SEO Reporting
Being an SEO Strategist for years now, I have come across different types of people in the industry. Conferences to meetup groups, you meet them all. Many have their own businesses (mostly web design or marketing companies) that do some type of SEO programming.
What seems to be the same occurrence is that 60% or more of these companies don’t offer reporting. How is that? Now I know there are many companies selling PPC campaigns out there that don’t do reporting, which I also feel is ridiculous, but how can a true SEO person not offer it.
- FACTS:
- Most businesses want to make the most amount of money with the least amount of effort.
- Being organized is difficult.
- People are lazy. People are greedy.
- If an owner doesn’t ask for it, why provide it?
- Managing many accounts is time consuming.
- Some companies need more than 2 employees.
Which category listed above did you fit into? Those are all valid reasons why businesses don’t offer SEO reporting.
When I take on a new SEO client I allow them access to the backend to see full reporting on their statistics, page ranking, keyword movement up (or down) the SERP, internal and external linking and a host of other features. Why offer so much? I know that speaking with my clients at the end of the month is just a small portion of earning their trust. Sure it involves getting them good rankings based off of their current keyword selection. But, wouldn’t you want more from a company (even if they are a freelancer) especially since clients can pay between $300 and $2000 a month for properly made, white hat SEO, offering reporting will just provide them with more confidence in your work and strategies you have in place for their SEO campaign.
Many people believe what they can see too. Give them a visual of how they are ranking and chat with them on the phone or through email to tell them what they can expect to see with next month. Give your client solid reporting and you are sure to gain their trust (even if they see their Page Rank drop). It may even save you from getting canned in the future.
Share
I’m curious what kind of “backend” dashboard you have to provide this information to your clients. I’ve been looking for a similar solution, rather than having to aggregate all of the information by hand and produce a PDF report for each client.
Do you have a good solution?
There’s still hand coding involved with each client but it’s much less work than in the past. I run the report and view the analytics and then paste the results into a template. That template is viewable by the client upon login. It takes me 15 minutes for every client, but that’s only once a month.