We’ve touched on how to compile an effective marketing report for a client, which can also be accompanied by an SEO report for their website. The purpose of the SEO report is to show your client that your strategy is working; driving traffic to their site and increasing their leads.
There are so many factors that can affect the search engine rankings of a website, so the trick to a good SEO report is to include only the most relevant information for the client. You need to show them what they want to see and leave out all the minor, more complicated SEO metrics.
Clients generally only care about traffic volumes to their site, their website rankings, their keyword rankings and their sales performance as a result. A good SEO report needs to make this information clear, easy to understand and concise. It needs to show data and facts to support the findings, and be just the right length.
If the report is too complicated and long, they’ll lose interest and stop reading, but if it’s too short, they won’t see the data or the value in your services. Here’s a guide to making an effective SEO report.
Outline your SEO objective
At the beginning of the report, state what your SEO goals are and how they can benefit the client’s business. Whether your goals are to increase rankings for certain keywords or to generate more inbound links, the client should know what you are working towards from the outset of the report.
Clearly explain how these SEO goals will help their business – be it “to increase traffic to your website” or “to boost monthly sales”. This will make it clear to the client why you are doing what you’re doing. This will give direction to the rest of your report and will manage your client’s expectations from the start.
Describe your SEO hypothesis
Just like a science report, a hypothesis is something that you will be testing and forms the foundation of the report. Your hypothesis is what you think needs to be done to reach your SEO goals and the client’s business goals at the same time. Write this as a simple, informative explanation that is easy for the client to digest.
This is where you can describe the process used to achieve these goals, such as ensuring all the pages on the site have proper title tags and meta descriptions. Having a clear understanding of your process will help you to include the right information in the report and leave out the irrelevant data.
Explain your SEO procedure
Tell your client what you have been doing for the past month(s). Let them know what goals you’ve already achieved, how this has already helped their website and why it’s important for their business. Provide evidence in the form of screenshots, data and analytics.
You can explain that you’ve already fixed all the missing meta tags, optimised their pages for certain keywords, fixed their images and captions etc. Show them why you’re valuable and how you’ve already helped their business.
Include your SEO observations and data
As mentioned already, data is vital to back up your words. If you’ve fixed numerous issues and improved their rankings, show them. Take screenshots of their keyword rankings, compare previous rankings with the latest rankings – even if the rankings are slightly worse, tell them how you plan on fixing this as soon as possible.
Show your client how they rank compared to their main competitors, and how you can improve this going forward. Remind them that fluctuations in rankings are commonplace and that their rankings over a long period of time are more indicative of their true performance.
Include graphs, charts and numbers from Google Analytics to show how their performance has changed over the past month. If traffic has increased, highlight this as they will definitely want to see the positive results of your work. Show them where this traffic comes from and how that’s related to the SEO work you’ve done in the past.
If there are more inbound links, show the client the numbers and where these links come from. Sometimes the quality of the websites linking back to your client’s site is more important than sheer numbers of links from rubbish websites.
Whatever work you’ve done in the past, use data to back up your claims and show the client tangible facts and figures that visually represent the worth of your work.
Conclude your SEO report
After all the relevant information has been explained and shown, tell your client what you plan on doing next. Let them know how you will improve their website in the coming month, and how this will have a positive impact of their business.
If you think something is not working with some of your strategies, explain how you will focus on fixing these issues. Once again, summarise what you’ve already done in a clear manner. Review your report and make sure that your conclusion ties in with the data provided.
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