5 Parts Every Effective Client SEO Report Should Have
The goal of a client SEO report is to show how your work is helping meet the business goals. In the sample report below, notice how little SEO jargon is being used. We’re focused on what the client cares about most – how many leads, customers, and sales this work is bringing in. It’s simple, easy to read and understand, and straight to the point.
This report is also great to review over the phone with the client as this is your opportunity to also ask the clients how well the leads are converting as this can be out of your control if they close on the phone or over email for example. This will help them see where they need to improve, how they can help the results, and also recognize (and appreciate!) the improvements each month.
We can keep it simple with this and let these numbers drive our monthly SEO actions. Always look at the business goals for SEO and if there is something you need to specifically track then you can of course add that and add it to the report if needed. Just keep the report focused on what matters most!
What to Track?
#1 Return on Investment (ROI)
Companies don’t care about rankings, keywords, or any type of analytical data before they care about their return on investment.
Is SEO making or losing us money? And how much? Here’s an example…
If $2,000 is being spent on SEO and it’s producing $10,000 in revenue, that’s a 400% ROI.
Here’s how you get that:
(Revenue – Investment) / Investment = ROI
Note: for e-commerce site, this is easier as you can see stats on site. For lead generation sites, the business will need to convert those and you may or may not get access to that data.
If you can’t get this data, you can report on conversions.
# of visitors > # of leads and then you can estimate their conversion on the backend.
#2 Traffic
In this section you should cover:
- How much traffic is coming into the website?
- What happened with this traffic?
Meaning what action(s) are they taking? Examples: sign-up for a trial, sign-up for a newsletter, watched a video, fill out a form, etc.
- Secondary to the above, you can also look at other traffic KPIs including:
- Sessions
- New v returning visitors
- Conversion rate for different goals
- Secondary to the above, you can also look at other traffic KPIs including:
- Sessions
- New v returning visitors
- Conversion rate for different goals
- Time per session
- Pages per session
- Bounce rate
#3 Landing Pages
#4 Rankings
This is where you should be reporting on real rankings (what is actually sending targeted traffic). We focus on revenue and traffic before rankings as rankings don’t always paint a full picture of the success of SEO. Rankings without traffic or revenue don’t matter.
Here are good rankings to report on:
- Rankings per page (different keywords per page)
- Rankings in positions (top 3, top 10, top 50, average position)
#5 Other KPIs
Other KPIs include those important for SEO but much less cared about by business owners.
These KPIs can include:
- Visibility in organic search results (market share you have compared to search volume)
- Website health (a look at the technical side of things and on-page optimization including meta titles & descriptions, headings, duplicate content, robots.txt issues, etc.)
- Crawability (are search engines crawling your most important pages?)
- Organic CTR (% of people who click on page after their search triggers an impression, the higher the better)
- Backlinks (number of referring domains and backlinks, domain authority score)
Sample Client SEO Report
Client Name: _______________________________ Report Date Period: __________
Overview
Our goal is to assist {insert client name} with generating {insert number of} new leads per month. In the past 30 days, traffic to the has been increased by {insert %} and more of the new traffic is actively looking for {insert industry} services.
There have also been {insert number of} lead generation form completions and {insert number of} calls that have come from direct SEO efforts. This is a {insert %} increase from last month.
Goal Completions
This has been a month full of progress, and we’re really excited to share the results that we’ve been seeing.
A large increase in site visibility in Google has increased form completions from {insert number} in the previous month to {insert number} this month and calls from {insert number} in the previous month to {insert number} this month.
Keyword Rankings & Traffic Numbers
This month the website is appearing higher in Google for searches that bring in customers who are ready to hire.
Current rankings
{insert chart image}
Note: the website is now appearing in position {insert number} for {insert keyword} which was appearing in position {insert number} last month. This has resulted in {insert %} more impressions, {insert %} more clients and {insert number} more lead generation form completions and {insert number} more calls.
Traffic has also increased by {insert %} from _________ to ___________ visitors.
{insert traffic image from SEO or analytics software}
Work Completed and Accomplished
Several technical tasks have been completed this month in order to achieve the results above. We have seen a quick improvement and these updates will continue to help improve your results over the coming months as well.
Here is just a sample of the tasks we have completed this month (please reach out if you’d like to go over more of the tasks and we’re happy to explain them in more detail):
- Added schema to 3 of the target webpages (which is a way of telling Google more of what the page is about)
- Increased 2 of the target web page speed (how fast the page loads for visitors) from 6.3 seconds to 2.4 seconds (Google loves to show fast loading pages)
- Corrected sitemap and internal linking issues (so Google can better understand the site and see which pages are more valuable, so those appear in results more)
Where We’re Doing Next
This month we have several tasks to help increase the site’s visibility to further increase the leads that come into the business. We are working towards an even bigger increase this month and here are just a handful of the tasks we have planned to make that happen (please reach out for more details):
- Reach out to ____________ and ____________ (websites) to discuss potential backlink and or promotion of {insert client site} which can help improve rankings and leads.
- Improve the next 5 technical site errors.
- Fix 7 citation errors (so Google shows {insert client site} in search results).
- Acquire 10 new citation sources (again, so Google shows {insert client site} in search results).
- Optimize 10 pages ranking on page 2 – 3 to boost rankings and traffic