An SEO ranking report is meant majorly for your clients. It is a statement that shows how well their website is doing in search engines, and how well you have helped them be visible to the world. What clients love is proof and not just words of assurance. Giving them a report shows them how well their website has grown and makes them satisfied that their money is being put into good use.

“The beauty of SEO is that, instead of pushing a marketing message onto folks who don’t want to hear what you have to say, you can reverse engineer the process to discover exactly what people are looking for, create the right content for it, and appear before them at exactly the moment they are looking for it. Its pull vs push”    Cyrus Shepard

A good report shows your clients how much traffic their website is getting, which sources/medium are responsible for most traffic, and how many leads they are getting because of their website. They could give the credit for the traffic to their site to their adverts, or to the work you have done and proof that shows you are responsible for the good things is with a report.

As an SEO expert, SEO reports inform you on what is working and what is not working. This will determine your strategy from here for better results. So working without SEO reports is like working blindly.

It is a perfect way to show your clients you have been working. A report proves to your client what has been done better than word of mouth. Constantly giving your clients good returns on their investment lets them know your value and builds trust more.

Clients most times depend on other forms of getting traffic apart from SEO. With a report, you can show your client what you have done. This way he gives you credit for traffic, leads and sales.

It is important that you master SEO ranking reports using a proxy so as to make it detailed and easy to understand. By using SEO proxy, you can measure your traffic growth and know if there is an improvement in your keyword position ranking. You get your data handy and this way, your client knows what is going on, recognizes your inputs and has confidence in your agency and the work you are doing for him.

There are good SEO reporting tools like SEMRush, Moz, Ahrefs and others that build good reports for your clients. These reports let them understand what is going on without bugging them with other technical information they won’t understand. What clients just want to see are more leads and more conversions.

Basically, the benefits of mastering your reporting are for the following reasons;

1 . To track the progress of SEO efforts

2. To highlight issues in the website and areas that need work to be done

3. To measure the conversion rate

4. To show the number of sales and leads that are being generated

5. To let you know how effective your SEO strategy is

6. To track all backlinks, social shares and also views

7. To allow the SEO expert to make inputs that will help improve the site ranking

8. It measures the client’s return on investment

A TYPICAL SEO RANKING REPORT LAYOUT

It is tempting to want to show everything to your client in the report. Metrics like page visits, unique visitors, change in position of keywords and others are available but it doesn’t mean you should add everything in your report. A typical report should have the following layout;

1 . Website traffic which is broken down by page

2. The keyword rankings for each page

3. Comparisons for each month with previous months

4. Website health

5. Backlinks report

6. Conversions

7. Your recommendations

8. Further month’s plan

Some reports usually include social shares and comments to help satisfy the demand of visitors.

A report is better and more appreciated if it is short and to the point. Recommendations are not a chance to tell stories but should be kept short. Your report should show measurable results and tell the client what to expect.

In the end, your report depends on what you want to focus on. It also depends on what your client is interested in and the kind of business. But a necessity in all reports is keyword rankings, comparing traffic, and sales/leads.

It is very important to know what to include in your SEO report to show your progress to your client. But what is even more important is being able to set up a report that will be loved and understood by your client.

The idea behind making a report is to show that you are a valuable member of the team and add to the growth of your client’s company. You use reports to retain your clients and even impress them by adding what is to be expected and what is to be done in the future. The following are best practices to follow when making an SEO report:

1 . CLEARLY DETERMINE THE OBJECTIVE

Before you even begin with the report, it is important that you clearly define your objectives. Having a plan and goals and objectives to meet up with can allow you more efficiently work towards them. With this at the back of your mind, you can show your clients what you have done and how you did them in your report.

What this means is that you have to always bear the agreement you had with your client, and clearly state them in your report. This is necessary because it shows you worked with a goal in mind, it shows the steps you took to achieve those goals, and it shows your progress so far.

2. EXPLAIN THE DATA

It is not enough to present your client with data that shows what has been done and allow them to come to their own conclusion. People have the tendency to see the bad side of things especially if they expect a lot. To add a summary of the data, explaining what it means so they can follow. You should do this especially if your client doesn’t have knowledge of SEO as they won’t know what to look out for in the data or how to read it.

3. OFFER OBSERVATIONS AND OPPORTUNITY

The use of SEO doesn’t guarantee anything in the short term as there are several approaches you will try out before seeing results. These results take for as long as 6 months and that is why you need to always let your client know what you have observed. These observations you present should support the opportunities you found in the data and acted on.

They will be some bad pieces of data but look at it as an opportunity and focus on improving on it and presenting it to your client as your observation in your report. Always be honest with your client. If the technique you are using isn’t showing good results, let your client know and move on to what you can do to achieve your goal.

4. OUTLINE NEXT STEPS

Whatever steps you want to take, it is good that you make it a habit to let your client know about it. This way your client is involved and knows what is going on. Let your client know what you are doing and why you are doing it.

There is so much information available for your SEO ranking report, but it doesn’t mean you should put in everything. Apart from the fact that it could make your report packed, your client doesn’t have an interest in everything. What clients do want to see in an SEO report are;

1 . The amount of traffic their website is now getting

2. What is their website ranking position

3. Where are they getting the traffic from

4. The number of leads and sales that are being generated through their website

5. The overall health of the SEO

6. A summary of the work your SEO agency has performed

7. Proof of a positive return of investment

Other information you can include is the analysis of any successes or setbacks you faced, a list of works performed, and also recommendations on the next steps. Your SEO report is ultimately determined by your client’s style and what is needed.

There are a number of tools that can be used to create an SEO report. Here is an SEO report that was created with the use of Raven tools which is an SEO reporting software. The report is a combination of keyword, ranks, search console, conversion data, site-auditor, and google analytics.

STEP BY STEP GUIDE TO SEO REPORTING USING RAVEN TOOLS

1 . Log Into Your Raven Tools Account

Log into raven tools at www.raventools.com 

2. Choose Campaign

There are a number of campaigns to choose from ranging from an SEO report for your own website or a client’s website. You select a domain from the list of campaigns or select “add new campaign” for a new site.

3. Open WYSIWYG Report Tool

On the left side menu, there is a WYSIWYG reports tab. Click on it. The reports engine builds, automates and stores custom reports for you.

Having clicked this, the dashboard will show you a list of previous reports and give you the option of creating a new one.

4 . Create a New Report

Click on “new report” to start creating a new SEO report. After clicking on it, a box with further instructions will come up with “4 steps to an interactive report”.

Based on your client’s preferences, you will include which metrics you want to include in the report so as to make it according to your client’s needs.

5 . Add Metrics

Select “add more metrics” to add analytics and desired features to your report.

With Raven Tools, you can include a wide range of metrics, integrations, and also text summaries. Some SEO report metrics you can add include;

1 . Google analytics and search console

2. Site auditor results
3. Social media analytics
4. Backlink profile
5. Majestic SEO and Moz Domain Insights
6. Keyword rank

Apart from what is provided, you can import your own data, add attachments and add summaries to the report.

6. Connect With Google Analytics And Other Integrations

After deciding which metrics to add to your SEO report, make sure your report is connected with your client’s accounts. These accounts in question can include social media profiles, google analytics and any Ad accounts.

7 . Add Logo And Customize

Raven tools don’t take credit for the report you are making. It allows you to label your SEO reports so that your client sees your report as coming from your agency and not from a third party. This is very important as it builds your client’s confidence in your agency.

You have the option of either adding your logo or your client’s logo. And then add your summary of data points, a description of work performed and a recommendation for future SEO efforts.

8. Edit Report Setting

One good thing about using report building tools is the ease at which you can turn a customized report for a client into a template you use for all your reports to various clients. This saves lots of time ad still gets the job done.

Going further than creating a template, you can schedule the reports to be sent from a customized mail and brand the reports to show your high level of professionalism.

From the settings menu, you can:

1. Name the SEO report
2. Save the report as a template
3. Set the report for use as one time or schedule regular reports
4. Set the date range
5. Add a cover page to the report
6. Add a table of contents
7. Set the number times the reports are to be sent

Adjusting these settings allows you to easily create a template for each client and generate new reports for them automatically as often as is necessary. This will save you lots of time and allows you to do more jobs and efficiently too. And the option of adding a cover page helps you further customize the report, making them more unique to each client.

9. Publish

After all, has been done and you are ready to publish your report, select “publishing options” and click on “publish report”.

A message will pop up telling you that your report has been updated and that you can view report via a link.

10 . Share Or Send The Report

After you have viewed the report, you can export it as a pdf file by clicking “export pdf”.

To send via email, go to your WYSIWYG Reports dashboard, choose report and select email report. Enter the recipient’s email address and click send.

1 . SEM RUSH

SEM Rush is a software that does keyword research and position tracking. It is highly valuable in the context of competitor research. It hosts a variety of position tracking features and is suitable for those who want to stay ahead of competitors in SEO campaigns, business, and social media campaigns. SEM rush also allows you to integrate your google search console and easily create disavow files.

2 . MOZ

MOZ was formerly called SEOmoz. It is a SaaS company that makes your SEO reporting readily available. Moz is affiliated with more than 1 billion global digital marketers and SEO reporting tools. It allows you to find keyword suggestions, accurate search volume data, and SEO competition. Moz also allows you to view on-page metrics, explore options for content and link building and to see how your campaign compares to competitors. For all comprehensive reports and everything SEO, Moz is fully equipped to help you.

3. AHREFS

Another good SEO reporting tool is Ahrefs. It is one of the world’s most highly recommended SEO online tools, second only to google’s website crawlers. It checks backlinks and features an SEO audit too.

4. KWFINDER

KWfinder is very useful if you are looking for long-tail keywords. It helps you avoid keywords that may cause difficulty in SEO while leading you to those keywords that will help with rank building. KWfinder is great at finding the most suitable keywords for an SEO campaign and also running analysis reports on backlinks or search engine result pages.

5. GOOGLE WEBMASTER TOOLS & SEARCH CONSOLE

This is a popular analytical tool that works to inform webmasters about how often their site is crawled by Google. Google webmaster tools have a pane that shows statistics of how Google sees the sites and how other search engines see them.

6. SCREAMING FROG

Screaming frog is an SEO spider ad web crawler that analysis SEO elements from web pages and allow them to be exported to other programs. Once the web elements have been exported to programs like excel for the formulation of a database of SEO recommendations.

7. KISSMETRICS

Kissmetrics is a good tool for tracking customer interactions. It provides metrics that traces a customer’s interaction with the site at various stages, displays metrics and tracks website visitors and also their actions.

8. SPROUT SOCIAL

Sprout Social is a great analytical tool that works well with social media. It integrates schedule planning, page management, and posts, allows users to view metrics and performance in a single dashboard.

9. BRANDWATCH

Brandwatch efficiently streamlines tasks that are involved with social monitoring around brands and niches. It crawls over 85 million social media websites for information about any social media campaign and business and gives an analysis of competitors too.

10. SITELINER

Siteliner is a software that scans and identifies issues with duplicate content on sites. Once the domain name is entered, siteliner crawls the site and returns information about the site content. It also has a powerpage feature that shows the number of times a page has been linked from a site.

11. WHITESPARK

Whitespark is an effective SEO tool that helps users with link building, technical SEO and content optimization.

12. SEARCH LATTE

Search latte is an SEO tool that allows you to view international google search results. It is of value to international marketers and SEO campaigns.

13. MARKET MUSE

Market muse scans the content of a site and compares it to similar content on other sites. It gives you information on what your content lacks and also allows you to create content with speed.

14. TRENDSPOTTR

Trendspottr is keyword research and content optimization tool. It allows users to catch up on content that has the potential to go viral way ahead of time, making it valuable for campaigns and social marketers.

Before generating SEO ranking reports using a proxy, you must first be successful in SEO and rank #1 when searched. In an SEO case study, Michael Karl made use of the following processes to rank #1 and generate 20,314 organic page views in 5 months:

1 . Keyword research

2. Content creation

3. On-page optimization

4. Lead generation

5. Content promotion

6. Link building

7. Proxy servers can help in generating SEO ranking reports by:

SOCIAL MEDIA ACCOUNTS MANAGEMENT

Some marketing companies manage social media accounts for people and the action of trying to access these accounts is sometimes regarded as spam by the social media websites and blocks the account. For you to have ads up you would then need to access each account from different IPs with the use of a private proxy for SEO.

SPYING ON COMPETITOR’S WEBSITE

You can check out the progress your competitor is making without being made by your competitor. This is achieved using a proxy that lets you spy without being caught.

FAST LOADING

When you use a proxy for SEO, your website is being stored as a cache on the user’s computer. This makes the site load faster and since speed is loved by Google search engine, it increases your website ranking.

WEB-SCRAPING

Web scraping involves getting data from other websites including those of your competitors. If you are caught you could get banned so a way to get around this is to go web scrapping with a proxy.

TRACK YOUR DATA

Private proxies keep track of all data that enters and exits the proxy server. You can keep track of your traffic, clicks, and SEO results so that you can implement changes until you get the desired result.