How to impress your Clients with reports

Table of Contents

Intro

One of the first things that you’ll have to understand when you run an SEO agency is all of the relevant details about monthly SEO reports.

These reports are documents used by project managers to determine how well a project has progressed over the course of the month. You will be able to better formulate a plan by making one of these assessments.

Keep in mind that these reports aren’t only for your benefit, but also for the benefit of the client. These reports will show your clients how much work you’re putting into projects. However, you benefit from these reports by going over SEO health, ranking progress, backlinks, and organic traffic progress.

Keep in mind that local SEO reports are a bit different because they focus on local trends and campaign growth in the local area instead of worldwide.

You can use plenty of tools to go over your local and monthly SEO. However, the tools you use should only address three things: insights, growth, and recommendations.

The Five Phases Involved in an SEO Campaign

SEO campaigns are a crucial part of ensuring that projects go smoothly, and you may end up having to optimize a site so that it ranks according to Google’s algorithms. This process will include things like link building, on-page optimization, keyword research, and SEO analysis.

Remember that you’ll never know how an SEO campaign will end up until it’s come to an end. However, you can plan things out so that you’ll accomplish your goals. This will greatly increase your chances of ending up on Google’s trending pages.

There are five phases in most SEO campaigns, and following these phases will allow you to effectively compete with other companies in the industry. This approach to SEO is known as The Blueprint because of how ubiquitous it is.

Learning

It’s essential to start off by doing your research so that you know exactly what happened in the last month. You can then base your report off of how things went before.

Improving

Using prior reports, you can take a look at areas that improved. This will tell you what you need to continue doing. This will allow you to come up with new ideas.

Building

After going over prior reports, you can then go ahead and start implementing the ideas you gleaned from them. Always make sure to use your resources to the fullest so they’re not going to waste.

Promoting

You will now be ready to launch your campaign on the various channels that you use. The more you promote, the further your reach.

Evaluating

At the end of the month, you can then go on to evaluate your campaign and see how it’s progressing. Evaluation will allow you to determine the facts about how your campaign is progressing and how you can improve it further.

How to Evaluate a Campaign

Since evaluation is the most important part of putting together your SEO reports, we’re going to focus on what you need to do to evaluate your campaigns. This is crucial because your monthly SEO reports will show you exactly what you need to adjust to make up for your weaknesses.

Remember that his phase will ensure that you understand your faults and will allow you to adjust. Remember that the intensity of the failures and not the number of them is an indicator of how badly a campaign is going. A campaign can be riddled with minor issues, but major ones will cause more problems.

Using local and monthly reports will allow you to figure out how to rectify these faults, whether they’re large or small ones. Here are two of the most important components to account for when you’re evaluating your SEO campaign’s performance:

Monthly SEO Reports

Going over monthly SEO reports becomes a lot easier when you know exactly what you need to focus on. For example, if you’re just getting started with SEO, you may not understand what everything means, but that’s why you work on your knowledge to expand your capabilities.

By taking your time and gradually learning what each metric means, you’ll be able to put together a more accurate report at the end of the month.

Once you’ve completed a monthly evaluation, you’ll be able to see what you need to put effort into and what’s not worth wasting your time on.

SEO Closeout Reports

Your closeout report is closely related to your monthly report but it provides a more general overview of the things that you need to know without going into unnecessary detail.

This will include details about your budgeting, timelines, results, methodology, and your campaign goal. You should include everything that’s in your monthly report but sum it up for easier reading.

How to Evaluate Your SEO Reports: An Overview

While the evaluation of the SEO campaign is just a phase of the overall process, you will need to break down this phase into sub-phases of its own. This is due to the huge range of factors that go into determining how you can improve.

Google Data Studio is one of the best ways to determine your analytics so that you can figure out what to include in your SEO reports. Google Data Studio makes up a part of the Google Analytics 360 Suite and it is available alongside software like Audience Center 360, Optimize 360, Attribution 360, Analytics 360, and Tag Manager 360.

By using Data Studio, you’ll be able to analyze and visualize data so that you can put together quality reports for sharing and storing. Of course, you’ll still need to gather data so that you can work on it. At this point, you’ll be able to reorganize, format, and calculate.

Once you have all of this data ready, you’ll be able to start putting together your canvas. In fact, Google’s Data Studio features a visualization feature that you can use to outline all of the info that it gathers. It also makes it extremely easy to share your reports with people all around the world.

Using The Blueprint, you’ll be able to understand more about what you need to know about Google Data Studio. Knowing the platform will allow you to use it to excel.

When you go over the template, you’ll be able to see your pages near the top-left corner. There are also four different kinds of page categories that you can go through so that you can easily access them. You’ll also have the option to remove or customize pages based on your needs.

The All Category

The four page types that you’ll be able to take a look at in this category are organic traffic performance, monthly summary, organic landing pages, and organic traffic breakdown. This category works well for sites that need their goals to be completed, their leads to be generated, or their eCommerce to be stimulated. You can toggle between seeing the last six months and the last twelve months of history.

The eCommerce Category

This category will include demographics, a breakdown, and the organic revenue dashboard. These pages will be useful for clients that put a lot of faith in Google Analytics, which they should. As you’d expect from the name of the category, you can use these pages to keep track of GA, transactions, and revenue for eCommerce clients.

The Goals Category

This category is similar to the all category but it focuses on the bigger picture so that you can see how your client’s website has been performing in the long-term.

The Local Category

There is only one page in this category, and it’s called the location breakdown. This page will tell you what you need to know about web pages that have links with location page URL filters. This category will be a part of evaluations that deal with local page-linked landing paths.

The All Category for Keywords

This final category covers everything you need to know about your keywords. It will address what you need to know about how your keywords are ranking as well as how trends are changing. You’ll also want to look at the live links page if you’re going to be publishing content.

The Sub-processes Involved in Evaluating Monthly SEO Reports

You’ll also have to know about the monthly sub-processes involved in SEO reporting. This will allow you to compile your report, customize it, and you can also learn more about how Data Studio operates so that you can make the most of it.

You’ll want to start off by going over the output info that you get from Data Studio and you’ll also have to study what the platform can do for you. We’ll go over what you need to know about these as you progress through compiling a report. This will benefit you by teaching you more about how Data Studio works.

Setting Up Your Data Sources

There are a few sources of data that you’ll need to have established so that you can come up with accurate monthly and local SEO reports. These include Google Analytics, the Google Search Console, and a source of keyword data. This will make it a lot easier to keep your website’s sources of data linked.

Google Analytics

When you set up Google Analytics, you’ll want to copy the source of data before doing anything else. You can then change the source’s name and follow the path outlined below:

Edit connection>Account>Select website>Reconnect>Apply

This will ensure that your site is linked, meaning that it can show you all relevant metrics. You can then go on to change or format the data later on.

Google Search Console

Like with Google Analytics, you should start by copying your data source. You can follow these steps to set up GSC for both Query and URL:

Edit connection>URL impression>Select website>Reconnect>Apply

As with GA, you can change this and format it later on.

Tracking Keywords

When you’re trying to track keywords, you’ll have to put a little more work into things than you would with GA and GSC. You’ll have to start by putting all of the data into a sheet. We recommend using The Blueprint template to do so. When the data is in Sheets, you can outline it in Data Studio.

When using the template, you’ll see sources like campaign timespan, target pages, monthly keyword tracking, and more. Here are the steps involved in using the template:

1. Use the Ranktracker keyword tool to get the required info about your keywords.

2. Get data from three different periods of time so that you’re sure that you have a complete data set.

3. Make sure that the columns are properly set up.

4. Choose a campaign month on your sheet.

5. Copy the data from GSC and GA’s sources of info.

Putting Together Your Report and Sharing It

Even though you won’t have to put a lot of work into setting up your SEO report, we’ll give you some advice so that you can more effectively accomplish your tasks with a minimal amount of effort.

As we mentioned, you’ll want to use The Blueprint Template on Data Studio to streamline your work.

You can then bring the data report into the ecosystem, and since most of your data is coming from Google sources, the data should fit in well. In rare cases where it doesn’t, you can adjust things manually.

Remember to change the name of the template as well as the logo that’s featured on it so that your client doesn’t immediately see that the template wasn’t purpose-made for them.

When the charts appear, go through them and fill in what you’ve gathered on the summary page. Also, make sure that keyword info is updated every month. You should also update the content and live links pages each month.

There are multiple ways to share your monthly SEO reports, including through links or through attachments.

Conclusion

A few final notes to take include ensuring that you examine the field changes when you’re setting up GSC and GA. However, you don’t have to pay attention to semantic configuration. When you share documents, you’ll want to avoid using the reminder feature because of how annoying it can get.

Finally, ensure that the data is always updated so that you don’t have a huge backlog of work to get through.