Everything You Need To Know About Client Reporting

Client reporting. Client reporting is an essential part of running your SEO business. SEO reports allow your clients to quickly understand exactly what’s being going on and can give them a good overview of how the campaign is progressing. It also allows them to see your plan of action going forward which is crucial as communication is key when it comes to keeping clients. Now, these SEO reports can be extremely helpful or they can completely turn off some clients. So I want to spend some time looking at exactly what is involved in putting one of these reports together and how to make sure that these are helpful for your clients.

Because if you’re providing great work for your clients and they’re getting amazing results but you’re not mentioning these results in your report, then they’re going to have no idea what you’re actually doing or the results you’re getting for them. So as a result, they aren’t going to be too happy. So we want to make sure the reports are simple enough and also highlight the impact on their business our work is actually producing. So what should you include in an SEO report? Now there’s a few things you should mention, such as a project overview. So give them a general overview of how the campaign is progressing. We should also let them know the completed tasks.

So this should be all the things you carried out that month. Maybe built some backlinks, maybe you built some citations and so on. The third thing you want to include in your report is going to be your keyword rankings. So this is super important. You need to let the client know exactly where they are in Google for the keywords they want to target. Are they in position 64, are they 24? This is extremely important. And it’s really important we convey this across to the client as well. The fourth thing you want to include as well is the backlinks you’ve built.

Now, a lot of SEO companies, they tell clients, yeah, we’re building tons of backlinks for you, but they never actually showed the backlinks to the client. I’m not a fan of this method at all, as there’s literally no transparency between you and the client. If you want to keep your clients in the longterm, you need to be transparent and let them know exactly the work you’re implementing. The fifth thing you’re going to want to include in your report is going to be the website traffic. So it’s really important as well that you let the client know exactly how many visitors they’re getting to the website every single month.

As you build out your SEO campaign, the client should be getting more and more organic visitors. The reason being is because they’re going to be more visible for their keywords, attracting more eyeballs on the website, so as a result, the website traffic is going to be increasing. So it’s super important you let the client know exactly the numbers they’re getting in regards to website traffic. The sixth thing you’re going to want to include in your report is the goals or leads generated. Now, this is more beneficial for those who are working with eCommerce clients, as you can track a goal as someone who purchased a product which is ultimately the main aim of your eCommerce website, to sell more products.

So when you’re tracking how many goals you’re achieving it can give you a better data insight into how the whole campaign is progressing. The seventh thing and the last thing you’re going to want to include in your SEO report is going to be a plan for the upcoming month. So whilst you’ve given the client already an overview of how the campaign is going along and all the work you’ve done in that current month, it’s also a good idea to let the client know exactly what you plan on doing the following month as well. For example, if one of the client’s keywords has dropped down to page seven, maybe, something really bad has happened.

You can let the client know and say, hey, I noticed one of your keywords has dropped drastically in Google, so the plan for next month is to work on this keyword and work on this page and get it back to where it was on page one. That is going to add some reassurance and really just confirm to the client that you are paying attention and you are taking their campaign seriously as you noticed one of the key was dropped and as a result, you’re going to work on it the following month. So those are the main seven things you should include in an SEO report. So how long should an SEO report be?

So really and truly, an SEO report should be as short as possible. We want to avoid boring the client with unnecessary fluff. Focus on the core elements that provide value, such as the seven things I’ve just covered. Now do bear in mind, you are going to come across clients from time to time that like massive, massive reports. They like pages, they like to know exactly what’s going on, what you’ve been spending all your time doing. In that instance, you are going to want to spend a bit more time for that particular client. However, what I like to do, instead of sending one big report out to start off with, I like to send my short and concise reports.

And then once I send my first couple of reports, I then give the client a phone call and just say, hi, how are you finding the reports? Are you getting all the information you’d like? Is there anything else you’d like to see in there? So just really get the feedback from the client and find out exactly what they want to see in their reports. And if you are missing off any elements, you can then go back and add those elements into that specific client report. This way you can ensure optimum client satisfaction and that the clients are getting what they want. So how do we create SEO reports? Well, we have two options.

You can do it manually, or you can do automatically. The first option, manually, is going to require more of your time. However, there’s going to be no cost involved. The second option is going to save you tons of time, especially if you’re working with multiple clients. However, it is going to come at a price, as you’re going to have to pay for a monthly subscription. So I’m going to walk you through both methods.

I’m going to show you the exact report I used to use when I used to send my reports manually, as that as exactly what I did when I first started my business as I want to keep all of my costs really low just to make sure I had the highest profit margins possible. However, when I grew my agency and I got more and more clients on, I was actually spending so much time doing my reports every single month, I actually changed to the automatic method, which saves me a ton of time. And of course, as I had more clients, I had more money to play with. However in the first stages, you might want to do yours manually as well.

So in the next video, I’ll show you how you can do it the manual method, and I’ll actually show you the exact template that I used to send my client reports. I’ll see you there.