What is an SEO report?

A monthly SEO report is a vital part of a digital marketing agency and that’s because, this is technically where you see the results of whether the SEO issues you fix on a daily basis has improved or dropped significantly. An SEO report is a detailed report which helps your client to compare and contrast with last month’s ranking using Google analytics to analyse the traffic and ranking keywords over the past month to their websites and online presence.

A monthly SEO report essentially have all the valuable insights on how a website is doing. There must be actionable insight with key factors that a client can understand on how their business is doing online.

This monthly update can either be used from an SEO toolkit like Ahfers, SEMrush, SEO PowerSuite, Moz, Rank Math etc. An SEO report can produce analytic data such as the ranking progress of a website, back linking and SEO health, organic traffic progress. As a matter of fact, the SEO monthly report produces the performance of the SEO strategies a company takes, and helps them to figure out which one works best.

An SEO report should convey:

• Insights

This has a lot to specifically do with highlighting issues in relation to SEO and areas that need to be worked with

• • Progress

This shows why the client hired you to do the job apart from the different number of digital agency companies out there. As a matter of fact, this much show the progress that you have given to the website

Why is an SEO template necessary?

Having an SEO template actually helps even a novice consultant to pitch an idea to the clients. That is why, it is not really necessary, however having this as a guide can ensure you tick all the topics that a client will need to see to convince them that the SEO strategies are working.

As a matter of fact, having a monthly SEO report template will give beginner SEO strategists a structure to organise and have it as a guide for them to even create their own.

What are the contents in an SEO report?

1. SEO health

This generally has to have the more important and technical issues and errors which will affect the website in terms of SEO visibility.

2. Backlink health

This is a list or incorporated strategy which will show you what type of websites are bridged to yours in terms of black linking and generating enough of traffic and engagement to your website.

3. Ranking Progress

In a ranking progress chart, it will help the client have an idea about what is happening with the website, if anything has changed; or if there is a possible drop off which then can be immediately rectified by both parties.

4. Organic traffic progress

This helps the client and the SEO strategist to work out a plan and understand the amount of organic traffic is being generated to the website, apart from that you may also have an idea on what pages are driving traffic.

5. Sales/Leads

This shows the clients a tangible ROI gained from the SEO strategies which you will use as a digital marketing agency.

6. Report Summary

Okay, so a report summary can be daunting to a client. That’s why it would be best, if you explain it to your client in simple and plain English. Realistically, when you are generating an SEO report there are a lot of technical terms related to SEO that people don’t understand.

Break the summary into:

• Project goals and KPIs – This measures the performance of a website for organic searches
• Tasks completed – This proves that there has been progress with the website
• Result overview – This shows the results after the measures have been taken for the website

7. Keyword Ranking

When you are first helping a client to reach some specific target keyword for traffic, we often try and see what works best, and how popular those search terms are on Google. If a keyword is not performing well, then you may use an alternate suggestion and figure out a way to strategize a way to get traffic via research of search terms and popular words used on the internet.

How to create/ generate an SEO report?

So, when a client wants to see his progress with a website, we, as a digital marketing agency must understand is that we shouldn’t have too much of unnecessary information on it. Instead, having just the above 5 categories can help a client understand not just visually but, once we send in a monthly SEO report; they can track the changes to see if there is a significant change or not to their website.

The truth is that however, when you are seeing drop downs it’s not that the digital agency isn’t strategizing but, trying to work its way through the path using different keywords or off page and on page SEO tactics that can be used.

Here are a few tricks to help with creating an SEO monthly report:

1) Pull the data

Show them proof as to why this is happening, where it’s going wrong and show the charts and graphs to your clients as they are unaware of how the website is operating from the backend.

2) Explain it to the Clients

Even though you are sending you clients a monthly update on their website, you must always try to explain to them about what is happening. As a matter of fact, there are often times where a client doesn’t understand and they assume that it is our fault that the website isn’t picking up its traffic. That is why it is crucial that you explain to them about the website.

3) Make suggestions

When your client wants better results, you can always suggest your ideas to the clients. When they want to improve traffic to their website you can either suggest keyword changing, or even working on backlinks and etc. to drive more traffic to the website.

You can always try to ensure that your client can see rather than hear the numbers, who wants to hear them?

Having nicely placed charts is also easy for a client to have an idea of what he is getting into. So, if you would like to create a template of your own with colours, it will be great to have an insight as to how a website is actually doing.

How long does it take to create an SEO report?

It doesn’t necessarily have to take an awful amount of time to create an SEO report, as a matter of fact, when you are making an SEO report, we often have to export data, pull from recollection, cleaning it up, copy and pasting not to mention downloading graphs and etc.

In fact, we often spend a whole lot of time trying to create a very fancy report to the client, however, one should always remember that a client has to be able to read the SEO report so, don’t get flustered if you can’t create a really aesthetically pleasing report.

A report that has no substance cannot help you for a long period of time.