Tips to Design a Good SEO Report
Search Engine Optimization is about optimizing the impact of every tactic you employed to channel traffic to your business website.
Planning and executing the strategy is only one aspect of the job. The other is reporting. Knowing what to report is just as important in ensuring maximum returns on your digital marketing investments.
The Good and the Bad SEO Report
There are two types of SEO reports.
The good ones and the really bad ones. There is no in-between.
1. The Good: Summarizes important data collated. Provides insights and suggests actionable activities for each.
2. The Bad: Raw data. No explanations. No suggested actions.
What must an SEO Report have?
An SEO report is a report on the performance of a website in search engines. SEO reports focus on domain metrics, organic traffic and search engine rankings.
They are an in-depth analysis of the website performance that has been condensed into easy-to-understand insights to help you make informed decisions on the next course of action. Their main purpose is to identify the effectiveness of tactics and techniques applied thus far and to propose any changes for improvement.
GoForPost – the leading SEO specialist in town – is sharing their SEO reporting template with you so you will know what elements to include the next time you’re running SEO reports.
1. Planning the Client’s Goals
An SEO report is only as good as the client. It is important that at the planning stage of the SEO strategy, the client is involved. Understanding the client’s needs, the nature of their business, their target audiences, and industry trends are key elements in the design.
If you design an SEO report without your client’s input, you’re setting yourself up to fail. Spend some time with the client and design the best report that can benefit his/her business.
2. Making it Easy-to-Understand
Don’t assume that every client that comes to you for reports are digital natives and will know how to read complex statistical data. It is important that the report is laid out in an easy-to-read format for everyone.
At the end of the day, remember that the client may have a limited understanding of digital analytics and will be basing their judgment on the SEO report you present to them. If you want them to return for more reports, you will have to reach out to them – just as they are trying to reach out to their audiences.
3. Covering the most Crucial Elements
An effective SEO report must be able to address all of the following:
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Show progress. The before and after scenario. A good SEO report can demonstrate to the client that progress has been attained through the tactics you proposed. If the data is reporting no significant growth then perhaps it is time to revisit the strategy and introduce new activities.
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Explain the data. A good SEO report analyses search engine activities and provide insights into each.
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Suggest recommendations. The report must be able to give recommendations to the client on how to reach strategic goals.
4. Incorporating Measurable Milestones
Different clients may have different SEO needs but there are still some measurable that every client will expect to see in their reports. Here is a list of them:
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Website ranking – compare rankings before, during and after SEO implementation.
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Traffic management – identify the pages with the most hits and the ones with the least.
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Sales data – provide data to show conversions to actual sales for ROIs.
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Backlinks activities – identify the type of backlinks to the site.
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SEO performance – identify bottlenecks and implementation issues to be resolved.
5. Taking the time to be Professional
Easy-to-read is important so is a presentation. Taking the time to design a report that looks professional and is personalized to the client goes a long way in impressing the client.
A good SEO report will have easy-to-read charts and diagrams as well as short, precise explanations and recommendations.
Read a case study by Enticehq and grab more insights on content development.
6. Knowing where to start?
There are templates available online for you to download and customize to your client’s goals.
If your client is a small business and only aiming for local search engines, you can customize the organic traffic slides to local geographic locations to pinpoint where the most hits are coming from.
If they are interested in high-quality content, you can focus the slides on content pages to see which page is generating the most interest. It could be their branding page because of an amusing video they have posted or their blog page because of the interesting articles they have been posting. Drilling down helps the client make improvements to their website to improve ranking status.
7. Knowing what to report
Depending on the client’s goals there are many things an SEO report can show. Here are just a few of them:
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General SEO health
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Missing alt tags
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Broken links
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Duplicated content
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Low word count pages
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Ranking
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Keywords
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Traffic
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Backlinks
8. Summarising the SEO Report
Your client is engaging your services because they do not have time to analyze complex data.
If you are preparing the report for them, then you must make sure that it is properly summarized to include all important information such as rankings, traffic, completed outstanding tasks and so forth.
SEO Reports are not easy. If you are a business owner without the expertise or time to prepare your own SEO reports, then it is wise to engage the services of a professional SEO optimization company to design your strategy, monitor its progress and track its performance. The money you invest in this venture will significantly improve your business website’s reach, customer engagement, and conversions. For more information talk to the team at GoForPost.