Reporting has long been an important aspect of search engine optimization. A high-quality SEO report is required to ensure that you or your clients can simply analyze and compare (with previous reports) the ROI from their internet marketing. That is how you can tell if your company is growing or not.
Creating ideal SEO reports for clients promotes consumer loyalty, revenue, and opportunities. Great SEO reports summarise important information and provide easy-to-understand insights into the job done.
SEO analytics may help you track everything from who visits your website to where they live. Including such information in your SEO reports for clients can be incredibly beneficial in determining the performance of SEO campaigns.
You can check your website’s SEO health, the efficacy of your SEO operations, and key areas to obtain vital insights that define your future SEO plans by creating an SEO report.
SEO reports for clients help in determining whether or not their SEO approach is effective and has a direct influence on their bottom line. It is a great tool that can assist you in gaining insights and developing effective campaigns.
This guide will explore everything you need to know about SEO reports to help you create an effective one what should a good SEO report include, the different sorts of SEO reports, the tools you need to create your SEO report, and a step-by-step journey for building one for your website.
Let’s Begin!
What is an SEO Report?
An SEO report is an important component of any marketing plan.
An SEO report is essentially a detailed document that summarizes the performance of your website in search engine results pages. It functions as a complete report card for your SEO activities, providing vital insights into your strengths, shortcomings, and places for progress.
It often includes areas like:
- Natural traffic
- Conversions
- Backlinks
- Overall site well-being
SEO reporting is a successful way for you to show the impact of your SEO efforts on their business to stakeholders typically a boss or customer.
On the other hand, an SEO report should not be overloaded with data, contain excessive technical language, or establish unrealistic expectations.
By creating SEO reports, you can also determine which campaigns work best for your company and how to enhance the others.
Do’s and Dont’s of SEO Reporting
| Do’s Concentrate on clear, actionable insights.Adjust the report to your target audience.Effective data visualizationConcentrate on progress rather than rankings.Highlight achievements and difficultiesKeep it short and to the point. | Don’t’s Become lost in technical jargonConcentrate on vanity metricsMake unbreakable promises:Ignore the user’s intent.Neglect competitor researchForget about regular reporting. |
Why SEO Reporting Is Important?
It is necessary to show your clients that your SEO efforts are effective and hence worth the money they are paying to your SEO or digital marketing companies.
A good SEO report is one in which you, the SEO expert, sift through important data, analyze it to understand what it means, summarise it in a way that your client (who is not an SEO specialist) can understands, and then recommend practical next steps.
The only way to convince your clients that your skills and knowledge are beneficial to them is to prepare a detailed and easy-to-understand report.
By developing the art of SEO reporting, you will be able to:
- Improve the efficacy of your SEO approach.
- Determine both positive and negative trends.
- Identify the areas that need to be improved.
- Understand what individuals are looking for and what challenges they are experiencing.
- Determine the ROI of the website.
- Determine which metrics require more attention.
What to include in your SEO Reports?
The data you include in your SEO reports will vary depending on the type of service you provide, but typical SEO reports for customers include information on keyword ranks, traffic, and technical website health. Other metrics such as conversions, landing page performance, speed and Core Web Vitals, backlinks, and competition overviews can also be included.
There is no single method to create the ideal SEO report for your customers. However, there are a few things you should think about placing in your SEO reports for clients.
Here is a list of elements to consider including in your SEO reports for clients.
1. Overview
Your clients may be confused or overwhelmed by technical terms, numbers, and piles of data. Your SEO report should include an “overview” of all of your website’s critical data, similar to an “executive summary.”
The overview section should provide context for your clients as to what the report contains and what they may expect from it.
The overview should help your clients understand the development and results of your SEO activities. For example, organic traffic has increased by 15%, resulting in the generation of 40 new leads. Or how their SEO rankings for their target term have increased.
2. Keyword Rankings
In addition to giving rankings summary reports to give your clients a big-picture view of your work, you can also include a part that specifies how their web pages are currently ranking for their target keywords throughout all tracked regions. This allows them to view their exact positions in the SERPs.
To provide a brief assessment of your clients’ ranks, begin your SEO reports with a project overview that includes the average ranking position, the number of keywords ranking among the top 3-10 search results, and the search visibility of the target keywords.
You may offer data on the first and last monitoring dates to allow your clients to see their ranking improvement over time. This ensures that clients can see the overall development made in addition to your hard work.
You can provide a brief rankings history table to highlight how your client’s rankings have evolved without providing data for each day to provide more data between the first and end days of tracking. This might assist you in determining whether swings in rankings are related to search engine updates or a seasonal trend.
Depending on the customer, you may also wish to send a keyword position analysis that compares your client’s positions to the competition. After all, your SEO success is dependent on the performance of your competition.
3. Traffic
Including online traffic metrics is an excellent idea, especially if your client’s goal is to boost visitors to their website.
If you use Google Analytics, you can use the “Source” and “Medium” parts to build the traffic section of your SEO reports for clients.
The “Source” part indicates the source of website traffic, such as Google, Twitter, or other specific websites. The “Medium” column exposes the “kind” of traffic, such as organic traffic, paid traffic, referral traffic, and more.
Your clients will know exactly where to spend time and money to improve their online traffic if they have a clear grasp of where the traffic is coming from.
4. Website Health Score
Consider using the website health score metric to gain a rapid overview of your client’s website optimization level. Clients can receive useful insights into their website’s performance, detect any concerns, and take the required steps to improve their site’s health by providing this information in your SEO reports.
You can examine technical criteria such as page speed, mobile friendliness, CWVs, crawlability, indexing, and security using tools such as SE Ranking’s Website Audit to generate a numerical score that measures the overall health of a website. This score can be used as a baseline for tracking progress over time.
Aside from the overall health score, it’s important to divide the assessment into particular categories and make recommendations for each. This will assist your clients in prioritizing their efforts and focusing on the areas that require the most attention.
In addition, highlight the progress achieved towards raising the website’s health score over time in your SEO reports. This might help demonstrate the worth of your services and highlight the concrete advantages of your efforts.
5. Conversion Rate
Conversion rate is one of the most essential key performance indicators for your clients. As a result, it must be included in your SEO reports for clients.
If you use Google Analytics for your SEO reporting, you may choose which goals you wish to measure as conversions.
6. Landing Page Report
Page-level traffic insights show you where your client’s visitors are coming from. You can tell if your clients are doing their jobs by finding their top-performing pages. The benefits of mapping the client journey are numerous.
Understanding user engagement and the effectiveness of targeted keywords requires analyzing landing pages. This part must offer insights into the traffic that each landing page receives, the user journey on these pages, and their performance regarding the SEO goals that have been established.
7. Google Search Console
As one of the most powerful (and free) SEO tools available, it’s an excellent approach to ensure your client’s site’s visibility in Google Search results. Incorporating this into your reports indicates that you are constantly monitoring the big picture, maintaining their website, and troubleshooting on a frequent basis.
Incorporate Google Search Console insights to highlight your comprehensive tracking efforts. This tool provides plenty of useful information, ranging from a site health assessment to organic search rankings. Highlight how important these data are for keeping an optimized Google presence and troubleshooting issues that may affect SEO success.
8. Link Metrics
A healthy backlink profile increases your chances of ranking well for the keywords you want to rank for.
Relevant inbound links from high-authority websites with non-spammy anchor texts are an indication that your website has high-quality content. As a result, backlinks are critical for SEO and the health of your website.
Keeping an eye on link metrics like Page Strength, Anchor Text, and New/Lost Domains will help you gain more organic traffic and maintain a solid ROI.
Link-building analytics are very useful for tracking campaign success. These will also assist you in discovering fresh links to your site and eliminating broken links.
Google Analytics makes it simple to track your backlinks.
9. Actionable Insights and Suggestions
With so many SEO tools accessible, you may collect a massive amount of data. However, providing practical insights and recommendations based on that data in your SEO reports for clients is how you can differentiate yourself.
For example, informing your clients how much organic search traffic you are getting is only useful if you can also show them how to enhance it.
Keywords, rankings, and search visibility are frequently the most sought-after successes. You will be able to amaze your clients more if you can report more organic traffic and search visibility along with the terms that led to that traffic.
10. SEO Site Health
A well-optimized website improves not only your client’s rankings and search visibility, but it also improves user experience, which leads to higher engagement and conversions. Broken links, photos that lack accessibility alt text, and other factors can all influence both the user journey and a site’s ranking.
Setting up regular SEO site audits is one technique to maintain track of a website’s SEO health. These reports aid in the rapid identification of issues as well as the identification of trends and patterns in a website’s performance over time.
Do you observe an upsurge in 404 errors after a new product launch?
Perhaps adding a QA check to the development cycle can help prevent them from occurring.
Automated SEO reports are an ideal approach to communicate the SEO health of a website to clients and stakeholders since they provide a concise and easy-to-understand assessment of the website’s performance.
What Tools Do You Need To Create an SEO Report?
There are many SEO tools available for creating SEO reports. The problem is that there are too many. Gathering data from different tools is a challenging undertaking for an SEO analyst or manager who manages multiple projects, initiatives, and websites.
The SEO reporting tools you require are decided by your specific objectives, budget, and technical knowledge. Various SEO tools on the market can assist you in creating complete SEO reports for clients.
Some of the most significant SEO reporting tools are:
- Google Search Console
- Google Analytics
- Semrush
- Google Data Studio
- Ahrefs
- Moz
Google Search Console and Google Analytics are both free. As a result, you can integrate the information from these tools with that from others, such as Semrush or Ahrefs.
The only way to show your clients that your SEO efforts are benefiting them is to prepare easy-to-understand but extensive SEO reports for them.
The above-mentioned SEO reporting tools enable you to build the best SEO report every time. This is an example of a Google Search Console SEO report.
How To Create the Perfect SEO Report for Your Clients
SEO reports are important not just for analyzing whether your techniques are working, but also to convey your findings to your clients. And, because this has a direct impact on your business line.
Let’s go over the steps you’ll need to follow to develop effective SEO reports for your clients.
1. Determine Your Goals
First and foremost, you must understand your client’s goals. Sit down with the business owner or marketing specialist and ask them what they are looking for in terms of general marketing tactics (PPC, social media, etc.) and, of course, SEO campaigns. Discuss with them their existing SEO goals, conduct an SEO study and/or audit in advance, and confirm how they connect with their company objectives. Make sure you explicitly define these objectives with your client.
For example, their objectives could be:
- To increase customers to their website
- To boost their overall revenue
- To improve their SERP
- Or, to increase their engagement.
However, keep in mind that as they are all linked together enhancing one goal can have an impact on another. More traffic does not always mean more sales, although it can help. Whereas the wrong traffic could reduce engagement.
Understanding your clients’ objectives will assist you in creating SEO methods to help you reach these goals.
2. Define Your KPIs
While it may be tempting to simply download the keyword rankings and organic traffic data and display them to your customers, this may not be sufficient to show your whole SEO strategy.
Always discuss your client’s (or your own team’s) goals with them so you know what to include in the report. Identifying the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and how you intend to accomplish them will allow you to demonstrate decisively how you have progressed towards those targets using the data supplied in the report.
Key performance metrics that you should include in your SEO reports for clients include:
- Traffic
- Engagement
- Conversion Rate
- Keyword Performance
- Links
- Site speed and performance
- Inbound marketing ROI
- Customer Lifetime Value
- Sales Revenue
- Page and Domain Authority
3. Prepare a Site Health Report
The general health of a website has an important effect on SEO.
A website’s health must be analyzed before any other steps are made, much like the physical health signs that your doctor examines each year at an annual physical check-up so you can see what you’re working with. Some of the criteria that influence site rankings are page loading time, broken links, bounce rate and session duration.
The following are the most important metrics to include in your site health report:
- Indexed pages
- Site speed
- Elements of AMP
- Schema markup
- Server response time
- Crawl errors
- Broken links
- Missing or duplicate meta tags
- Page crawled per day
- Bad redirects
- Time spent downloading pages
- Security issues
- Domain authority and page authority
- URL Structure
Tools such as Ubersuggest, Woorank, and SEO Site Checkup can help you assess the health of your website. Here is an example:
4. Prepare an Organic Traffic and Engagement Report
When creating an organic traffic and engagement report, examine how the site was performing before you started working on it and how far you’ve come. This will allow you to highlight the changes that have been made in a certain time period.
The following metrics must be included in your organic traffic and engagement report:
- Organic channel report
- Page views
- Time spent on page
- Page per session
- Organic CTR (Click Through Rate)
- New vs. Returning visitors
- Exit rate
- New subscribers
- Number of shares or comments
The metrics described above can be checked using tools such as SEMrush, Hubspot, Ahrefs, Google Search Console, Hotjar, and Crazy Egg.
Here’s an example of an Ahrefs organic traffic report:
5. Prepare an Organic Conversions Report
When preparing an organic conversions report, you should explain to your client how their site performed previously as well as the current condition. This will allow you to highlight progress in organic conversions month after month or over a specific time period.
To create organic conversion reports, you can use free programmes such as Google Analytics.
You can include the following metrics:
- Organic sales
- New visitor conversion rate
- Returning visitor conversion rate
- Cost per conversion
- Cart abandonment rate
- Customer lifetime value
You may track organic conversion rates with Google Analytics by generating a custom report. To create a custom report, follow these steps:
- Login to your Google Analytics account.
- Choose a website from the list for which you wish to create a report.
- In the left panel, select the customization tab.
- Select + New Custom Report.
- In the Metric Groups section, offer the metrics you want to track (target conversion rate, sessions, goal completions, organic searches):
- Save the report
You will now be redirected to your new report. Always give a summary of the next steps to improve your client’s performance on these indicators.
6. Prepare a Backlink Analysis Report
Mention how many backlinks the site has and how many links it has lately acquired when creating the backlink analysis report. This will assist you in emphasizing the effectiveness of your link acquisition approach.
Here are a few factors that must be included in your backlink analysis report:
- Link distribution ratio
- Dofollow vs. Nofollow links
- Percentage of exact match anchor text
- The number of links acquired in the past 30 days
- The ratio of the backlink to the referring domains
- Domain and page authority
- Branded vs. non-branded anchor text
- Spam score of the domains
- Citation flow
- Trust flow
For performing a backlink audit, you can use tools such as Moz, CognitiveSEO, and Majestic.
An example of a backlink analysis report is shown below.
7. Prepare a Ranking Report
When creating a ranking report, include how many keywords your client’s website ranks for and how these keywords perform in terms of engagement. Highlight all of the new keywords you’ve added or eliminated in the last quarter.
Your site content examination will help you determine which information is most attractive to your target audience.
Some metrics to consider are:
- New visits
- Reach
- Social Shares
- Inbound Links
- Comments
- Conversion rate
Preparing a ranking report can assist you to figure out how well your content is performing in terms of engagement. Highlight all of the keywords that you added or removed during the specified time period.
After you’ve completed all of these reports, add an overview section to help your clients understand what you’ve been working on and the outcomes. To make your SEO reports for clients more valuable, include recommendations and next steps.
8. Prepare a Featured Snippets/Voice Search Report
It is important to prepare a voice search report.
Highlight the terms for which the client has begun ranking for featured snippets when generating a voice search report, as this will help with voice SEO.
SEMrush lets you see how many featured snippets your website currently has and how many fresh opportunities exist. The Already Featured tab displays the keywords for which your site is already ranking as a featured snippet, and the “Est. traffic gained” indicator displays the amount of traffic generated by featured snippets.
It also indicates how many of your target keywords have featured snippets (that you’ve included to your campaign). The tab is ordered by default based on the difference in organic positions between your domain and the URL that is currently highlighted in the sample.
This allows you to see the featured snippets that are nearest to you and have a good probability of ranking high in the SERPs.
Conclusion
SEO reporting can assist your company in identifying areas for improvement and raising the bar in terms of how you use your resources to benefit your clients. Effective reporting assists all stakeholders in remaining open, accountable, and pleasant, all of which are qualities that help businesses develop.
Remember that a good SEO report will assist you in determining the efficiency of your SEO activities. First, ask your clients what they want to see in the report, and then write a brief blurb for each one in simple language to help them understand the metrics in the report.
Simply follow the steps described above, and you’ll be creating visually appealing and insightful SEO reports for clients in no time.
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