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 is 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.

Choose helpful Data Visualisations

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.

SOURCE: Dig­i­tal Doughnut