic traffic they’ve been receiving. A reasonable conclusion would be a decrease in search visibility, but you can’t put it down to this in its entirety. You’ll need to give specific recommendations on how to fix the issue and an explanation of what caused the drop.
You won’t really know what caused the loss of organic traffic until you have an up-close view of what they did in the past to earn that traffic or keep it unless you have access to SEO reports from company’s they’ve hired in the past. As a result, you could come to an inaccurate conclusion about the problem and make solutions that aren’t helpful. A decrease in search visibility can occur for a variety of causes, including:
- Losing the backlinks they’ve earned
- Updates from Google that affect their rankings
- Competitors improving their SEO efforts
- Their site being unfriendly to mobile visitors
To avoid making recommendations that aren’t applicable in your report, phone the customer before you start working together and ask them about their previous practices.
While some people will argue that an SEO audit provides all the information you and your customer need (which is true), speaking with the customer will help you understand why they chose one strategy over another to improve their site.
For example, how do you determine the link between a client’s products — such as a landing page maker — and a drop in organic search traffic?
That is why you must incorporate client on-boarding steps to ensure that you have a thorough understanding of what the client is doing or has done so that you can better comprehend what is going on.
Illustrate The Relationship Between Your KPIs And Business Metrics
Above all, your client wants to know how your SEO efforts are impacting conversions, and that is precisely what the report will focus on.
Along with quantifying the number of conversions and goals reached, you’ll want to establish a correlation between your SEO actions and conversions. As a result, the client gains a better understanding of SEO’s genuine impact.
For instance, in e-commerce, popular conversion goals include adding products to the shopping cart, registering for an account, and proceeding to the checkout. If you’re collaborating with an e-commerce customer, your report should demonstrate how SEO contributed to the increase in these actions.
Have you altered the site’s structure to make it easier for visitors to navigate between product pages and the checkout? If such is the case, can you demonstrate the effectiveness of your adjustments by comparing historical data to current data?
If something you’ve done is effective, don’t be afraid to discuss it in your report. Given that not all of your SEO efforts will directly result in sales, demonstrating how your efforts are progressing prospects along the funnel should be sufficient to demonstrate to clients that you are offering value for money.
On the other hand, if your data indicates a decrease in conversions and a lower-than-optimal target completion rate, explain this to your client in your report. Occasionally, seasonality has an effect on conversions, particularly in the e-commerce industry, where sales rise over the holidays.
Additionally, in circumstances where seasonality has an effect on conversions, emphasize year-over-year variations in conversions to draw a connection between your efforts and the results you achieve.
Other things that may indirectly affect conversions are site migrations and redirects, which change the quantity of traffic your clients receive. Therefore, describe these swings and their impact on the firm in your reports to ensure that the client understands what you’re doing.
There Is No Short Cut To Online Success – It Requires Thorough Planning And Preparation
When your SEO strategies are performing as expected, it’s tempting to assume that everything is well and that preparing reports would be a breeze. However, we both know that hitting home runs in SEO campaigns isn’t as common as you’d want.
As a result, you’ll want to double-check that you’ve included all of the metrics that provide a complete picture of what’s going on on your client’s website while writing your report. Your recommendations will be more relevant and effective this way.
When it comes to traffic, for example, different numbers will be generated depending on the age of your blog entries, your brand, and the number of links your material has received, among other things. Older blog entries are more likely to receive visitors, and if your numbers look good, you might assume everything is fine.
But traffic isn’t the only thing that interests you, right? You want web visitors to take specific actions on your client’s website, so the first step is to figure out what they’re doing.
You can examine how web visitors behave once they click on each blog article if you delve a little deeper. You’re likely to come across a blog article or two that receives a lot of traffic but has a high bounce and exit rate.
Because they’re still current and your target audience is still interested in the issue, these types of blog posts have a lot of potential. Being comprehensive allows you to demonstrate to your client that your efforts are paying off in addition to generating relevant and valuable advice. A blog post that ranks well in search engines but has a high bounce and exit rate is well optimized for search engine rankings but not for readers.
So, instead of requesting a budget for new content in your report, focus on upgrading the client’s existing material to keep it fresh and relevant for site visitors to lower bounce and exit rates.
If the customer has a large library of content and most blog posts have a high bounce and exit rate, suggest a change in SEO strategy: spend half of your time updating existing content and the other half on creating new material.
Running An Effective SEO Campaign Takes Time
Running an effective search engine optimization campaign requires time. Depending on how frequently you report to your clients, each report will provide an opportunity to illustrate the value you bring. Templates are useful, but you should go a step further and show clients what you can accomplish for them. With so many SEO report templates to choose from, it’s tempting to believe that once you choose one that works and give it to your clients, you’re done. It is, however, up to you to figure out how to make your reports more successful.
It’ll be worthwhile since you’ll be making it easy for clients to relate what you do for them to the results you achieve.
How To Report on Content Marketing?
A content marketing report enables you to analyze several data that indicate the performance of your material. It enables you to see what is and is not working, highlighting which material has to be altered, improved, or maintained in order to achieve your business objectives.
What you select to track is determined by the objectives of your content marketing campaign. To ensure that your job is successful, it is critical to outline your campaign objective prior to creating your content marketing report.
Several Popular Content Marketing Campaign Objectives Include:
- Increasing brand awareness
- To generate more leads
- Conversion rate optimization
- Increasing website traffic by utilizing on-page SEO (search engine optimization)
- Creating a brand identity
- Retaining current clientele
After you’ve established the objectives of your content marketing strategy and specified your key performance indicators, it’s time to begin producing your report.
To determine your content’s performance metrics, you’ll need to employ an analytics programme. Google Analytics is one of the greatest SEO tools for collecting data for a content marketing report because it allows you to analyze a variety of detailed indicators. With Google Analytics, you can design a customized dashboard that displays all of the critical metrics you need and want to track.
You’ll also need to demonstrate your understanding of:
- Keyword research and placement ensuring the pages you work on have engaging titles and copy with no keyword stuffing.
- How to utilize content on social media platforms.
- Internal linking structures
- Landing pages
And ensure you are not publishing the same content over and over – customers want more traffic – recycling instead of creating unique quality content can impact search rankings and will affect the number of keywords you show up for when people type what they’re looking for in to the Google search console.
Your clients want to see evidence you can improve search engine rankings using content.
How To Report on Link Building?
Making a report based on your link-building efforts provides useful information about the success of other connected metrics. We frequently observe a link between increased backlinks and increased traffic or conversions. Keeping track of acquired and lost links over the course of the year can assist you in determining which links are the most beneficial to your customer and adjusting your strategy accordingly.
Educate your customers about the importance of linkages. Ascertain that they comprehend the fundamentals of link creation, as well as how links are related to site performance. Use this foundation of knowledge to develop a tale about your customer’s SEO and your link-building efforts.
What To Report On For Link Building SEO Campaigns?
- Metrics for the domain
- Domain Authority and how you calculated it
- Lost and acquired links
- Backlink anchor text
- Link value in terms of ROI
It’s like driving a car on the highway wearing a blindfold when you don’t carry out regular SEO reports.
How can you get to the top of the SERPs for your prospective clients if you don’t know which aspects of your SEO strategy are working and which actions you should avoid? And how will your clients know you are good at what you do if they never see any evidence of your work?
Unfortunately, producing an SEO report template that your team can you and your clients will be interested in reading is a difficult task – but not impossible.
We know that it’s difficult to determine what to include in an SEO report, what KPIs to report on, and how much data your customer wants to know about.
Do you think you’re ready to write an SEO report that your clients will actually read now?
Conclusion
This article only goes over a few pointers and suggestions worth considering. Some of these ideas and suggestions may be more relevant than others, depending on your client’s company goals. We propose keeping track of and reporting on the indicators that are most closely related to your objectives. Good luck with your reporting!
