Creating Relevant SEO Reports: How To Smartly Sidestep Intangibles & Achieve Intended Goals
Making SEO involves picking measurable objectives and picking goals in context to client’s business priorities. Optimizing pages, mapping keyword, backlinks and site-crawls are part of building the correct picture in the SEO report.
Often when creating SEO reports for team members or clients, you might find it difficult to choose which information is relevant enough to be included, and which to omit.
Your SEO report should help the client get results that help improve their working and business outcome. What really, is your client’s priority is the first question that you’ll need to answer. Is it to improve sales or ranking or specifically to generate more site traffic? Is the client hunting for means to explore a new market? The business goal may differ but the basic rule should be to create a concise and clear report with only the most relevant data. Make sure the report works towards a hypothesis that is followed through with goal, information, procedure and observations.
Starting On A SEO Report
Confused about what the final outcome should be? Ensure that you outline and discuss the current SEO goal with client. Choose tangible objectives and explain why they’re chosen. With fixed objectives in mind, the how-to of achieving them have to be charted. Prepare a hypothesis or a step-by-step plan, keeping the explanation transparent. Outline procedure early using different report tools like Moz Pro custom report tool and list out your observations.
Keyword Performance & Page Optimization
Keyword performance is about listing improvement in ranking, change in search visibility of different keywords and poor keyword performers. This helps compare client’s ranking with their competitors’. Include details of page optimization in the report using the page-optimization tool that also suggests how to improve ranking in an illustrated format. Mapping inbound traffic can be a direct indicator of progress but do outline reasons behind it.
Generating the Links
When increasing the number of back-links is one of the goals you’re working at, giving an update on the progress is important. Your report should explain the type of links you’re trying to get and whether your focus is on quantity or quality. Also, lay on the table for the client the effect that the methods you’re planning to use for this will have on his back-link profile and business goal. Your client should know if you’re working to get links from websites that have a high MozRank and MozTrust.
Site Crawling
A good report can be made better by inserting modules of site crawl into it. Through them the efforts made can be linked in context to the client site and well illustrated. Outline every step taken, like redirecting a 404 page to active page. Here a graph can be included.
The Next Step: Drawing Conclusion & Review
Moving beyond the plan, its relevance and impact, the report needs to list the next steps of action. Secondly mention steps that are working and those that are failing to generate desired response. Inform about plans to optimize pages or building links, etc.
Give the report a last glance before sending it out to the client. Make sure its focuses on steps being taken and their result, in an easy language keeping SEO technicalities to bare minimum. The presented data should reflect true value towards the objective.
Auto send the custom report with the option available with Moz Pro that allows weekly or monthly emailing of reports for keeping clients update on progress. Making a smartly designed SEO report helps you and the client channel the investment and efforts in the right direction.