Developing SEO reports
If you manage SEO for your Agency clients, it is a good idea to submit regular progress reports. SEO Reports offer you an opportunity to evaluate tactics and track progress but is also always nice to present evidence of any key achievements and peaks in performance.
The purpose of developing SEO report is to demonstrate the tasks completed, progress made, Key achievements, Keyword rankings, changes to traffic and set objectives and tasks for the following month’s reports are vital and you need to let your clients, upper management, and other stakeholders know how your SEO campaigns are performing.
The SEO report is like a calling card for some agencies. Smart companies use automated APIs to organize and compile SEO reports without spending hours of manual work. Some companies rely on automatic SEO reporting tools. For other companies, it is a time-intensive and considerably low-value exercise.
Creating an SEO report has three-fold benefits: offers solutions to readers, helps build trust with your clients, and improves your expertise. The primary goal of creating a SEO report is to understand what people are searching for online, the words they are using, the solutions they are looking for, and the type of content they wish to consume. Once you understand the target audience’s intent and objective, you can easily improve your website’s SEO and connect website browsers to solutions you have to offer.
By focusing on all the key metrics of your SEO, you can build trust and authority with your stakeholders i.e., clients or managers. This will help you, service clients, well as they will find you productive in your deliveries. Additionally, by creating an SEO report, you can measure the performance of your SEO strategies and tactics.
This way, you can determine which campaigns work best for the predetermined goals and which don’t cater to the specific requirements. You can further modify your SEO strategy accordingly. The SEO report should be a tool by which you can gain insights and build powerful campaigns for organic search. You might think of this as a client deliverable, or a monthly expectation to appease your boss, but an effective SEO report is much more than that.
It will give you a one shot overview of your performance and easily spot problems and opportunities. Covering metrics like organic traffic, external and internal link building, social media, etc.
Having an SEO report template handy means you can streamline your SEO reporting process, deliver reports to clients or managers faster, and extract insights without any hassle. Different clients have different SEO requirements, but there are certain checkpoints that cannot be ignored when we track SEO performance
It is worth pointing out that in the early days, SEO reporting mostly included metrics like backlinks, organic keywords and click-through rates. But measuring only these basic metrics just does not cut it anymore. You need to go beyond search traffic and clicks, as an authentic SEO strategy is all about winning long-term engagement, traffic, and readers for your website.
Different SEO tools are available in the market which offers visibility scores, using their own different formulae. They help users with averages, traffic and impression data. It is very important to take care that the report made by you must be client-centric and must detail the specific tasks completed. Build your report around your client.
It also includes an overview of the previously agreed aims and objectives that you have been hired to achieve. Avoid generic objectives, like ‘make the site rank better’ or ‘attract more business’ because they are too vague and harder to measure. Broad objectives may need breaking down into smaller tasks. Make a list of completed tasks in your report and keep ticking them off the list.
If you have a Google My Business account, make sure you record it as a completed task. For many people, keyword rank position is likely to be the part of the report that most interests the client.
Another tool to track keyword ranking progress is Woorank keyword tool. Simply add your keywords to Keyword tool and it will track progress as well as provide the average monthly search volume (particularly useful now that Google’s keyword planner only provides a broad data range) and competitor rankings. For each keyword, you can also see performance over time and as compared to your competitors for a better understanding of how well it is doing. This is also useful for impact monitoring procedure.
Few suggestions for a first-timer who is looking to create an initial SEO report on how to approach creating an SEO report for clients is that WooRank makes site auditing and reporting very easy. After you’ve run an audit, you can create a report in a matter of a few clicks and it can be sent to clients too. Some essentials you need to include to make perfect SEO reports for your clients are firstly Traffic: channels.
If the key goal of your client’s website is increasing organic traffic then put traffic at the beginning of your report. You will also want to use the source or medium section of the traffic report which will give you more specifics about where the traffic is coming from, thus helping you conclude where you should spend your time and money. While other metrics can be important but it totally depends on the company you are working with.
Next you should include conversion rate and goal completion in your SEO report. All the traffic in the world is great, but it would not get you too far if that traffic is not doing what you want it to do. Conversion rate belongs at the beginning of your SEO report because your clients will likely be most interested in this metric.
Goal tracking is the best way to illustrate progress to clients. Page speed insights and Time on site and bounce rate is also very essential to be included in your SEO report. Time on site and bounce rate help give your insight into whether the content you are creating is “sticky.” Future Recommendations and execution plan is the most essential portions to be included while developing your SEO report.
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