What and how you report on your SEO efforts depend on how you set up expectations with your client. While SEO reports are dependant on a client’s business type, this is what everyone generally wants to see:
SEO KPIs – Evaluate SEO metrics that are closely tied to revenue growth.
Ranking progress – See how rankings of the most important keywords have changed.
Organic traffic progress – Check how the previous two aspects translate into absolute traffic numbers.
Backlink growth – See new, valuable referring pages that drive traffic and/or pass link equity.
SEO health – Know that the website is doing well from the technical SEO perspective.
Your work doesn’t end with just dumping a bunch of metrics into a document, though. You need to interpret them. Your SEO reports should convey the impact of your work in the most succinct and coherent way possible. That’s how we made the template as well.
Now let’s get back to the expectations between you and your client. The report should primarily contain what you’ve previously discussed. If you sent an SEO report without educating the client beforehand, you’d get a lot of questions and demands to show more data. This is even if the SEO report is perfect. That’s because you’re the SEO expert, not the client.
I’ll explain all the used metrics and data as we go through the slides later on. But I also highly recommend you to check out our articles on SEO KPIs and SEO metrics that actually matter. These will help you and your clients be on the same page.
How long does it take to create the report?
Based on what I’ve heard, SEOs can spend anywhere from 30 minutes to a few hours per month on each SEO report. This depends on several factors:
Dividing the workload like this whatsapp number list allows both the vendor and the affiliate to focus on their strengths. The improvements are similar on desktop and mobile. Most of the focus in 2021 was on mobile results.
Your responsibilities in the project
Complexity of the project
Your SEO experience and knowledge
Your data analytics experience and knowledge
Reporting format you and your clients prefer
Let me expand on the last point. It seems most SEOs prefer using the good old PDFs and decks for reporting purposes:
Our SEO report template is also in a deck format because it’s the easiest to use and read for everyone. The downside is you have to go through new data every month and put it together manually.
Some seasoned marketers prefer to use automated data dashboards like Google Data Studio, Tableau, or Power BI. These may take you a lot of time to set up initially. But they can update all the data automatically, saving you time in the long run. If you’re wondering about this option, we’ll be releasing Ahrefs’ GDS connector soon to help you with that.