Monthly SEO report - thoughts please?

D Hayes

I'm doing some SEO work for a few clients on a monthly basis and I'd like to present a monthly 1 page report to them.

Ideally, I would like automate the report using Excel by pulling info from Google Analytics, Webmaster Tools and a rank checking tool.

I'd like to include information such as:

- current keyword rankings
- backlinks built for the month
- social media mentions/likes etc.
- site traffic

Can anyone suggest the best way to go about this? Any tutorials to set it up on Excel, or any sites that can do this for me?

Thanks in advance.

mneylon

Seomoz and a few of the other tools will do this for you

The Apprentice

I was a previously paying (Last month) and still active member of seomoz also. Fantastic forum but for $99 bucks a month for pro version. very hard to justify the cost, for what you get to be fair

The reports are good, but not fantastic.
The keyword reports are pretty good to excellent

Thats it - Im using other tools for some of the other tasks that are free .. So im not sure i wanted to spend 99 bucks for these 2 features

I have found that given the client backlink details, is quite over their head and most will tell you straight up - i dont give a **** about that give me the positives. What the Flip have you done for me this month over last month and so on ..

Stick to the positives and you should be fine, dont be afraid to mention negatives also !

D Hayes

Thank you both for the replies. I have a free trial with SEOMoz, which was very good, but as The Apprentice mentions, the cost does not justify it for me at the moment.

Thanks for the advice regarding explaining back-links to customers too. I think that I'll try to keep it as high level as possible.

The Apprentice

Ye keep to the overviews for the over technical bits, You can go into heavy detail talking about it first hand for explanations but after 2-3 months clients just don't care about digg, and stumble etc !!

They want Conversions, or traffic or whatever deliverables on the pre-contract agreement !

Best of luck with it anyway

Mrs OBumble

You sell with benefits (% traffic increase, sales increase, whatever), not features (backlink, keyword ranking, etc),

akazzz

I think there's a software which specialized in this. I think it was www.reporb.com

Rollo Tamasi

Mrs OBumble wrote: »

You sell with benefits (% traffic increase, sales increase, whatever), not features (backlink, keyword ranking, etc),

^ this.

An increase in backlinks, and an increase in rankings may not mean an increase in performance.

From my experience, it's best to separate out performance and activities and re-iterate that the activities should eventual yield a positive performance.

Look into some Advanced & Customised Google Analytics Reports and have them scheduled to go to you and the client each week (free).

Depending on how many keywords the client needs tracked, you might be able to get away with using this Firefox Extension (free!) Delve into the keywords in your analytics, determine how many keywords are giving you a good portion of your traffic and use a combination of these in your ranking report. In the company I work for, we monitor < 2% of our keywords twice a week.

A weekly rank check report only give a snapshot for a day at a specific time and there is no legislating for the range of keywords your site will be found for. So don't get too hung up with rank checking i.e: don't bombard keywords into a report because it seems like the right thing to do. Rank reports just give a general indication of how your site ranks. It's no definitive and shouldn't be treated so.

Finally, if you want to get into building your own reports, look into this guy http://excellentanalytics.com/

link8r

Some shotgun thoughts:

You could use Google Webmaster Tootls' Search Queries reports but its an average spread.

IMHO, $99 for a business isn't really a huge overhead ! I think its quite cheap. Businesses have to invest. seoMoz reports are API run, so there's quite often a huge difference in API and what the user sees when you take into account browser, location and so on. And I dont like seoMoz's advice.

Reporting on Link Building - if this is done manually, it shouldn't be a big deal to do manually - afterall, it shouldn't be in the hundreds (well, I'd hope not). But we don't ever report on this.... its just too dangerous.

One of the disadvantages of Freemium is that it gives the idea that everything is free. Businesses have to invest in the right tools - very
important if you want people to invest in you!

ellinguistico

need to look at this later.

dgerryd

If you are providing a service and you are an seo guy not saying you need seomoz's software cause there are plenty out there for free but you should be benefiting from this software included in your price. Even if you do a good job and rank them well that doesn't mean they will see a rise in sales if there site is **** and they have no clue about conversion this is nothing to do with you so I would keep it simple and show them the traffic stats that you have improved since you started providing you have increased the traffic to the site that's easily done with google.