Creating Insightful and Useful SEO Client Reports

SEO is still a growing and extremely lucrative practice, perfect for attracting the right type of audiences to recognize your brand online and conduct one of the desired actions on your site. Search is still the most effective channel for growing your business on the Web and stimulating meaningful interactions with people who have a high potential of becoming your paying customers.

confirms everything stated above. According to their findings, search still beats social media by 300 percent as the premium source for generating online traffic. This is because, as the study claims, . The same study has also confirmed that most Internet users today use the world’s most popular search engine for finding the answers to basically all types of imaginable questions.

Whether they’re searching for new places to visit, or products to buy or sell – people turn to Google for help.

However, even though we live in the day and age of intelligent shoppers – most people who use the Web today don’t really like being sold to. They’re far more interested in finding the best solutions for their problems on their own, through a simple search.

A lot of today’s businessmen know this, and that’s why more and more of them are allocating bigger and bigger chunks of their overall marketing budgets to SEO. They believe that a quality SEO campaign has the power to basically turn their business around and position their brand at the very top of Google’s SERP for their desired keywords, and thus help their company grow.

In theory, this sounds achievable – but in practice, not so much.

The Reality of Investing in SEO

Even though SEO is a profitable practice that can bring you loads of leads and quality customers, it’s also a process that’s constantly changing and evolving. It cannot be rigged in your favor, regardless of how much time, money or energy you invest in it. You cannot really buy your way to the top of Google’s search results pages for specific queries. There also isn’t a list of things you can do and immediately climb up SERP.

Most clients don’t understand this and that’s where problems start to creep in. Just like in any other business, the reason why most clients stop working with a particular SEO consultant or agency is that they don’t really see any ROI. If you’re not helping them climb to the top of Google’s SERP for their desired keywords, what are they paying you for?

Clients care about one thing and one thing only: results.

To a modern business owner, any arrangement that doesn’t clearly communicate how much money they’re making is immediately a bad business arrangement.

Unfortunately, this way of operating doesn’t apply to SEO, because nothing can be guaranteed in this department. And even when an SEO agency gets their client to rank at the top of Google’s SERP for the desired keyword, they cannot guarantee it will increase their overall sales in a particular time period.

This is the burden that all SEO pros carry with them each and every day.

However, even though some clients may be difficult to work with or naturally predisposed to leave, the vast majority of client departures is preventable with quality reporting. Many things get lost in the shuffle due to poor communication and lack of feedback. This often leads to frustration, misunderstanding, and finger pointing by both involved parties.

Developing a successful relationship with your client can be achieved through transparency, by aligning goals and visions, providing proof of results, and successfully communicating the value of your efforts, which are all elements of a quality SEO report.

In this article, we are going to list all the things every SEO marketing report needs to have in order to earn you client respect and successfully present your worth to those who are paying for your services:

1. Keyword Ranking

Let’s start with the basics. Regardless of what they do, and in which niche or market they operate in – your clients surely have a list of keywords that are important for their business. It is your job to regularly monitor these keywords and work on their rankings.

Tracking the movement of these keywords will provide clear insights into whether certain techniques and tactics you employ are working for the client’s business. If the rankings are going down, that usually means your SEO strategy isn’t really working and that you need to try different things. If they’re going up, that signals you’re doing something right and should continue in the same direction.

You can follow your keyword rankings via tools like SEMRush and Ahrefs, which you can digital marketing KPI dashboard. Once you do that, you can easily filter, merge, single out, track, analyze, and display your insights, so the client can rest assured knowing you’re on top of things.

Depending on your client and campaign, there are numerous ways to track and display your keyword results in your reports. For example, like in this particular case, you want to separate your mobile keywords from desktop keyword results.

Like I’ve said, it all depends on the client and the goals of a particular SEO campaign.

Naturally, whatever it is you’re doing – try your best not to delve too much into such metrics. Tracking keywords on a daily basis won’t really do you much good. Try not to overanalyze and provide your client’s actionable items and reassurance based on your findings in this department.

2. Organic Traffic

Traffic is the lifeblood of every digital business. Understanding who your visitors are, where they are coming from and why is an essential component of every marketing and growth strategy.

Once you figure out who your audience is and what keeps them coming back to your site – you can start developing strategies that will surely help you generate more buzz around your business.

Organic traffic is not the same as total website traffic. Organic traffic relates directly to SEO because everything that comes from paid ads doesn’t count here. Organic traffic numbers are usually in direct correlation with organic search rankings, which basically means that working on your traffic will have a positive effect on your positions in SERP.

This metric is great for discovering new opportunities as well. By analyzing this data, you can discover new search phrases that have brought people to your site. Optimizing your business for those phrases could help you earn some new wins in the future. This is why we have positioned this metric at the top of our SEO template.

3. Goal Conversions, Revenue

Tracking revenue and macro conversions is a crucial part of your process. Every type of client is interested in knowing if their business goals are being met thanks to your SEO efforts.

Some of the most commonly tracked conversion-related metrics include:

Regardless of niche or market, you’re always tracking one of them. Even though conversions come in different shapes, they always, at their core, relate to one of the above-mentioned categories.

Email subscriptions, contact form completions, clicks to social accounts, site or page visits, product video views, PDF downloads, live chat triggers – these are just some of the more regular things most businesses consider to be conversion goals. They all want to see how your strategy is improving the overall success rate of these actions.

When it comes to SEO, we mostly follow conversions that come from organic:

In Reportz, you can set numerous widgets for conversion/revenue tracking and analyzing the sources from which they are coming from.

You can easily bring in data from various tools to a single, centralized location, from which you can make sense of performance numbers across multiple visitor segments, and thus, figure out how well your business is actually doing online. Which elements are slowing your sales numbers down and what you can do in order to improve them, most importantly.

In this part of your report, you can also see what segments of your site and strategy need fixing, which channels are your most profitable sources, and what you can do to bring your leads closer to actually becoming your paying customers.

4. Search Visibility

As we already mentioned this in our previous article, just like with e-commerce clients, your SEO clients are also interested in knowing more about their website traffic, how to optimize their rankings and make smart decisions concerning their website’s appearance in the search.

This is where data can help.

This is the tool most SEO professionals use to monitor website performance in Google search index. As you can see from the screenshot above, you can monitor everything, from clicks, CTR and impressions, to technical status updates and crawl data.

Our Search Console widget displays it all, in a clear and easily understandable manner, so your client can almost effortlessly monitor all the upgrades that have been made to their site, concerning its visibility and performance in search.

Over to You

Thank you for taking the time to read the latest post on our blog. We hope it has helped you understand how to design a great SEO report. The only thing that’s left is for you to start applying our formula to your own client reports, and send us feedback on how well it’s working out for you.