Steal Our search engine marketing Report Template (Impressed by search engine marketing Consultants)

Based mostly on what I’ve heard, SEOs can spend wherever from half-hour to some hours monthly on every search engine marketing report. This is dependent upon a number of components:

• Your obligations within the mission
• Complexity of the mission
• Your search engine marketing expertise and data
• Your knowledge analytics expertise and data
• Reporting format you and your purchasers choose

Let me broaden on the final level. It appears most SEOs choose utilizing the great previous PDFs and decks for reporting functions:

Our search engine marketing report template is a superb place to begin to create an search engine marketing report your purchasers will respect.

To create the report from begin to end, you’ll want the next instruments:

Prepared?

An government abstract web page highlights crucial info within the report. That is helpful for senior stakeholders who might not have time to learn your complete search engine marketing report.

That is typically the primary and final slide {that a} CEO seems to be at. Thirty seconds later, they’ll say, “Nice job!” and gained’t hassle to learn the relaxation.

What kind of issues must you embrace within the government abstract?

• A quick abstract of your search engine marketing KPIs
• “search engine marketing wins” price sharing
• Crucial duties accomplished throughout that reporting interval
• Duties that require additional consideration

Next, you can add other SEO KPIs. A popular choice to include for many businesses is conversions:

The screenshot in the report is taken from a custom Google Analytics (GA) report that only shows the source/medium dimension and selected conversions to avoid all the clutter in the default reports. The conversions are then compared month over month (MoM).

Depending on the client and their business type, you may want to include different or more KPIs. The rule of thumb is to choose metrics as closely tied to the business’s revenue as possible.

You can see two of the most universal SEO KPIs: organic traffic and conversions. But you could also include search visibility.

Search visibility is the SEO version of one of the most important marketing KPIs: share of voice (SOV). It’s keyword rankings on steroids.

To get the search visibility metric, create a project in Ahrefs’ Rank Tracker. In there, paste the main keywords that encompass what your audience is searching for (you need to finish keyword research first), tag it to enable filtering later, and you’re good to go:

You’ll then find the search visibility metric in the Competitors overview tab:

4. Keyword Rankings

The overall search visibility KPI isn’t the only visibility metric that clients are interested in. They have certain product categories or topics on the blog that usually differ in relevancy and value to the business. That’s where measuring search visibility for keyword segments comes into play.

5. Keyword winners and losers

While search visibility metrics are the best proxies for your organic growth, most clients also want to see position changes for their most important keywords.

Presenting position changes of hundreds of keywords in a deck will get pretty messy. We should, therefore, satisfy the client by only reporting on the most important keywords for the business. You can then include the rest by linking to the exported spreadsheet if the client wants to see it.

6. Brand vs non-brand split

For well-established brands, you can segment non-branded organic traffic to show the impact of removing brand traffic.

The reason for showing non-brand traffic here is to avoid attributing organic traffic changes to marketing activities unrelated to SEO. For example, if the marketing team launched an excellent PR campaign or started airing mass marketing campaigns, your organic traffic would naturally go up just from people looking up your brand more.

To show a more accurate overview of organic traffic progress, simply apply a query filter in Google Search Console (GSC):

Again, you want to compare the current month’s performance with the previous month’s and, ideally, even with the year-over-year (YoY) performance. Most businesses tend to have seasonal swings, so some MoM comparisons may look bad just because the high season has already ended.

Be careful here. GSC only provides 28-day views and comparisons by default. So, you need to select custom dates to compare whole months. Remember to compare the same number of days. Let’s look at a scenario where a month has 31 days (e.g., in such a case, start the comparison on the last day of August to account for only 30 days in September).

7. New referring domains highlights

Next up is the backlink profile, which shows the client what new, interesting links they have found in the last 30 days.

If you are responsible for backlink profile growth, go to Ahrefs’ Site Explorer, check the Referring domains report, and filter for new referring domains in the past 30 days (as you can see in the slide.)

We show the highlights of the newly acquired referring domains sorted by Domain Rating (DR) score because it’s a solid and easy-to-understand proxy for improving backlink profile growth.

If you engage in outreach activities and see a new referring domain gained from that, you can highlight it in the screenshot so the client can differentiate between earned and acquired links.

8. Link building progress

This slide details the link building work done during the month.

It can include:

• The pages you built links to.
• Any standout, new referring pages.
• The number of links those pages got.
• Your link building statistics, e.g., prospects contacted and success rate.
• Any insights you deem relevant, e.g., exceptionally good or bad link bait content.

There’s much more to evaluating link building than the number of links and DRs of referring domains. But that’s relevant for link prospecting before launching outreach campaigns, not for SEO reporting. Your clients don’t need to dive into all the nuances.

9. Technical SEO health overview

This is where you’ll give a snapshot of the website’s health that considers all technical SEO errors and issues.

To get this data:

You get the Health Score on the overview page after each crawl is completed.

If this is your first time crawling the website, use this Health Score as a starting point. You can start referencing monthly comparisons in your second report.

Now, you may be thinking that one metric isn’t enough to reflect the whole state of technical SEO. And you’re right. But you’re usually not sending SEO reports to developers or other SEOs who can easily understand more in-depth information. For this reason, the Health Score is the best proxy for a client-friendly, technical SEO metric.

Again, this doesn’t mean you shouldn’t report on more technical SEO metrics. Some projects involve huge websites and complex, technical SEO tasks. In such situations, the client will likely welcome crawling and indexing statistics and details about the most important issues impacting your website’s technical SEO.

After sharing all the data and reports, you should give them a plan of the most important SEO tasks you’ll be working on next month.

A quick to-do list summarizing your main focus for the following month will be enough. It will also serve as an anchor for your next SEO report.

So there you have it. A fully customizable SEO reporting template to give to your clients. In case you skimmed through the article first, here’s the link again: