When it comes to creating useful SEO reports for your clients, it can be hard to balance the most relevant information to include with what they really want to see. You need to show your clients that what you’re doing is creating results that positively impact their business. With this being said, you need to ask yourself what they consider progress. Regardless, you need to create reports that are concise and easy to digest. If a report is too long, your client might lose interest. If it’s too short, they may wonder what they’re paying for. This is why we pulled together some tips on how to create an SEO report for your clients.
Determine your objectives
Your first step is to determine what you’re setting out to achieve. You want to make sure that you outline your current SEO goals very clearly for your client. Include tangible business objectives. These can be anything from increasing monthly revenue to drive more traffic to your online shop. However, don’t forget to explain why you’ve chosen these as your objectives. If you just tell your client that you’re planning to increase their keyword rankings, they may not understand why that’s important. By outlining what you’re working on and why, you’ll help them better understand your report and set their expectations.
Establish the KPIs you need in your report
You can’t create an SEO report without knowing what KPIs you need to include. Remember to always show your results in hard numbers. No one wants goals that aren’t measurable. Your report should show numbers that you can rely on and easily track over time. Below are the most relevant KPIs to include in an SEO report:
Traffic
One of the most common SEO goals is increasing organic traffic. If your client has this as one of their goals, make sure that your SEO report includes their site traffic generated through organic and paid search. This will allow them to compare the traffic their website generates organically with the traffic from their ads. This will allow you to highlight the impact one may have on the other.
Engagement
Now that we know where the traffic comes from, you need to establish where it’s going. You need to include the bounce rate in your report. A high bounce rate may show that the website doesn’t meet visitors expectations. This can be caused from the site’s speed, user experience, or content quality. You want visitors to stay and visit your site. The average session duration, page per session, and time spent on site are important metrics. You should display all of these KPIs page by page to give a good overview of the top and least performing pages.
Conversion rate
These KPIs are good to add if your client’s goal is to increase the number of sales, form completion, or downloads through their site. A high conversion rate and conversion volume directly indicates how your SEO efforts are paying off and how many leads are created based on your optimized website.
Keyword performance
A large part of SEO revolves around keywords. You want to know what keywords are the most performing. Make sure that you know which specific keywords improved the rankings, how search visibility has changed, and the average position in your target keyword search results.
Links
Never underestimate the importance of backlinks. Make sure to include the domain authority metrics of those backlinks on your SEO report, as well as the new and lost referring domains. You need to make sure that you have relevant inbound links. Also, you need to make sure that your backlinks have good domain authority and are credible sources with the right anchor text.
Record observations
This is where you can show your clients real and tangible data. You’ve outlined what you’re doing to help them achieve their current SEO goal, but now it’s time to show your results.
Draw conclusion
Once you’ve shown what you’re working on, why, and how it’s impacting their business, you want to outline what they can expect to see next. You can let them know what your next course of action is and what you this is working so they can be prepared for your next report.