Before you begin to build your report, it’s incredibly important to learn what's useful to the people whose business depends on your work. After all, a report is useless unless it’s actually providing insight that is applicable to those who are reading it.

Knowing the business you're serving inside and out is paramount to your success here, and interviewing your clients and stakeholders is one of the best ways to discover what they care about. There are endless questions to ask along these lines, but a few examples could include things like:

1. Which goals or metrics have you measured in the past? Why? This can give you an insight into their experience with reports.
2. Which metrics do you want to keep an eye on each reporting period? This lets you know what’s important to them and what they seem to focus on, which helps you decide which additional data points they would probably like to see.
3. How often would you like to see reports? Many SEOs report on a monthly cadence, but don’t assume that's the case with new clients. Additionally, some data (like links) may work better monthly, whereas something like keyword ranking positions could be shown weekly.
4. Which metrics do you wish to know more about? Many clients are unclear about SEO and website metrics and may relish the opportunity to learn more.
5. What did you like about the reports you’ve seen in the past? This question and the next help to gauge expectations.
6. What have you disliked about them?
7. What's your definition of success? Many clients who are educated about SEO may have a more nuanced answer here. Either way, it helps us understand what they're evaluating when reading a report.
8. How have you received reports in the past (in-person, automated, email, conference call, etc.)? What did you like or dislike about that experience? The level of involvement can affect how the report is presented to the client.
9. How does reporting play into your budgeting decisions? Seemingly an obvious question, but this helps you understand how closely they read reports.
10. Would you like any additional data or presentations delivered to you outside of regular reports? Some clients also like annual reports that compare the last year to the one previous.

Sometimes this questionnaire is worth doing on the phone if you think you’ll get more elaborate answers. Speaking with someone one-on-one helps both of you be more talkative and forthcoming. Your client might also find a one-hour meeting to go over the questions less intimidating than taking the time to respond to everything through email, especially with you on hand to address any questions or uncertainties.

But some clients will want to have time beforehand to think about their past experiences before writing down answers. It all depends on the person or business and their communication style. If they seem more eager to take calls rather than get things done through email, a meeting is likely a better option. If you can’t tell either way, ask them.

Knowing your client's preferences is just one side of beginning regular reporting and ongoing work. It’s up to you to do your own due diligence to see what's been done in the past and how you can leverage your goals, client expectations, and competitors to do work you’ll be proud to report on.

Nine times out of ten, the client’s perspective on a relationship is leaps and bounds different from the agency or consultant side. This can be good, bad, or indifferent, but it’s up to you to dig up past reports and data to help suss out historical performance and identify helpful changes to improve your client’s experience. If you have the odd chance to talk to their previous SEO provider, do it, even if you must do so with the lens of knowing the relationship ended for one reason or another. Any information you can get on what's been done before is valuable for your future efforts.

Past reports offer a strong foundation on which to build new goals and objectives, whether you decide to keep reporting on past metrics or not. You can see where the past focus was and whether or not that's still relevant, or should shift. Many times your clients will look to you to determine what the focus and goals of the project should be. You're the expert — they want to know your recommendations.

Here’s why it’s important to evaluate each client individually: It’s tempting to report on the same metrics for all your clients. It’s easy and duplicatable, and you know firsthand how SEOs love easy solutions that scale. But that doesn’t mean that the same report over and over again will properly showcase all the hard work you’ve done for each specific client. In fact, a cookie cutter approach to reporting will likely leave out important tidbits and facts. It’s worth the time and effort to also do a competitor audit, an initial website audit, and even perhaps a SWOT analysis to see where your client stands.

Competitor audits

Some of the items to consider in an SEO competitor audit include:

• Who the client determines is their competitor, as well as “sleeper” competitors they haven’t considered
• The history and future of the industry and product offerings
• The unique value of your client’s offerings compared to others
• Competitor organic SEO performance
• Competitor PPC ad campaigns
• Keyword rankings for top industry terms

Most clients will have a list of two to four competitors they can rattle off at the drop of a hat. But in most cases, these are businesses that have been in their crosshairs for years, if not decades. While they're probably not wrong, don’t take a client's word as the be-all-end-all for who they're competing with in the online space. Proper research will reveal other outlets they hadn’t considered. These could be places like third-party stores on eBay and Amazon for retail, nonprofits for specific services, or government agencies in certain locations. Just because an organization may not be categorized the same way as your client certainly doesn’t mean they aren’t a competitor.

Website audits

A true website or SEO audit is its own beast that we've covered many times. But via the lens of reporting, there are few additional points to consider when auditing a site to see what needs to be improved in SEO.

These include:

• What are we going to change that needs to be tracked immediately to gauge our progress?
• Which keywords are crucial to helping the client get ahead?
• Which errors need to be tracked monthly as we fix them?
• What audit findings can give our report context as to why we find certain metrics important?
• What does the client’s website show us in terms of what is doing well?
• Is there anything we found that will likely get worse? Often, we think too much about what will be improved and need to also set expectations for other types of fluctuations that come with site changes.
• How have issues with optimization affected metrics in the past?
• Which metrics don’t show the client the best view of their site (e.g. “yes your bounce rate is high, but your conversion rate has been increasing month-over-month”)? In the wrong context, some metrics will tell the opposite of the story you're putting together.

Most audits are undertaken to discover what's wrong with a site. But a good report needs to consider the audit from the other side: How will our conversations with our clients go once we’ve identified issues and improved their website?

SWOT analysis

SWOT is a common business acronym that stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. A SWOT analysis can be based on the compilation of your competitors, website, and past report research to make some definite decisions about your next steps. In each area, there are specific considerations for reports.

• Strengths: Which metrics are strong and have done well historically? What characteristics of the website will continue to serve SEO projects well (e.g. good UX, mobile-first optimized, etc.)?
• Weaknesses: What needs to be improved for the upcoming reporting period and foreseeable future, including both one-off fixes and ongoing efforts? What focused goals need to be set?
• Opportunities: Where does the data have a chance to do well and showcase improvements? Are there low-competition keywords that could be focused on to produce good results for the client?
• Threats: Where is there potential downfalls for the client, even if they're currently doing well in that area? For example, they have overall market domination for highly relevant keywords but a competitor has slowly been moving up in rankings. Or they haven’t yet fully optimized for mobile so Google may not give them as large of a presence in the SERPs.

The areas covered in an SEO SWOT analysis is dependent on how much information there is about a client’s past history, their competitors, and the current state of their website. Additionally, if they are in a heavily competitive industry like medical or technology, it might be more important to do a SWOT analysis than other smaller or less competitive fields.

All of this front-end research not only sets your agency up for long-term, high-quality reporting for clients, but it can also help you win clients before you’ve even started doing any actual hands-on SEO work.

Don’t think of reporting as something given to clients after you’ve signed the contract and done the work. Reporting can also be used to supplement client pitches that illustrate where the opportunities are and where they're falling short. If a potential client sees the work that you’ve put into helping their business before they’ve even signed with you, they’ll be hard pressed to say no to a compelling pitch that features customized advice for their specific website.

In order to pull off this type of proposal development, consider featuring the following in new client proposals:

1. Competitive research to show that you’ve done your due diligence
2. Answers to top questions these potential customers may be asking, customized to how it applies to their specific business and industry

When it comes to these introductory reports offered during pitching, don’t get taken advantage of by prospects by giving them too much info. Just giving them a taste of what your agency can do can certainly boost their chances of signing a contract.

Now that you know how reports can win new business and strengthen your relationships with clients, let's get tactical: how do you build reports around particular topics? We'll learn about reporting for content, keywords, and rankings in Chapter 3.