What to include in my report ?

[grafmiville]

Hi everybody,

I'm not a SEO expert just an e-marketing trainee and i have to create a smart SEO report template for a real estate company.

I don't know what to include in this personal monthly report :

What are the key informations ?
Should I include Google Analytics data and wich one?

Sorry for my english that's not my mother tongue.

Thanks for your answers

[paints-n-design]

An easy way to say something about revenue are goals in analytics. It's pretty easy for clients to tell you, what a conversation or lead is worth for them. So you can easy easy use that with goals in Analytics.  Or you need e-commerce tracking - depends on client (https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1037249?hl=en)

[grafmiville]

Thanks you all for your quick replies, you help me a lot !

If I well understood you, data like Keyword Ranking or Landing Page analyse are not usefull for the client

So I will focus my report on Conversion and Traffic because I haven't got any data about revenue.

Thanks everybody ! You are very helpfull !

Cheers

[paints-n-design]

Tom Roberts said what you need. In my country (I don't know where u are from, but you said engl. isn't your native language - so it's also not mine) it is pretty hard to tell people, that it is not usefull to see things like ranking positions and earned backlinks. But earned links can be come from anywhere not your active work and rankings are just - like tom said - a point of organic visits.

Here a lot of people think you can rank under silly keywords wich are searched a lot and you can make organic traffic looks good, when u rank under such keywords. When your client understand, that this is simply not the truth, the three points are all you need (Traffic, Revenue, Conversations/leads)

breakdowns like branded vs non branded, mobile vs desktop are possible.

Hope you live in a country, where people know a bit more how internet/search works. I had to refuse potential clients, because they simply don't understand (or even tried or try to believe)

edit: saw that Tim Holmes mentioned mobile so thumb up 4 you tim

[TimHolmes]

That is a great resource from Tom. his three initial points are also my top elements. I would also think you could consider breaking your traffic down into sources and mediums. Organic, CPC, Email etc to help show your clients where the traffic is coming from

Also in today's ever increasing mobile market, also a breakdown of traffic by device.

Cheers

Tim

[TomRayner]

Speaking from both a producer and a recipient of these reports:

The most important things for me are:

1. Revenue
2. Conversions
3. Traffic

In that order.

For any SEO report, I would be expecting to see, above all else, how much organic visitors (or people who have visited from organic search in some part of their user journey) have generated in terms of revenue.  Some companies model this entirely within Google Analytics, others may have a CRM that stores the customer financial data that you'll need to sync up with analytics.  But basically, show them **how much money **organic search has made them last month.

After that, I'd want to see how many organic search visitors converted on the site (bought something, signed up etc).  It's worth reporting this separately from revenue, as you can get an idea of which conversions are more "valuable" to you.  Show them how many conversions organic search has given them.

Next, look at traffic.  This is important to report as you need to show them how much organic search is contributing to their overall traffic, and hopefully show them it is increasing.  It can also help you identify other issues - for example, if traffic increases but revenue or conversions do not, is there a problem with the quality of the traffic or, more likely, a problem with the website's user journey or design?  Remember, organic search is inbound marketing, and so searchers are actively looking for the thing that drives them to your web page.  If you can get organic traffic but can't get it to convert, it is usually a problem with your website's design or UX.  Show them how many visitors organic search has given them.

Anything else, to a company receiving an update on how SEO is progressing, is just fluff.  My clients don't need to see things like error rate, crawl indexing, canonical reporting - even rankings (a sub-KPI of traffic, but ultimately not what the client is interested in).  For a top level report - something that says what has our money got us - I stick with these three principles.  If I'm producing a technical audit on the website, then of course you want to give more detail, but for a general monthly report it's overkill.

There are caveats to all of this (such as breaking down branded vs non-branded organic traffic), but this should be the starting point.

Hope this helps.