SEO monthly reporting isn’t always the sexiest or most exciting part of SEO work — unless you’re delivering sizeable improvements in traffic and conversions each and every month. Even so, monthly SEO reporting is critical when providing high-value SEO services to clients.
Here are five key benefits of SEO reporting when you’re offering — or even thinking about offering — monthly SEO services to your clients.
Fulfill Your Clients’ Expectations
The vast majority of SEO clients will expect monthly SEO reports as part of any SEO services. If they don’t, they’re likely not educated enough to know the value of monthly reporting.
If your clients already have expectations around SEO reports, make sure you’re clear on the specifics of those expectations. When you are, you may end up creating custom reports for high-touch clients who pay enough to justify the extra time. Or, you may find you have clients that just need basic reporting.
If your clients don’t yet have expectations around SEO reports, live up to best practices and provide them a report anyway. When you do, you'll want to keep their monthly reports more general. This way, you won’t drown them in data or waste hours of your time creating reports. Pathfinder SEO offers a white label monthly SEO reporting feature that provides all the necessities.
Keep Lines of Communication Open
You’re busy. Your clients are busy. In many cases, your clients may not have time for a monthly call (or simply may not feel they need one). In scenarios like this, delivering monthly reports is an opportunity to show your clients that you’re still working hard for them behind the scenes.
Delivering monthly reports to clients who rarely communicate can:
- Show them you’re actively managing their SEO.
- Keep them informed with important takeaways.
- Remind them that you exist and are focused on delivering value.
- Remind them that they need to loop you in on any business developments.
These benefits of monthly SEO reporting also apply to clients who communicate often.
Active Management of SEO Campaign Performance
Have you ever heard the idea that “you can’t manage what you don’t measure?” It directly applies to SEO services. When you aren’t measuring a website’s performance with monthly reporting, it’s hard to know if the SEO strategy you’re implementing is actually working. Monthly SEO reporting is the easiest way to measure and analyze SEO campaign performance for clients on a regular and recurring basis.
Many freelancers and agencies who provide SEO services don’t provide reporting as part of their SEO packages. Nor are they measuring and analyzing SEO performance on a regular basis. If you aren’t measuring SEO performance for your clients, you might not be doing a good job managing their campaigns, either.
Prevent Big Problems
Every now and then we’ll pull up a client's monthly report and notice something that doesn’t look right. Maybe rankings dropped for a high-value keyword or traffic seems to have mysteriously disappeared altogether. Monthly reporting keeps us on top of these issues so they don’t become serious problems.
If you aren’t regularly reporting to your clients, months can go by before you notice critical issues, which gives those issues time to compound. This is both embarrassing for you and potentially harmful to your client relationships. Proactively addressing any minor issues through reporting is one way to show clients that you’re staying on top of things.
Highlight the Value You’re Providing
When you pitch SEO services to your clients, you probably promise specific results. Monthly reporting is an opportunity to show that you’re living up to your promises and creating real value.
Delivering an SEO report at the beginning of every month is one of the best ways to highlight the specific value you’re providing. Even if you have low-performance months, you can show clients that you’re still a valuable member of the team and explain how you’re taking action to adjust and offset any dips in performance.
The Take Home
When you’re providing SEO services, monthly SEO reports are an essential piece of your offering. Otherwise, your clients will miss out on useful and timely insights. Worse, your business will miss out on one of the easiest ways to maintain long-term SEO clients.
If you want to learn the ins and outs of monthly reporting while providing SEO services to clients, Pathfinder SEO will help you create an SEO service package your clients will love.
