If you manage SEO for clients, you know how important it is to provide accurate and insightful reporting. You’ve done the work, now you have to show it.
Your customers rely on you to give them the relevant information they need to make informed decisions about their marketing efforts going forward. The SEO report is their (and yours) roadmap.
Getting it right every time is a matter of creating a system that you can continually mimic for each client.
So, what goes into perfect SEO reporting? These are the seven basic elements.
1. Traffic: Sources
Is increasing organic traffic to their website your client’s main goal? Start your traffic SEO reports.
If you are using Google Analytics, you will also need to use a source / medium Section of the traffic report for this part of the report. It will give you more information about where your visitors are coming from, helping your customer decide where they should spend their time and money.
Be sure to also include mobile phone sources in this part of the report since the invention of cell phones 63% of search engine traffic is organic in 2021.
This part of the report will look similar to the image below. To get there quickly, go to acquisition> all traffic> channels.
2. Conversion rate and progress in targets
Huge streams of site traffic are great, but if you don’t know what your visitors want or how they want to interact with your content, not even all the traffic in the world will help you get very far.
In other words, if you can’t convert your visitors into customers, no amount of traffic will help.
Conversion rate is probably one of the most important key performance indicators (KPIs) for your customers, so put this near the front of your report for easy access.
Once you figure out your conversion rate, you’ll be more than willing to explain what comes next in the report and describe why they see certain insights and data points.
To make it clear to the customer the conversion rate, define certain goals that you want to track as “conversions”.
In this example, a nonprofit customer used takedowns in their “Thanks for the donation!” A page to track completed donations.
Google Analytics will count each landing as a donation, which helps complete the goals on complete the goal bit.
To reach the goal, go to Transfers > Goals > Overview.
for example:
Screenshot from Google Analytics, July 20223. Highest performing pages
You probably know where your visitors are coming from, but it is essential to know where they are going on your site.
If someone lands on your site organically via Google, great; However, if you know they clicked on your most recent blog post, that’s even more valuable.
You always want to include the best performing pages so the customer knows what works and what doesn’t. There are usually lessons they can take from pages that do well and apply to pages that could use helping attract (and keep) traffic.
One way to pull data from Google Analytics to show this is in the Landing Pages section.
To get there, first, go to Behaviorand then Website contentAnd the landing pages. You’ll see which URLs are hot and which aren’t quite.
4. Page speed insights
Take a quick break from Google Analytics for this part and head over to a tool called Google Analytics PageSpeed Insights from Google. It’s a completely free tool that will show your customers how fast their pages load and any performance issues they might be able to fix to improve their results.
Sometimes, something as small as a video clip has a very large file size. This simple quick fix can get your pages up and running quickly.
Page speed hasn’t always been a high priority, but as users’ expectations become more demanding with their online experiences, having your pages load quickly is crucial to keeping visitors on your site.
Google even tells us that the probability of someone Website bounce up 32% If the loading time goes from a one-second load to a three-second load.
Screenshot from PageSpeed Insights, July 20225. Bounce rate and dwell time
Knowing that visitors have come to your site, clicked on certain pages and, in some cases, converted is very helpful.
But to complete the full picture, your customer needs to know how long people spend on their site and how many people click away after the first landing page.
Dwell time is the time someone spends on a website page when it comes from an organic search. Do they explore other pages from there or are they looking for a quick answer?
However, a high bounce rate isn’t always a bad thing.
If their landing page is full of internal links to other pages on your site and they bounce back quickly, it probably means they’ve moved on to exploring those outbound links.
In this section, focus on the bounce rate of the primary site pages with rich content such as videos. They have to stay on for a while to consume the content.
6. Ranking and backlinks
Backlinks can be powerful tools for websites that are struggling to make headway in their SEO rankings.
You can find many tools to track the links you have, which is useful because it can identify potential SEO opportunities.
If you’ve helped your client get backlinks as part of your SEO strategy, this section of the report is where you’ll show their impact.
For rankings, you should include the site’s ranking for the keywords you’ve identified as most valuable to a customer.
Just keep in mind that rankings are no longer everything and SEO – we now know that countless factors, such as history, user geographic location, and personalization can all affect rankings.
7. Recommendations and next steps
Recommendations may not be the first thing that comes to mind when under a mountain of data, but recommendations and next steps are ultimately what the customer is looking for at the end of that report.
Your next steps and recommendations will use all of the data you’ve pulled and applied to the strategy moving forward, so there’s an actionable plan for improving inefficiencies and maximizing success.
One last note
The best way to show your progress with SEO reports is to compare results from previous reporting periods.
Choose whatever frequency works for you and your customer—quarterly, year-over-year, etc.—and use it consistently to show growth.
Put all of these aspects together, and you’ll have the perfect SEO report every time.
More resources:
- SEO Reports: Which Metrics Are Important and How to Use Them Well
- 7 common enterprise SEO reporting mistakes to avoid
- SEO status report
Featured image: fizkes/Shutterstock
