Why Is Client Reporting an Important Piece of Your SEO Puzzle?

Has this ever happened to you?

It’s the end of the month and you’ve scheduled an in-person meeting with one of your major clients.

You’re more than satisfied with the results you’ve achieved so far and you cannot wait to present them to your client. There are also lots of fresh ideas that will definitely impress them.

However, your client shows up and tells you that they cannot do business with you anymore.

They cannot see any significant improvements in their rankings, traffic, and conversions, finding it difficult to calculate their actual return on investment.

So, what would you do in a situation like this? Give up on your client?

Of course not.

The SEO industry is rising at an astonishing pace. Signing and retaining a client is now more difficult than ever, so sending your clients to your rivals is not even an option right now.

Instead, you need to provide them with something truly valuable. Something that will prove them wrong. A document that backs all your statements up with undeniable facts.

Yes, I’m talking about a detailed, personalized, and data-backed SEO report.

Crafting a Report that Backs up Your Actions

One of the major mistakes SEO agencies make is not sending detailed SEO reports to their clients regularly. Some of them create reports on a monthly or quarterly basis. Others, however, do so only when it’s time to renew a contract.

In other words, your clients pay for your SEO services regularly, without having a full insight into what they are investing in.

And, guess what. Sooner or later, this will make them angry and they’ll leave you for your competitors.

This is why you need to create comprehensive SEO reports for each of your clients.

And, when I say reports, I don’t mean confusing PPTX or Excel sheets. You cannot polish up your data and show the most representative results to your clients anymore. They are aware of what a proper report should look like. They expect real-time feedback and, if you give them anything less than that, they won’t be satisfied.

Building Relationships Based on Trust

We’re living in an era where transparency is prioritized as the foundation of a healthy client-agency relationship.

Your clients know how fierce the digital landscape is and how difficult it is to rise above their competition and keep relevancy.

This is why they want you to keep track of their SEO progress regularly and inform them regularly about it. They want to be active participants in this process.

And, solid SEO reporting is an important piece of this puzzle.

It helps you show your clients where they are at the moment and what has changed from the moment they hired you. Most importantly, it helps you support all your decisions with actionable data and provide genuine insights into your strategy.

This is how you will build client relationships based on transparency, trust, and honesty.

Your Clients Need to Understand the Basics of SEO

The mere fact that one hired your agency means that they know little about search engine optimization.

And, this is why they usually set unrealistic goals and expectations that may hurt your relationship on multiple levels.

Some of them won’t even care about the SEO techniques you use. They’re interested in end results and how much money they will get from them.

So, to make sure you take your client experience to a whole new level and strengthen your relationship, you first need to explain the simplest principles of SEO to them. Help them get the basics right- explain how the SEO industry works, what the most effective techniques are, what steps you need to make to improve it, and what KPIs to track. They need to know that this is a highly turbulent field, where things can change upside down in a few days and this doesn’t have to be your agency’s fault at all.

Agreeing on what KPIs to track may be challenging

Before you start building an SEO strategy for your client, you need to understand their goals and choose the KPIs you’re going to track.

The metrics you monitor need to be relevant to your client’s business objectives.

So, having a nice, long talk with your client may be a good starting point.

Discuss their ambitions and ideas. Be honest with them. Tell them how realistic they are, based on their current performance.

Keep in mind that most of your clients don’t care about those metrics that don’t translate into cash. There is far more to their KPIs than monitoring rankings, website traffic, or blog posts’ shares and likes. These are just tiny aspects of their overall SEO strategy, a process that requires a continuous work, a lot of dedication, and achieving gradual, small wins.  

Remember, it’s paramount that you consult your clients when choosing the right KPIs and that both parties are on board with your strategy.

How to Create a Spotless SEO Report?

Now that you know why creating a killer SEO report is important for keeping your clients happy, you need to learn how to craft it to boost user experience. Here are a few elements of a good client report you need to keep in mind:

• Mind the design. Present mountains of your keywords, digits, and data in a simple and visually appealing way to make them easy to follow.
• Always brand your reports. Make sure you personalize your SEO reports by adding your clients’ logos.
• Make your data available. You’ve invested a lot of time and effort into building a spotless SEO strategy for each of your clients. Now, it’s time you show them the results. Apart from sending them a report via email or handing in a printed version, you could also create an URL for each reporting dashboard so your client can view the data effortlessly.
• No matter what tools you use, present your insights in one SEO report. Choose automated reporting tools that integrate with a wide range of SEO tools (Google Analytics, Moz, Ahrefs, etc.) which allow you to combine the widgets on a single dashboard.  
• Keep them simple and to the point. Your goal is to make SEO, which is already complicated for most of your clients, easier for them.

Over to You

Reporting regularly keeps you on track.

This is a great opportunity for you to provide your clients with real-time insights, make them a part of your SEO strategy and, prove how valuable your agency is to them. Above all, you will manage to improve your collaboration and build a stronger relationship based on transparency and honesty.

How do you use SEO reporting to boost client satisfaction? Let us know in the comment section below.

Emma Miller

A digital marketer from Sydney. Works as a blogger, Senior Editor for Bizzmark blog and a lecturer at Melbourne University. Tweets industry related articles.