Nowadays, SEO (Search Engine Optimization) has become one of the most important marketing strategies. The main reason is that SEO can help any company improve its visibility, awareness, exposure and credibility, among other things, in the online world. However, not every company has a marketing department that’s knowledgeable about the SEO best practices, which is why such companies oftentimes hire reliable digital agencies for the purpose of outsourcing SEO.
From the agency point of view, it’s vital to create regular SEO reports that will update clients on the state of the campaign, as well as inform them about how various SEO activities affect their business goals. Furthermore, these reports need to be perfect so that everyone can understand the information that’s included in the report. In most cases, managers or CEOs are not SEO-savvy and they have no clue what jargon words like bounce rate is or why it is important. Your job is to explain to them what it all means, as well as the importance of your actions the best way possible. With that in mind, here are a few essentials to create perfect SEO reports for your clients.
Portray how your strategy aligns with company goals
More often than not, you’ll find yourself in a situation where clients are only interested in the end result. They want to know how your strategies affect profitability and the company’s bottom line. However, that doesn’t mean that you should skip every other bit of information in your SEO report. As a matter of fact, you should make an effort to show clients how your strategies align with their business goals. After all, SEO cannot produce viable results after a day or two.
Therefore, help them understand that your SEO strategies will create value over time until every business goal is eventually achieved. Here’s an example of your strategy’s overview and actionable tactics for achieving a business goal:
Stage one – Market and competitive analysis
Stage two – Outlining a plan
Stage three – Choosing tactics to focus on
Stage four – Measuring results
Stage five – Making adjustments to current strategies
Include visual elements in your report
Every SEO report needs to be insightful and rich with information. However, raw data can be overwhelming for clients, which is why your report should also be visually appealing. Humans are visual beings and they can comprehend visual data more easily. Therefore, include visual elements, such as images, pie charts, graphs and, of course, a bit of color into your reports. This will make the data understandable and memorable, while also ensuring that you won’t have to spend hours on end explaining the information to clients every time you provide them with a report. Visual presentation can tell a story much more quickly and efficiently than any other means.
Back your claims with facts
If you only claim that a certain strategy you’ve focused on will improve conversion rates or website traffic, the chances are that clients won’t be inclined to take your word for it. Instead, you should back your claims with facts. The best way to do so is to monitor certain KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) and relevant metrics that will back your claims. Analytics is always more or less accurate when predicting marketing outcomes. To make a perfect and factual SEO report, you should opt for an efficient SEO reporting tool that will help you gather information from various metrics and KPIs.
This will make your reports more viable, as they’ll contain not only speculations or predictions but actual insights from analytics that will back your claims. In other words, presenting clients with evidence that your strategies are, indeed, working will ease their minds.
Recommendations and advice
Every SEO campaign is unique, which makes your client reports unique as well. One of the important sections in your reports should be recommendations and advice for clients. As a marketing expert, you should suggest the next steps to clients even though the goals they set have been achieved. As you already know, SEO is dynamic and the rules change often. That said, Google alone changes their algorithm multiple times on a daily basis. In other words, SEO campaigns require constant improvements, changes and tweaks. Oftentimes, you have to change your approach completely. Any advice or a recommendation to clients on how to move forward should be your priority.
Making an effort to meet client needs, even a small effort, can go a long way for you as a marketer and for the agency you work for. In today’s competitive market, digital agencies that can truly deliver results and provide value to their clients can ensure their success in such an environment. SEO reports are not easy to make, especially the perfect ones. Clients tend to be quite demanding and picky when it comes to results. After all, they want to know whether or not the money they’ve spent hiring your agency is worth it. That’s why it’s important to take the time and effort to craft truly perfect SEO reports that will ensure client satisfaction.
