How to Vivify Boring SEO Reports With Storytelling?

Monthly SEO reports provide a channel for informing the clients, displaying the return on investment, and leading the conversion for upsells. These are the only way to keep your clients informed about the work you have been doing for them, and therefore, these reports are a crucial part of any SEO strategy.

Even though SEO reports are vital in numerous ways, they are generally reduced to mediocre PDF templates with a general message forwarded to clients every month. If this sounds anything like your own SEO reporting approach, you are literally passing up on many significant opportunities to retain your clients and upsell with cautiously built storytelling strategies.

Good SEO reporting makes a huge difference when it comes to building trust with your clients. Effective customer service and results are the bread and butter of every digital marketing agency, and SEO reports help us distinguish ourselves from the competition and build long-term relationships with our clients.

If you are struggling to retain your clients or are just looking for a way to engage with them more, SEO reports are your answer. It is an excellent way to show your clients what you are bringing to the table, which is all the more so crucial today to retain them.

This blog will talk about all the items a useful SEO report should contain and how you can leverage storytelling strategies to establish a relationship with your clients, demonstrate the worth of your tactics, and unveil vital upsell opportunities right away!

1. Organic Impressions, CTR and Clicks

We all know that SEO has a wide reach, but if you want your target customers to click through to your content and convert, you need to communicate the right message to the right audience at the right time.

That’s the reason a useful SEO report must incorporate critical metrics such as clicks and organic impressions. Although this information does not give many insights into on-page performance, it sure provides you a starting point to talk to your clients about the changes in user behavior and market trends.

You might want to cover the prominent data at the beginning of your SEO reporting call so that you can dive into a more in-depth discussion with your client. You can also use this data to suggest additional work for clients, demonstrate annual performance improvement and justify work during particular times.

You can show data from Google Analytics and Google Search Console to help your clients better understand how you can influence their website’s overall performance.

While clicks and impressions do not communicate too much information regarding how a site is performing, this part of the SEO report can be used to slide into upsell opportunities and demonstrate your SEO skills.

2. Keyword Ranking

Considering that search engine optimization is all about ranking particular pages for target keywords, you should incorporate keyword rankings and performance in your SEO report. Moreover, you can use the keyword information to kickstart a discussion around user intent with your clients and bring your SEO strategy back to their overall business goals.

You can leverage this opportunity to show your clients that you understand SEO is a lot more than just about keywords and Google. After all, if your strategy fails to draw in quality traffic and increase conversions, your clients will have to choose a different agency.

You can consider the following topics with the keyword performance in your SEO reports:

• Present photos of keyword tools you use to display patterns. Demonstrate the monthly changes in your SEO report to show the progress and increase the energy of every client call.
• Suggest outreach, content optimizations, and other SEO strategies to drive your target audience. Link keyword ranking to your results, services, and the overall business goals of your clients.
• Conduct a quick SEO and content audit to offer new opportunities for additional work. This is an excellent way to boost your client’s website performance while also simultaneously growing trust and monthly revenue.

Keyword rankings give a powerful indication of market trends, user intent, and competitor strategies. Utilize keyword rankings in your SEO reports to aim attention on success and shift the discussion towards upselling opportunities to tweak and bring your strategy in line with your client’s business goals.

3. Explain How Users Engage With Your Content

Generally, SEO strategies are explained in theoretical terms; therefore, as SEOs, it is our responsibility to join the dots for our clients between their business goals and SEO metrics whenever possible.

You likely spend plenty of time discussing multiple SEO marketing angles, such as the user intent, website performance, customer journey, and so on. All these factors impact the way search engines rank content in the SERPs, and above all, these factors affect the conversion rate.

Nevertheless, SEO is theoretical and pretty hard for our clients to grasp on their own. This is the reason we need to incorporate detailed terms, explanations, and visuals in our SEO reports to educate our clients and build trust with them. o

Displaying how users engage with your client’s website is vital in educating them better and helping them realize how your monthly SEO efforts affect their site’s performance. In addition to this, if you can call attention to a blockage in the customer journey and offer interlinking, CRO, or on-page optimizations, you will be on your way to establish trust with your clients and ease into an upsell opportunity.

4. Google Analytics Events

You can use Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager to demonstrate how your SEO and CRO tactics influence user behavior when they land on their website. Educate your clients about on-page SEO by tracking clicks on particular call-to-actions throughout specific pages.

Content optimization and CRO are excellent ways to help your clients achieve their goals. Moreover, these are high-margin projects that can produce instant results.

When reviewing your clients’ results, you might want to focus on how users engage with their call-to-actions, which means you’ll need to connect Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager to demonstrate that your optimizations drive more site visitors to profitable pages such as sales pages and contact pages.

For instance, let’s suppose you perform a quick test for a client to showcase how with a few alterations in their on-page SEO, you could boost their click-through rate for different pages and posts. You spot a couple of pages that would yield the best results, and then after a month of testing, you incorporate call-to-actions in multiple pages that you have optimized.

After a couple of months of these on-page optimizations, you notice a significant increase in their click-through rate and lead generation on your client’s website. This test was undoubtedly a success, and as a result, you can now show your client the impact of your on-page optimizations on their lead quality and bottom-line.

Now, this is an excellent example of how you can use SEO reports to build relationships with your clients, showcase your knowledge, and experiment with ideas. Moreover, this can all result in profitable upsells. Nevertheless, this all wouldn’t be possible if you don’t have an educational and winning report to support your claims.

Even though it might not be a massive part of your SEO reporting process, try and incorporate metrics around user behavior to show how users engage with your clients’ on-page content. Such data can also help link prominent SEO metrics to your client’s business goals, which again should be a major part of the overall story you are going to communicate to your clients every month.

5. Include Local SEO Information

It is no secret that local SEO forms a vital part of any SEO strategy to bring in qualified leads and sales for local businesses. There are many tools available in the market that you can use to keep your listings and NAP information uniform for your clients. You can also utilize a local SEO reporting tool to showcase the results of your local SEO strategy.

Local SEO services not only provide instant value to clients but also offer you an excellent opportunity to pitch supplementary services such as blogging, outreach, and page optimizations.

Although local SEO may not necessarily be an ideal fit for all your clients, you’ll be able to uncover incredible opportunities if you provide honest solutions to address your clients’ needs and show accurate data to demonstrate the value of your overall SEO efforts.

Therefore, make sure you incorporate local SEO metrics within your monthly reports when it seems logical and touch on the metrics that are of importance for your clients, such as driving direction requests, foot traffic, and phone calls.

Wrapping It Up

While reports aren’t the primary reason why many SEO professionals chose this career, monthly SEO reports allow us to paint a picture for our clients to show them how our monthly efforts have helped improve their website performance. It will enable you to demonstrate the SEO services’ value and retain your clients for a long period if you master the art of conveying a story around every metric and then link the results back to your agency. So go ahead and keep these five tips in mind the next time you set out to prepare SEO reports for your clients.