Decoding SEO Reports: A Guide for Clients

Your organization hires an SEO agency with industry expertise and begins partnering with them. During the interview process, you asked questions about reporting and the agency promised regular reports to keep you up to date on progress.

Now it’s the end of the month and you’ve received multiple SEO reports. But they’re a bit confusing and filled with jargon that you don’t know. No worries – we can help decipher the reports so you can make smart business decisions about your agency relationship and your SEO strategy.

Importance of SEO Reporting

SEO reporting is a key part of creating a working and collaborative relationship with an SEO agency. Without regular reports, it’s easy to overlook progress toward your goals. Because SEO takes months to see measurable results in terms of ranking or significant traffic, key metrics can demonstrate small progress toward your goals that will soon likely turn into significant success.

Additionally, reports provide clear and concise communication between your organization and the SEO agency. By getting reports on a regular schedule, you know when to expect updates and are not constantly wondering about progress. Additionally, you ensure that the agency doesn’t overlook sharing important results that can make a difference in your business decisions.

SEO reports also help demonstrate ROI to stakeholders, which is especially true given the often lengthy timeline to see significant SEO results. Because reports can show traffic growth, keyword movement and lead generation, you can share these documents with business leaders. By providing data about ROI, you can increase the likelihood of your organization continuing to invest in partnering with the SEO agency.

Getting the Most Value from Your SEO Report

The most important aspect of reporting isn’t that your agency sends you a report each month, for example, but that the report meets your specific needs and expectations. As the customer, you should talk to the agency about any changes needed to the report to make it useful to your organization. The report should be a tool with business value, not another document to handle each month.

Some agencies create generic reports that are almost identical for each client, except for the metrics. Be sure to ask your agency about customizations and review the reports to make sure that they are specific to your goals and your industry. Agencies that do not customize reports may be treating SEO as one size fits all and not creating an individualized solution for your organization.

Key Components of a Modular SEO Report

While each agency and SEO tool uses different report formats, the most common format is a modular approach to reporting. With this type of report, the agency provides clear and defined sections that address each of the areas that affect the overall SEO results. Because SEO rankings and traffic are based on multiple features, this type of structure makes it easier for organizations to get the full picture of their current status and how to achieve their goals. If your agency is not currently offering modular reporting, start a conversation and discuss their thought process for the current format.

Not all modular reports are the same, however. You can customize the components based on your goals and current focus. During the collaboration process, be sure to share any sections of the modular report that are not useful as well as any components you would like added. Here are common sections of a modular SEO report:

Traffic Analysis

This section provides the answer to one of the top questions that marketers and business leaders have: How many people are visiting the website? While this metric is important, this section should also answer two equally important questions: How are visitors finding your website, and how do they engage with it?

While it’s easy to get into the weeds with traffic numbers on specific days, the most important thing to look for is trends. You want to ensure that your traffic is steadily growing instead of declining. If you see the numbers going down, then talk with your agency about new strategies to try.

This section also can help you discover which referral channels are most successful. For example, if LinkedIn is providing a higher number of referrals than X, your marketing department should focus its efforts on LinkedIn. The referral numbers show that visitors likely to become customers tend to come from LinkedIn over other channels.

Other key trends to look for include high bounce rates on specific pages and short session durations. These metrics can indicate that people visiting these pages are not finding what they are looking for, so these pages may need revamping. Additionally, check which pages are performing well, which can give you clues on new types of content to create.

Conversion Tracking

While traffic is a positive sign, the real goal is to turn traffic into customers, which is measured by conversions. This section specifically measures quantifiable actions, such as visitors purchasing a product, turning into a lead or signing up for a demo. If you are seeing high traffic but low conversions, then you are likely attracting a lot of people but not the right people for your business goals. You need to focus on searching and make changes to your strategy to better target people who are likely to buy. In some cases, you are attracting the right people but need to strengthen calls to action to push them over the line.

Next, look at the details of the conversion metrics. By identifying which specific pages are high converters and low converters, you can then see what is working and align your strategy in that direction. Be sure to look at the sales funnel compared to conversions and identify where in the funnel you are losing conversions, which can help guide changes to content strategy. Additionally, identify which keywords are driving conversions and prioritize continuing to rank in these areas or similar searches. These keywords are attracting website visitors who are both your target customers and ready to buy, which is the golden combination.

Keyword Ranking Overview

In this section, you will find everything you want to know about your website and keywords. You will see detailed information about performance for each of your targeted keywords to help you determine if your strategy is working and spot new opportunities. If your report does not include competitors’ keyword rankings, ask your agency to add them to the next report to help find new keywords and compare your progress across the industry. When reviewing this section, look specifically for keywords that are close to moving to the first page, which is a significant jump, and make sure your agency is going to focus on these keywords in the short term.

Technical SEO Metrics

Your SEO rankings and organic traffic can only improve so much if you have significant technical issues. This section highlights any issues that may be holding back your SEO success and provides insights on how to fix any issues. Be sure to check that the report confirms that search engines are able to index and crawl your site; if this is not happening, then your SEO will rapidly decline. Another key area to verify in the report is mobile optimization to determine any new mobile usability issues. Next, check out any pages with slow site speed and prioritize fixing those issues. Additionally, look for other errors, such as broken links and duplicate content.

Actionable Insights and Strategic Recommendations

While the other sections are useful, you want to make sure that each report includes clear next steps for both the agency and your organization. Since certain actions are more likely to make an impact, the list should be prioritized. The agency should share both your current SEO strengths and areas for improvement. Key areas to look for in terms of action include content creation and backlink profiles, since those typically involve close collaboration with your organization and the agency.

Tools and Templates for Effective Reporting

SEO tools make it much easier for your agency to create effective and easy-to-read reports. If reporting is not part of the services your agency provides, you likely still need to present data to your stakeholders to show progress on the SEO investment. You can use tools to create reports for your own business leaders.

Here are three tools to help make reporting easier:

Google Analytics

While many people start using Google Analytics because the price – free – is right, the tool offers many features that help create usable and accurate reports on a wide range of key metrics. In addition to reports about users, devices and traffic, you can create numerous other types, including acquisition, engagement, retention, conversion and monetization. One benefit of Google Analytics is that you can create custom dashboards for each stakeholder highlighting the most important metrics for their role as well as their integrations, especially with Google Ads. However, users often report that Google Analytics is time consuming to learn and the data is only retained for 14 months, making long-term comparisons difficult.

SEMRush

Because SEMRush is a comprehensive, end-to-end SEO tool, you can create customizable reports that cover most aspects of SEO, including keywords, traffic, backlinks and competitor analysis. Additionally, the tool conducts regular site audits and identifies technical SEO issues affecting indexing and crawling. However, SEMRush’s high cost and learning curve make it challenging for organizations to use simply for reporting. However, if your agency is using SEMRush and not currently providing reporting, have a conversation about adding in reporting as part of your package.

DashThis

Organizations with limited budget and ramp-up time that want more than Google Analytics offers can turn to DashThis. In addition to extensive integrations and automation features, the tool is relatively easy to use with its drag-and-drop interface combined with multiple reporting templates. However, DashThis offers fewer customization options than other reporting tools and does not provide the deep analysis of multiple KPIs like SEMRush.

Talking with Your Agency about Reporting

As the customer, your input should be included in many aspects of the reporting. Here are three key conversations to have with your agency about reporting:

Automation in SEO Reporting

When talking with your agency about reporting, don’t overlook the topic of automation. Agencies that automate the process provide many benefits to their clients. Because automation requires less human intervention, the agency has more time to focus on SEO tasks that require a human touch. Additionally, automation typically creates more accurate reports using real-time data. Automation tools that integrate with multiple platforms also make it easier to compile all data into a single report for you instead of providing multiple reports from different tools.

Frequency of Reporting

Another key topic to discuss with your agency is how often they will provide reports. Monthly and quarterly are the two most common options. While weekly is technically possible, this short interval makes it harder to spot meaningful trends and is typically not recommended. If the proposed frequency for reporting does not work for your organization or stakeholders, discuss the topic with your agency to find a solution.

In the majority of cases, monthly is a better option for reporting for a range of reasons. However, organizations with a low budget or slower-moving campaigns may find that quarterly reports meet their needs. With weekly reports, you can spot changes in metrics, such as lower traffic or decreased conversions, and make adjustments before a long-term effect sets in and damages your website authority.

Delivery of Reports        

Many organizations overlook the importance of the delivery phase of reporting. Because collaboration and communication is key to a successful SEO partnership, organizations with agencies that simply mail over a link to the reports often find the process lacking. By setting up time to go over the results with the agency and key stakeholders, the agency has the opportunity to provide any additional context to the metrics as well as propose additional changes. You also can then ask questions and make sure you feel comfortable with the next steps.

The reports and the reporting process often sets the tone for the ongoing relationship between your organization and the agency. By making sure you understand all aspects of the reports and feel that the process meets your needs, you can set your organization on the path to the greatest possible SEO success.