SEO Reporting : Win Prospective Client’s Trust

Make your clients feel truly valued with comprehensive and streamlined SEO reports and make your job simpler.

Want to learn how to create SEO reports that educate IT services companies in London, grow their trust and rapport with them?

Read the full article on how to make IT services companies in London feel truly valued as part of your SEO IT consultancy, and even on a more personal level, too.

Fundamental of SEO Reporting

Creating organised reports, establishing value, and setting goals

1. Concise and Distinct Reports

Spend time to remove all unnecessarily information. The result should offer a glimpse into what’s been happening for the last reporting. Let your values and expertise stand-out using easy-to-understand and clean white-labeled results even when the data doesn’t show much gain.

Although reporting is not the most important thing SEO IT Consultancy in London do, reporting keeps the ball rolling. Through reporting, SEO IT support services in London show their clients what they did and why SEO is important.

SEO reporting has purpose:

  • used to identify areas of the site that require improvement; and
  • used to monitor progress and measure impact

Reporting can be simplified and optimised like SEO. Accurately portraying the result of your labor and highlight ways to streamline the process allows SEO IT support services to focus on delivering results to their clients.

Here’s what IT services companies in London expects to see in SEO reporting:

Remember, create cleaner reports that only contain the most valuable and insightful information that show case actual result.

2. Setting Goals

Goals reflect what IT services companies want to accomplish. In setting goals Search Engine Optimisation IT consultancy should consider the SMART goal:

SEO SMART Goal

SMART Goal Example:

Specific: Roc Pro Mktg Ltd want to boost the blog’s traffic by increasing the weekly publishing frequency from 3 to 5 times a week.

Measurable: 10 % increase on the average number of pages per visit.

Achievable: Roc Pro blog traffic increased by 10% last June when we increased the weekly publishing frequency from 3 to 5 times a week.

Relevant: As the blog traffic increase, Roc Pro boost brand awareness and generate more leads, giving sales more opportunities to close.

Time-bound: End of July.

Defining clear report goals provide IT services companies to proper SEO maturity expectations.  Keep in mind that white-hat SEO takes time to see the results. However, monthly reporting can help IT services companies see not only their gains but what’s the next campaigns.

Building Relationships

Strengthening relationships with clients, stakeholders, and prospects

Providing insight that’s useful to IT services companies is what a report is. SEO IT support services have to determine what the client want to achieve.

Know Your Client

Understanding client is the key to giving them good service which in turn results into strong customer relationships and new sales through positive word-of-mouth recommendation. However, understanding them requires a thoughtful analysis to identify their preferences and anticipate their needs to exceed their expectations.

Here are ways to understand your client better:

1. SWOT Analysis

It’s important to evaluate each client individually. Knowing their strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats let’s SEO IT consultancies in London to see where the client wants to stand.

2. Competitor Audits

Your clients’ competitors are a goldmine of information. SEO IT support services can use every aspect of that SEO strategy to help clients’ website with organic traffic.

Performing an SEO competitor audit lets you:

  • Learn what works and what doesn’t in your industry.
  • Find competitors’ weaknesses, and capitalise on them.
  • Find competitors’ strengths, and replicate them.
  • Understand what SEO tasks to prioritise going forward.
  • Understand how difficult outperforming competitors in the SERPs is likely to be.

Take note that, just because an organisation may not be categorised the same way as your client certainly doesn’t mean they aren’t a competitor. Everything above is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to competitive analysis for SEO.

3. Website Audits

Website audit aims to increase online presence. It also identifies problems with website architecture. Thus, sites learn where to improve technical site performance.

These includes:

Reporting can be used to supplement client pitches that show case where the opportunities are and where they’re falling short. Providing potential clients compelling pitch that features customised advice for their IT services website before they signed with a search engine optimisation IT consultancy can gain loyalty.

  • User engagement
  • User experience
  • Traffic
  • Functionality
  • Site health
  • Website performance

Content , Keywords, and Rankings

Analysing keywords, SERPs, and content marketing

1. Gain/Loss Report

This part of the report should comprise at-a-glance findings that let everyone know instantly where they stand. This include:

  • Meeting goals
  • Missed goal
  • Discrepancies
  • One-sentence explanation of the most important finding

Be sure to include positive and negative results. Leaving the negative information leads to unrealistic expectation and clients’ mistrust.

2. Keyword Analysis

Elaborate keyword intent and proposed new keyword targets for the next reporting period.

There are 3 types of intent:

  • Informal
  • Commercial
  • Transnational

These types of intend helps SEO IT support services to better understand user’s behavior and though processes.

Analyse data by determining the following:

  • Relevancy
  • Competition
  • Difficulty
  • Search volume

These can help SEO expects decide what is worth targeting and what isn’t.

3. SERP Features Analysis

A process of looking at the top-ranking websites in the SERP or Search Engine Results Page to determine whether the keyword you want to rank for is relevant and the possibility to outrank your competitors. SERP analysis is an important part of keyword research.

Hence, recognising the importance of SERF while winning its different features, it can be tough to sustain on to. You don’t have to panic if your client has lost some SERP feature. You just have to educate your client that it’s the norm and emphasise your action plan for improvement.

4. Keyword ROI 

Clients are prudently aware that a drop or rise in keyword rankings can correspond to profit increases and decreases. To calculate keyword ROI, multiply keyword search volume, CTR, conversion rate, and conversion value. Educate your clients on how keyword rankings can directly affect their business. Let them know how your work can impact profit and which SEO improvements will lead to an increase in search rankings.

5. Content Marketing

Content marketing and SEO always go hand-in-hand for one affects the other in a multitude of ways. Here are some of the areas to consider content-wise that has an impact on your website ranking:

  • Highly trafficked pages
  • Page optimisation
  • Rankings for core keywords

Link Building

Explain critical information about link building efforts

Educate your clients on the importance of links, like how link building work and how links are correlated to site performance

1. Domain Metrics

Know which domains link matters. Using Domain Authority metric will determine the overall value of a domain that’s linking to you.

2. Domain Authority

Domain Authority is calculated by evaluating multiple factors into a single DA score. This includes:

  • Linking root domains
  • Number of total links

Domain Authority can provide a good overall metric to clients when they want to know the quality of domains that are linking to their sites.

3. Links Lost and Acquired

One of the important parts of any report. The number of links that are lost and acquired throughout a specific reporting period will always change. There are plenty of reasons why a link may be lost or gain that’s outside of your control. Make sure to educate clients about the difference in link quality and the nuances in that matter.

4. Anchor Text Relevance

Links from trustworthy, well-known sites that correlate with IT services industry helps give search engines a clue as to what the site is about and which industry they serve. Thus, anchor text is not considered a strong ranking factor having good anchor text for back links is important.

5. ROI

Determine the strict ROI of links can be difficult, especially when there are benefits that go beyond a single conversion, things like:

  • Brand awareness
  • Quality traffic
  • Ongoing referral traffic

We cannot directly calculate the conversation of time, expertise, and effort. Make sure that clients know that it’s against Google’s guidelines to purchase links.

Link building ROI reports should focus on what goes into earning links. Record any direct and extraneous costs and make connections as to how they drive revenue.

Technical Site

Incorporate important technical SEO elements

Technical action which intent to improve search results which includes:

  • Optimising site speed
  • Including descriptive meta titles and descriptions
  • Ensuring the proper redirects in place

Educating the clients about technical issues can be a challenge. Keep in mind not to use SEO and developer jargon and focus on explaining the effect of what you’re doing. In that way, clients will understand and engage themselves about the improvements on the site. 

1. Back-end Factors and Site Health Issues

Clients are more apt at being judgmental if they notice a sudden drop in organic search visibility, blaming Google or the SEO. They don’t realise that their technical site health is the cause behind many issues with sites ranking. Here are some health issues to include:

  • Metadata optimisation
  • HTTP status codes (4xx, 5xx, redirects, etc.)
  • Schema optimisation
  • Minifying images, JavaScript, and CSS as needed
  • Removing or adding plugins to optimise site performance (and why)
  • HREFLANG implementation or issues
  • Best-practice areas, such as proper canonicalisation, disavow requests, and internal linking additions

Let your clients know about these issues that needs to be fix so that they won’t put a blame on you.

2. Impact

Never forget to include current and expected impact of changes on your report. This sets client expectations and helps them understand how ongoing technical SEO can help their website visibility and traffic continue to grow.

3. Prioritisation and Progress

Timeline of expected progress by prioritisation should be included for issues that haven’t been settled yet. This includes:

  • flagging areas that need to be addressed immediately,
  • explanation as to why urgency should be placed

Setting priorities should be according to client goals and having a concrete deadline so it won’t be neglected.

SEO reporting requires relating what the data shows to real events in the client’s business. As long as you provide them with suggestions, an action plan for improvement, and a thorough explanation, bad result is easier to digest and move past. SEO IT support services may find SEO reporting overwhelming, thinking about the troubles in making your report, the deadlines and clients’ expectations. However, it doesn’t have to be that way. 

Contact us now for a free SEO audit.