SEO Reporting: How to Develop Effective & Impactful SEO Reports

Welcome to a new edition of Crawling Mondays. This one is dedicated to SEO reporting. What about those automated SEO reports that we see across many tools? What are the expectations that clients have? How we can do actual SEO reports that have an impact in our SEO process, which at the end of the day is a little bit of what we should want. To talk about all of that and more and to make sure that you develop the right SEO reports at the right time in the SEO process that help you to grow and achieve results. I have invited a couple of very well-experienced SEOs who have tons of work behind this particular area. On one hand, I have Dana Di Tommaso from Kickpoint.

Hello, Dana.

Hello. And on the other hand, I have Gus Palogia from Teamwork. Gus has tons of experience also working at the agency side. So let's start a little bit of conversation. I have seen people when they speak about SEO reports mixing the terms and actually speaking about SEO dashboards. What are these types of issues or struggles or scenarios that you have faced regarding misconceptions of SEO reporting when you inform or talk with your clients? How do you communicate them?

I always try to start a foundation with a client by saying, you know, when you say the word report, here's what we're talking about. And I think having that common language is really important because they may be referring to a dashboard or they might want an Excel sheet or they might, you know, what is their definition of report? And I also think that on the agency side too, I think that people make some classic mistakes here where they really have this nervousness about the size of the report and what that means for the amount of data you're gonna be giving the client. Like the client doesn't actually care about the 24 pages of data that you care about. They might care about these 3 things and it's okay to give a client a report that just covers those 3 things. We're not being paid by the pound here, right? Or not, you know, you're being paid by the results, not necessarily the process that gets you there. So I think it really depends on the client, on a client-by-client basis, or in-house if you're in-house. You know, really find out what do people actually want to see, and then give them that specifically. Don't overdo it, you know, and also think about the visualizations as well. And I think that there's also a really important distinction to be made between a report and a dashboard, as you mentioned. Typically what we'll do is we'll have a dashboard that's reporting and it's results and it's You know, are we going to get there? What has happened in the past? But it's really overview. And then we'll make a second dashboard that's either for us or for their in-house team that's more of a diagnostic. That's what we call it. And that's the nitty-gritty details of how are things going, looking at stuff like, you know, you don't have as high of a click-through rate on these high-ranking terms as you should. You know, what should we do about that? Like those kinds of details. The decision makers don't necessarily need to see that, but they need to know that you're aware of it. And then the other mistake that I think people make is they rely too much on tables. I don't know, SEOs love tables, right? And it's forever and ever we've loved tables.

I think it's lame Google Sheets and Excel, right?

Yeah, totally. Because those are the tools that you start with, right? As you always open up an Excel. If I said to you, you know, make a report, you would make a table of sessions by channel, right? Like this is the start of most reports. And that isn't necessarily where most reports should start. Nor should it necessarily be a table because a lot of people are very visual learners and they don't necessarily— a table is not a great visual medium to communicate what you're trying to get across. So really think about the best way to present the data as well. And I think it does take more thinking and it does mean that you probably can't necessarily use those default reports in the tool, which the tool only gets you the data, doesn't get you the insights, right? That's what you're being paid for is your brain to bring those insights. So really think about how you can transform that data into something that's going to be really useful for the end person getting the report.

For me, it's really about the, you know, the results you achieved. So on the metrics that matter for them. So if they're interested in leads, if they're interested in sales. So you can give one big number that shows you're going into the right direction. Second, what you did to achieve that, the test that you performed or, you know, whatever it was visually that explains what's happening. And the third point is what's happening next. So, you know, results are great so far. We did A, B, C, and D. This is what's gonna happen next month. And especially Like all my clients back in the agency time, they would like to get their reports in the first week of the month, and so there's plenty of time to finish that report saying this is what's going to happen in August. So very early in the month, they know what, you know, what's coming after, and you have enough time to discuss if they want something else to happen or if they're not happy with something, or perhaps they ask for something And that is not listed there. So I think it's sometimes also to give them that peace of mind that we are moving in the same direction here and they know in advance what's going to happen.

At the start of the SEO process, it should be fundamental to define what the stakeholders and decision makers like. These are the metrics that you care about and these are the goals that we're achieving, right? And of course, if you're talking with a counterpart, for example, I work with a lot of bigger type of companies that have their own in-house SEO teams. But if I am talking with the marketing director or even sometimes even the CEO, right, of the company that have no idea about crawlability, indexability, and they don't care about that. They care about the bottom line, about the ROI of the SEO process, about the growth in conversions, etc. The type of metrics that we should include in these reports when communicating the progress to each one of these different audiences. Should be really different, shouldn't be the same, right? And what we should be mindful all the time is to establish right at the beginning, what are those metrics that actually connect and matter for each audience, and what you should be including in those reports that actually makes sense for them to know, to understand, to drive action, right? So for example, if you want to drive the action by the decision maker showing, look, like we're already achieving growth with those areas for which we have been able to get the resources that we asked, but we are experiencing bottlenecks with this other sort of implementations from a technical standpoint. And this is why we are not growing. And we're stuck in results with this area, it should be very obvious, very visual, as Dana says. So instead of a table, like show how you're like not progressing in terms of traffic, the line is pretty flat versus your competitors, how they are outgrowing you. So something impactful like that. And I do believe that This is about communication too. It's another way to communicate with your client, highlighting what matters the most from your work in order to inform and then incentivize those actions that you want your client to take, hopefully like to give you more support. Let's focus more on the don'ts, those main mistakes. And I do believe that you already mentioned one. I think that we sometimes obsess a lot on the length. Of our deliveries and documentation and outcomes. Like people like developing every month or every two weeks like twenty pages reports, and and why? Like it takes so long to analyze. Also, a lot of automated reports I have seen. Like clients share me like former reports that they have gotten. Sometimes you see like the default report that they get from certain tools that sometimes add metrics and data that it's trivial for that particular project. What else do you tend to see, and what would you really? What would you really suggest to eliminate, to not do, to SEOs who are just starting on this?

I think one of the things that I like to ask people is, you know, what, especially if you're working with in-house teams, because we also work with some large companies and their in-house teams, is ask people, what are you being judged on in terms of your performance review? You know, tell us what metrics are going to actually matter for you or from a business goal perspective. And then we'll take that and break it down into KPIs and metrics. And we do that in something called a goal charter. But I think that that's something really important, and Gus touched on that as well. And I think as well, the other thing to think about is, you know, sophistication of the final audience. You know, like you might care about these things at the super high level, but this person just wants to know, is my phone ringing or am I making money? And something that we've been doing in our reports for a few years now is instead of reporting on like phone call conversions, we'll say, is your phone ringing? And I think really using their language and including a lot of microcopy in reports to explain, because if they're only looking at it once a month, we use Google Data Studio reports for a lot of our reporting. So the clients can go look at it whenever they want. It's always up to date. And so because we don't know when they'll be looking at it, we include a lot of microcopy to explain what things are. Because if you use this, you know, insider SEO terms in your reports, and you may have explained that, you know, a year ago when you first started working with the client, now they're looking at it now saying, I don't know what DA is, or, you know, not that I think you should ever include that in a report. But let's take that as an example, right? Like, oh, domain authority, what does this mean? And then people start thinking about it, and they don't understand it. And they think it's really important, right? And so it's good to explain those things. And it's also, I think, good to have a little explainer with the client, be like, hey, this is how bounce rate is calculated. It doesn't mean what you think it means. Or this is what new users means. Or this is, you know, these are all these common metrics that maybe you've been using and they don't mean the thing you think they mean. This is what they actually mean. So I'm going to report on this, this, and this instead. And by creating that really common set of knowledge, you're able to establish, you know, you're making the client, they're learning something. So they feel like they know something, which is exciting for them. And you're really establishing this common language between you and the client. So you're never at cross purposes when you're reporting and they're saying, oh, I didn't know that's what that meant. Or what are you saying this? I think it means this.

Yeah. I think there are a lot of things that you learn over time once you start, you know, building that relationship with the client. Something that I had a situation last year that once the pandemic was out there, I worked with a client that was always looking for international leads and we were reporting, look, your leads are growing on this country and that country. Everything seems to be going really well. And at some point they wouldn't attend the calls we had arranged. They weren't really good with communication until at some point they— the CEO came in and he was really mad at us. He was saying, I'm not getting anyone at my door. And then we realized that the missing piece was we're getting the leads, but we don't know if they're turning into patients on your side. So after that very heated moment, we put a workflow like, okay, so once a month, Before we do this report, you're gonna send us what are the countries those people are coming from so we can discuss on, you know, people can travel from a certain country, we shouldn't put a lot of effort on this. And you kind of learn over time the business metric that matters the most for them because we can throw a bunch of buzzwords from the SEO world there and then they'll be like, oh. Sometimes maybe they don't understand and it's like business is going well, Everything seems to be fine. Let's just keep rolling with this. But then at the end of the day, you can even sometimes catch on the ghost, like they don't really know what's happening here. Maybe I should have a slide on my report that explains what this means. So there's always this conversation going. People sometimes are afraid of reports being too big. Why don't you start with like a basic report? After the first month, discuss with the client, are they happy with this? Those are a few other things that I could include if you're interested. If there's something you haven't seen before and so on, you kind of learn over time what really matters for the clients. If it's too little, they will complain. If it's too much, they're not going to read. And so you need to find what is the best way there.

Sometimes we get stuck with certain formats or organization, following the same structure with all of the clients. And then at some point say, oh my God, but for this particular context or circumstance, I ended up having like 20 pages or a presentation. But sometimes we don't need to go at that level of granularity for each single scenario, like just highlighting a couple of them, knowing when to summarize, knowing to make the best use of executive summaries, especially for people who don't need to understand every single detail. I have seen people like being afraid of why they asked to actually see it or to learn more about the scenarios. It's like, it's okay that you have documented that at some point in the presentation, but it doesn't need to be your first slide. Right? So having a good executive summary, summarizing the top 3 things that are working, what is not, and what you expect to happen, that actionability. I think that that is one of, let's say, the top mistakes that I see, that sometimes like the documentation of what has happened is amazing, it's great. But as a decision maker, I'm not sure what should I do with it? Should I just keep giving you the same resources than before? Are you requesting for more resources, for more support? What do you want me to do? A lot of people, I think, that miss that last part. doesn't use necessarily the report to recommend or to make a point. What are the usual steps that you take to develop your rescue report that you think that are high level enough that anybody can learn from or to use criteria or rationale for the process?

I've given a couple of presentations about it, actually. So my first one where I talked about this was back in 2014, which is— I rewatched it recently. It's still applicable now, although I dress a lot better on stage now. And that was at MozCon. And I talked about proving your value and the idea of how do you get the, you know, those big goals and turn them into actual KPIs and metrics. And that's a good introductory one. And then there's another presentation that I gave quite recently that involved goal charters. And I think that that's also a valuable one to watch because that's really where we set those foundations with our clients and looking at those goal charters and figuring out what is going to matter for you. Because as I said, like every client has a different sophistication level. You touched on this too, you know, what is actually going to matter for them. And then also, how forward-looking can we be? And obviously 2020, 2021 has been a little bit weird for forward-looking and setting goals. You know, we have to throw a lot of things out of the window, but at the same time, there are, you know, general things like you want your business to be here by the end of the year. So currently we're here. How are we going to get from here to there? And that's really just the, that's the trust the client wants to give you is that you are going to get them there. Or if you're not, that you're honest about it. And I think that's the other aspect of reporting as well as just being honest about the results. They're not trying to sugarcoat it or put the best face on it if it's bad. Things go wrong. Sometimes we make mistakes. I think it's also important to really be specific about where mistakes have been made. Also, don't— I always tell people, choose which hills you're going to die on. If there's something really important, don't make everything equally important because then nothing is important. If there is something really critical, if you're doing a technical audit, for example, and I did one recently for the site that's going to launch and they had a really common situation I've seen where every 404 page 301 redirected to a 200 that was /404, right? We've all seen this before. And so I wrote and it was highlighted in red as like, this has to be fixed before launch. And there was a bunch of other important technical issues. None of them were going to be as disastrous as that one where it was actually a site migration to a different domain. It was just going to be a nightmare of URLs, right? So I knew that that was going to be a problem. It's like, that's my hill to die on. And so I'm going to highlight that and make sure that they fix that right away. And they did because I made it so important. But if it wasn't buried amidst, you know, 50 other items that they had to fix, then it wouldn't necessarily have gotten fixed before launch. So I think it's really important to choose, you know, out of this list of things, like, which one of these are the most critical for you? And then those are the things you have to highlight. And just really keep reminding yourself, like, no one has time for this as much as you do. This is your job. It's not everyone else's job. So how can you make their lives easier by really pulling out what's super important to them?

I would say for me, like, as a standard report, Summary, the numbers on what we got. I like to have examples of things. So, you know, we created this new piece of content or I don't know, wrote 5 new blog posts. You're not gonna write, we published 5 blog posts. Maybe you can mention it, but put a screenshot of one so they know this is happening, this is on their website, and they can picture that. Gives you like a visual break on that as well. And I usually finish with next steps in order to keep it concise and interesting for people can follow exactly what they want. I really enjoy putting links or to spreadsheets or putting links to, if you use a project management software, put a link to that task and put owners as well. So if you're using a PM tool, you have an owner. If you're using a spreadsheet or if you're just listing the tasks, put the client name there as well. If you need their approval for for something, they know who to talk to. Even in your team, if they know there are 3 people that work in this account, they know, you know, Aleyda is the one that's gonna finish this. So they can even, if they wanna chase you on something, they know who to chase. And if you're— everybody from your team is on that call, they know that the client knows that they have to deliver something. So everybody's really on the same page on what has to be done. And on the points that Dana was talking about highlighting, I always try to do that as well. So let's say if you have a standard report, there are some slides that always will be there. I need a client to approve a press release. I can make a whole page just about that. This is the text that we have at the moment. We want to release this on the 10th as per your request. This is pending on your side. So— Unless you do this, we're not going to achieve what you asked for. And so, you know, you make everybody very aware of what has to be done, and then sometimes it depends on them for something to happen, and it's clear for them what has to be done. And often what I see on cases like this, the client has a click at the moment. It's like, oh yes, I'll have this for you today, or I'll have this by the end of the week, or I'm sending this to someone else. So it turns that into an action that is kind of happening in front of you rather than, here's an email out of the 100 emails that I got.

This is great because I think that you highlighted something very, very important that we can leverage nowadays, which wasn't as easy, let's say, 5 years ago. All these project management tools and coordination tools that we have, and now like our work is pretty much cloud-based. So if we're developing our report, I see more and more people using Google Slides, right? Because in Google Slides, they can prepare like a presentation, but they— if they want, they can link directly to the Google Sheets where they have the issue. And if the person wants to learn more about the issue or the data that is not matching well or has problems, they can go and take a further look. Or maybe they highlight certain metrics evolution, but if they want to really be monitoring this like at a day-to-day basis or a weekly basis or see how it goes without having to create a whole new presentation yet again, which will happen every month, for example, they have a link there so the person can go directly to the Google Data Studio dashboard if they want, right? Or if they want to learn more and combining more data or more metrics, right? So I love how nowadays we have this toolset, let's say, that will allow us to not necessarily be pushed to have everything in the report, but being able to link directly to those areas and the tools and platforms that we use on a day-to-day basis. And I wanted to ask you, like, what are the tools that you tend to use the most? And you would like to share how you use them too?

A good project management system for sure is helpful. For reporting tools, I would say definitely Google Data Studio is huge, but the preparation of the data behind that is also really important. And so we've been using BigQuery a lot more to pull data from various sources and put it all together in BigQuery. And then there's additional work that you can do, processing work in BigQuery to be able to pull different datasets together. So for example, playing together Shopify with Google Analytics. There's also a little bit that we do with Zapier.

Amazing. For the reports, do you use Google Slides or do you directly use Google Docs?

Google Data Studio, because there's actually a presentation mode in Google Data Studio now. So if you build the Data Studio report in a way that it is a slide, Then you can actually like show it as a slide on the screen.

Amazing.

And then you don't need to use another tool. I hate using multiple tools for the same thing.

That is a great recommendation. The presentation mode and also having multiple pages.

Don't put it all on one page. Your report will crash.

100%.

100%.

Yeah.

For me, Google Slides for sure. And I really like Supermetrics. There are a bunch of other tools that will do the same thing. It's basically, it's going to pull information. To connect to all APIs from Search Console, Analytics, and other tools, and you can schedule that to happen once a month. So things that I used to do before, like go on Google Analytics and select the period and take a screenshot, and this screenshot doesn't look good, and your second screen is bigger, the screenshot looks weird again, and all the time that I used to waste on just putting the data in a place, that doesn't exist anymore. Once you configure that once, your tables and all your visuals are there in one place. So I would definitely recommend making this connection, and then you can actually spend the time that you have now putting insights and writing a story about that report. And teamwork, of course, or I mean, any project management tool will really help you here. So yeah, that's pretty much it.

If I had a wish, it was that every single SEO tool or tool that we work with SEO, all of them had really good API, Data Studio connector.

Well, that's what BigQuery is for, because if you pull everything into BigQuery on a regular basis, one of the tools we use for this is called Stitch. You can pull from almost anything into BigQuery on an automated, like daily basis. And then that's your backend for your Data Studio reports. And they run so much faster off BigQuery.

So yeah, I actually use KPI Beast. They do this with Google Sheets, right? And of course, if you need more capacity, BigQuery will be a much more, let's say, robust solution. But yes, it will be great to not necessarily have these workarounds and additional steps to put all the data together.

If there's SEO tool makers watching, please have a good API. I feel like that's just like your table stakes at this point.

Many tools do have them, but They have a lot of restrictions. Oh, even Google Search Console, right? And then on the other hand, many of the tools also charge extra to access APIs too and certain connectors. So to start wrapping up, I wanted to ask you for any last tip, something that we haven't yet covered. Is there something that you think that we have left out that you really want to highlight?

I mean, I touched on this briefly, but I think truth. is one of the most important things, and honesty is one of the most important things. Because let's be honest, the barrier of entry to this field is having a computer. You know, it's obviously— and you can say whatever you want, and it isn't necessarily true that you're any good at this. So I think it's important, especially with clients who've worked with bad agencies in the past, to be extremely honest about your capabilities, even if you're like, no, you can't actually do that. And I think that that's one of the most critical pieces that gets you trust with a client, is being— having that openness and that honesty with a client. And I would say that that's really a recurring theme a lot with our engagements with clients is just, we've worked with clients who've worked with bad agencies before. They've worked with good agencies, but they felt like they weren't being heard. And I think that's one of the biggest things is just like, listen to your clients, actually take in what they're telling you, ask lots of questions, have good communication and be honest. You know, and I think that that is going to serve you well in your SEO career.

First, I had this feeling before that I finished a report or I felt it was finished and then I look back and it's I'm not telling anything here. I'm not proud of what we did. So sometimes it can be, you know, a benchmark of the quality of your work. And in other cases, I just realized, oh, we did other things that were not in this report. So I need to put a new slide. I need to explain this a little bit better because we spent a lot of time on this and, you know, they need to understand. Maybe the results will come in a few months, but they need to know that something's happening. So I try to— now that I don't spend time taking screenshots anymore, I have time to look at this. And my other tip here is learn where your client is actually hanging. I worked with a client that would never reply to the reports, but if there was something on the PM software, there will be a conversation going on there. A lot of people that I didn't even know in the company, they were liking something or they were discussing something. Some of our clients will really give you that attention once you're having your monthly call with them, So you can save that moment to discuss something. Or some of our clients will just look at the body of the email. They won't care about the reports, but they will see the highlights that you put there. So if you learn where your client is actually hanging and where they give attention to your report, that's a place where you should put your best work or put more of your efforts.

Amazing! Great advice. What I will suggest is to ask 2 questions, right? Very basic questions that allowed me to keep my SEO reports focused on what actually matters. Why is this important? If at some point you feel that, oh, should I include this? Should I not? Is this like important enough or not? Like why this should matter for that particular person, not for you. For you, potentially it matters, but for the person that you will be presenting that report. And then on the other hand, now what? What do you want to achieve by informing about this, right? Like what do you expect from informing about this particular evolution or status of something? So it should be very, very clear, very specific, easy to understand, not for them to sort out the next step, but it should be you who should define these next steps, right? And as long as you do these 2 things, I will say that it matters, it's important. And that is why this type of reports cannot be automated because they will be context-specific and should be very personalized based on your particular situation, the people who you are going to be reporting to, the particular stage of where you are in your SEO process. So we cannot expect that these are automatically generated by any tool. You can obtain the metrics, in a very automated way if you configure them well, but the insights and the outcomes and the analysis, it should be you, right? It should be you. So thank you, thank you very much, Dana and Gus. It was amazing to be able to speak with you. It was very useful. Hopefully this will allow people to clarify and refine and have a clearer view of what they should expect and how they should do their SEO reports. And if you have any questions, any doubts, leave them here below. And of course you can follow always Dana and Gus, they are very active on social media, so you can follow them on Twitter. You will see the handle here. So thank you again for joining me today, and we're looking forward to see you again in Crawling Mondays. Bye-bye.

Bye.