Creating perfect SEO reports for clients enhances customer loyalty, increases revenue, and lands you more opportunities. Great SEO reports summarize key data and provide easy-to-understand insights into the work done.
SEO analytics can help you track a lot of things, from who visited your website to where the visitors live. Putting such details into your SEO reports for clients can be extremely helpful to gauge the effectiveness of SEO campaigns.
SEO reports for clients help assess if their SEO strategy is working and directly impacts their bottom line. It is a powerful tool that can help you gain insights and build powerful campaigns.
When it comes to Google searches, the No.1 result gets nearly 20 times more clicks than the page at the No.10 spot.
Image via FirstPageSage
That’s why marketers continuously strive to reach the top of search engine result pages.
SEO reports for clients help you analyze the performance of your SEO efforts, offering key insights that help shape the future of your SEO strategies.
In this blog post, we give you proven tips to create perfect SEO reports for clients.
Before we discuss how to create amazing SEO reports for clients, let’s first understand what an SEO report is, and why it is important.
An SEO report is an overview of how well your client’s website follows best practices and performs on search engines. It is an integral part of a well-defined marketing strategy and helps you measure the ROI and performance of your SEO activities.
A good SEO report helps your clients discover areas of improvement in their SEO strategy.
A good SEO report:
Traditionally, SEO reporting included metrics like CTR, keywords, and backlinks.
Measuring just the basic metrics does not cut it anymore. In this day and age, a winning SEO strategy is one that creates a loyal audience base, engagement, and traffic for your website.
Search Engine Optimization is an extremely effective marketing tool, but it takes time to see a return on investment. This is where SEO reporting comes in super handy.
SEO reports for clients show your success over time and help you implement steps that deliver long-term wins. It offers three major benefits:
A quality SEO report helps you better understand the intent of your target audience.
When you know what your audience is looking for, it becomes easier to tweak your website’s SEO to connect with the people online. It also helps you focus on the key metrics, building trust and authority in the long run.
By creating SEO reports you can also figure out which campaigns work the best for your business and how to improve the others.
Does creating SEO reports for clients sound like a lot of work? SEO reporting tools can make things easier for you.
There are several SEO tools available in the market that can help you create in-depth SEO reports for clients.
Some of the best SEO reporting tools are:
Tools like Google Search Console and Google Analytics are free. So, you can combine the data from these tools with others, such as Semrush or Ahrefs.
For instance, Semrush allows you to create reports from their SEO report template or from scratch according to each client’s unique requirements.
The SEO report template from Semrush includes:
Preparing easy-to-understand but detailed SEO reports for clients is the only way to show your clients that your SEO efforts are benefiting them.
The SEO reporting tools mentioned above let you create the perfect SEO report every time.
Here is how a Google Search Console SEO report looks like.
Image via Search Engine Journal
The perfect SEO report is clear and descriptive and contains key findings, relevant data, and actionable next steps. Consider using an SEO report template to standardize your process, making it faster and easier for you to generate SEO reports for clients.
Of course, there is no single way to create the perfect SEO report for your clients. However, there are certain elements that you should consider including to create stellar SEO reports for clients.
Here is a list of elements you should consider including in your SEO reports for clients.
Technical terms, numbers, and tons of data could be confusing or overwhelming for your clients. Your SEO report should contain an “overview” of all the important metrics of your website, much like an “executive summary.”
The overview section should give your clients context about what the report contains and what they can expect from it.
Remember, your clients are busy people and may not always have time to deep dive into every single metric. So, keep your overview short, simple, and easy to understand.
The overview should help your clients understand the progress of your SEO campaigns and results. For instance, the organic traffic has increased by 15% and generated 40 new leads. Or how their SEO rankings have improved for their target keyword.
Here is an example.
Image via Advanced Web Ranking
Including web traffic reports is a good idea, especially when your client’s goal is to increase traffic to their website.
If you are using Google Analytics, you can use its “Source” and “Medium” sections to create the traffic section of your SEO reports for clients.
Image via Premiere Creative
The “Source” section tells you where the website traffic is coming from, such as Google, Twitter, or other specific websites. The “Medium” section reveals the “kind” of traffic, such as organic traffic, paid, referrals, and more.
With a clear understanding of where the traffic comes from, your clients know exactly where to spend time and money to increase their web traffic.
Tracking engagement metrics like bounce rate, page per session, and average session duration can help you and your clients leverage content that attracts and retains users.
By including engagement metrics in SEO reports for clients, you can show how well your content marketing strategy aligns with their user interests.
Engagement has a direct impact on profitability as engaged users are more likely to buy, remain loyal, and refer new customers to the brand.
Google Analytics is a great tool for tracking engagement metrics, as shown below.
Image via Piktochart
Getting a lot of traffic to your website is great. But the real question is, “are these visitors converting?”
Conversion rate is one of the most important key performance indicators for your clients. So, it must be included in your SEO reports for clients.
If you’re using Google Analytics for your SEO reports you can set specific goals that you want to track as conversions.
Image via Search Engine Journal
By analyzing the traffic you have a good idea of where your visitors are coming from. But do you know where they are heading on your website?
Include the top-performing pages in your SEO reports for clients to let them know what’s working and what’s not. Identify what’s working for the pages that're doing well and apply it to the ones that aren’t.
How can you find the most popular pages on your website?
It’s quite simple with Google Analytics (and it’s free).
Just tap on Behavior>Site Content> All Pages.
Image via Databox
You will see important metrics, such as Page Views, Unique Page Views, Average Time on Page, and so on.
Under “Behavior,” there is also an option called landing pages. It will help you identify which URL is the most popular and which is not.
Keyword research and tracking keyword rankings give you valuable insights into what type of content your users are more interested in and searching for.
However, if you include details of every keyword you are tracking in your SEO reports for clients, it will be very confusing.
Instead, include a snapshot of the top target keywords you are ranking for to show that you are attracting the right audience.
The Google Analytics keyword rankings report looks like this.
Image via Databox
A healthy backlink profile multiplies your chances of ranking well for the keywords you target.
Relevant inbound links on non-spammy anchor texts from high-authority websites are an indicator that your website has high-quality content. That’s why backlinks are extremely important for SEO and your website’s health.
Keeping an eye on Link metrics, such as Page Strength, Anchor Text, and New/Lost Domains, can help you get more organic traffic and maintain good ROI.
The link-building metrics are also important for tracking campaign success. These will also help you discover new links to your domain and eliminate broken links.
Keeping track of your backlinks is easy with Google Analytics.
Image via Monitor Backlinks
With so many SEO tools available, you can gather a huge amount of data. However, offering actionable insights and recommendations from that data in your SEO reports for clients is how you can distinguish yourself.
For instance, showing your clients how much organic search traffic you are getting is of no use unless you can also show ways to increase it.
Keywords, rankings, and search visibility are often the most sought-after achievements. If you can report higher organic traffic and search visibility with the context of what keywords drove that traffic, you will be able to impress your clients more.
You can include the next steps, as shown in the example below.
Image via Single Grain
We hope you now have a fair idea of what to include in your SEO reports for clients. Let’s take a look at the steps needed to create great SEO reports for your clients.
If you want to create perfect SEO reports for clients, you must be clear about the client’s objectives.
Talk to the business owner or marketing manager and get a clear idea of what they want to achieve through their SEO campaigns.
Once you understand their SEO goals, conduct an SEO audit to verify how they align with your client’s business objectives.
For instance, their objectives could be:
Or, maybe they want all of the above.
Understanding your clients’ objectives will help you build SEO strategies that can help you achieve these objectives.
The best SEO reports provide a concise and detailed summary of the SEO health of a website. You can’t create one without establishing the KPIs you want to include in the report.
Always show results in terms of numbers and not in subjective terms, such as “good.” Measurable KPIs are reliable and easy to track.
Some of the important key performance indicators you should include in your SEO reports for clients are:
Here is a sample template for you.
Image via NinjaCat
Your website’s health can have a huge impact on SEO. It is extremely important to assess it before taking any steps so you are clear about what you are working with.
Lost links, broken links, page loading time, bounce rate, and other such metrics could negatively affect a site’s rankings.
Some key metrics to include in your site health report are:
Tools like Woorank and SEO Site Checkup can help you find issues affecting your client’s site health. Here’s an example.
Image via Single Grain
The next step in creating SEO reports for clients is to prepare an organic traffic and engagement report.
Here are some metrics you can include:
Here is an example of an organic traffic report from Ahrefs
Image via Single Grain
Pro Tip: When you prepare an organic traffic and engagement report, don’t forget to mention how the website was performing before you started. This will help you highlight improvements over time.
You may use free tools like Google Analytics to create organic conversion reports.
Some metrics you can include are:
Here’s how you can use Google Analytics for custom SEO reports.
Image via Single Grain
You may consider including the following metrics when creating a backlink analysis report.
Here is an example of a backlink analysis report.
Image via Moz
Pro Tip: Invest in backlink analysis tools like Semrush and SE ranking because building good backlinks is the easiest way to SEO success.
Even the best content strategy has room for improvement. Your site content report will help you figure out what content resonates best with your audience.
Some metrics to include are:
Image via Learn Digital Advertising
Preparing a ranking report will help you assess how your content is performing in terms of engagement. Highlight all the keywords that you have added or removed in the given time period.
Here’s what a ranking report looks like.
Image via DashThis
Once you have compiled all these reports, add an overview section to help your clients understand what you have been working on and what are the results. Don’t forget to add recommendations and the next steps to make your SEO reports for clients more useful.
Q1. What is a good SEO report?
A. A good SEO report should be simple, easy to read, and most importantly, easy to understand. It should not use technical jargon or confuse your clients by presenting too much data.
A great SEO report:
Q2. What should your SEO reports for clients contain?
A. SEO reports for clients should ideally be a summary of key SEO metrics that show how their website is performing. The report should typically contain information on
The best part of SEO reports for clients is that you can customize the reports according to the goals of your clients, making them more meaningful and valuable.
Q3. Why are SEO reports for clients important?
A. SEO reports for clients have a key role to play in creating a robust digital marketing strategy.
Gathering the right data, sorting, and understanding the information can help marketers figure out what efforts attract customers and what areas can be improved.
SEO reports for clients also help show your clients the results of your SEO efforts, and how your strategies are impacting the SEO performance of their website.
Q4. How often should you send SEO reports to clients?
A. Most marketers send SEO reports for clients on a monthly basis, as changes are more notable month over month.
However, it is also a good idea to send a yearly report summarizing the annual SEO performance.
Q5. How long does it take to create SEO reports for clients?
A. Depending on the amount of data you include and the tools you use, SEO reports for clients can take anywhere from 30 minutes to a few hours every month.
The following factors may also impact the time taken to create SEO reports for clients:
Using an SEO report template could simplify the process, helping you create SEO reports for clients faster.
You now have all the information you need to create SEO reports for clients that are useful and informative.
Just follow the steps mentioned above, and you’ll be creating beautiful and informative SEO reports for clients in no time.
Do you have any tips for creating SEO reports? Please share them in the comments below.
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