Best Practices for Creating An SEO Report
As a marketing agency, one of the main jobs that you have is to send reports to your clients. You have to tell them what you have done, what steps did you take and what are the growth of the campaign and other details.
But there are quite a lot of people who are not sure what things they should consider while creating an SEO report. And if you are one such person, then I am here to help you out.
In this article, I am going to talk about the Best Practices for Creating an SEO Report.
So here we go.
Best Practices for Creating An SEO Report
Report what they want to know
There are quite a lot of people who create SEO reports by highlighting areas that their client does not really care about.
Instead, you need to report only what they want to know. As your clients are busy, so they do not have much time to go through a detailed report or anything. Instead, they look for the important metrics in your report.
So if you are pitching a client for the first time, you will need to identify the business objective and then create a plan which can achieve the goal. Then you have to execute the plan and report the metrics based on the progress that you need.
In other words, you will need to choose the appropriate KPIs to match their business objectives. And you will only need to stick on those while you report.
Set Specific Goals
You will need specific goals while creating an SEO report. While you start working with a client, always mutually decide a specific goal. Like in the first month, you can tell your client that you will be delivering about 3000 page views and mutually agree on this.
This way, you will be able to tell your clients that you have achieved the goal, and if you did not, you could talk about why you missed hitting the target.
Usually, when you do not mutually agree on a specific goal, your client always expects better results for you. Even if you deliver 4000 page views in a month, your client might ask you why it was not 5000?
But when you set a goal, you guys will talk around it only.
Choose helpful Data Visualisations
Are you planning to deliver your clients a pretty report, but without any data? If yes, then do not. Of course, to put your data in a pretty way, you can hire a design agency or graphics designer. But if your data is not helpful, it will not work for you.
So whenever you are creating a report for your clients, always choose charts and graphs that can deliver metrics clearly. Also, it is easier to understand. Some of the popular chart types that you can use are bar charts, pie charts, and line charts.
Tailor SEO Reports to your Clients’ Needs
Always tailor SEO reports based on your client's needs. You may think of creating a default reporting template. As it will save lots of time of yours, and you do not have to create a template for each client.
But you should know that different clients have different SEO knowledge. Also, they have different expectations of you. So the template that you are creating for a client might not match the other client's needs.
Instead, whatever report you are creating should match the client’s specific needs. This way, your client will pay more attention to the reports, and it will be easy for you to deliver what your client is seeking.
Know who you are writing reports for
It is pretty important to know who you are writing reports for. For example, if you are creating a report for an SMB owner, there is a high chance that they will have no SEO knowledge.
In this case, you need to create reports which are easy to understand and do not get into the complicated and technical stuff. Instead, you should keep your reports straightforward and use an easy language.
So you should really try to understand your client first.
As it will help yourself to understand what kind of reports you should send them.