SEO Reporting Tools for Agencies
As an SEO professional who has been in the industry for many years now, I have found that most clients that come to us for services were not generally given bad services from previous vendors. Instead, they just didn’t understand what was going on and how it was helping them in the organic search engine results. Could the vendor have provided more items in the retainer or executed better tactics? Most likely, but, for the vast majority, the main cause of frustration was a lack of communication about what was going on.
The main reason for this lack of understanding is that vendors don’t set clear expectations, and they don’t educate the client. They also tend to not report what is happening and don’t explain to the client how their services are helping them. If you don’t have solid reporting, then from your client’s perspective you aren’t doing very good SEO work. It is critical that you communicate the amazing work that you are doing because that is going to be the only way that they will know.
With that being said, here are the main things that you want to be doing to be more successful about reporting to your clients.
Pre-Sale Discussions
One of the largest disconnects happens when the client does not understand what you are doing. They just know they pay X amount of dollars per month and that they should expect results 4-6 months down the road. This might work for a lot of clients who don’t care, but the majority will want to know what is going on. It is up to you to educate them fully and get them to buy in to what you are doing — which is using the best SEO practices to make them more money.
Here are some pitfalls that you don’t want to fall into during the pre-sale discussions, which frames out the process of working together:
1. The client doesn’t read your proposal, welcome emails, or listen to your demos.
You have to make sure that the client is listening to you and that you are explaining everything clearly in this stage. They have to know what you are going to do for them in detail.
At Visiture, we do live screen shares, where we show potential clients our program. We also make sure to engage them with questions to make sure they understand. Sometimes, potential clients might not understand what you are talking about but don’t want to speak up.
2. The client doesn’t understand what you do.
This could pertain to a number of things — from link building to putting calls to action in information. Really dive deep with the client, show them how SEO works, and more. I like to ask the potential client their skill level or knowledge about SEO on a scale of 1-10 and then discuss our program based on how advanced they are.
3. The client doesn’t understand that it takes 6-12 months to get good results in SEO.
You should always try to frame the process so that the client will expect the work you outline to get done, but, other than that, they shouldn’t expect any results for 6-12 months.
There is a right way to look at SEO and a wrong way. You want to make sure that your client is looking at it the right way ― as a compounding customer acquisition channel. If they think they should see major improvements in four months, they will probably be disappointed, they will waste their money, and they will not be very happy with you.
4. The client is too used to their previous engagements with other SEO companies.
Unfortunately, I see this one a lot. Potential clients get stuck in their ways, thinking that all SEO companies are the same, and some have magical powers to give them instant rankings after 30 days. This cannot be further from the truth.
My counter to this is to really hammer home how much our company is different and how our services are different, and show how our engagement works. If you do not differentiate yourself from their previous engagements, then you will be the same to them.
5. You don’t include details in your proposals of your scope of work.
This is another huge mistake that SEO companies can run into. They try to simply do things to make it easier to understand and faster to onboard accounts, but all this does is create a higher turnover of your SEO clients. Spend the time to really get to know your customers, write detailed proposals/SOWs, and create custom proposals/invoices.
Spend more time in the discovery and onboard phase because that is what it takes to make your client succeed. If you must, make them sign longer contracts, but show them that you do it because you are spending the time to get to know them.
Organic Search Engine Revenue
After working on adjusting their mindsets and expectations during your pre-sale discussions, you want to look into how you report to your clients. The first and most powerful reporting concerns the revenue from organic search engines. You can look into this by going to Google Analytics > Acquisition > All Traffic > Channels.
Revenue from organic search engines is the most looked-at metric for the client because this is really all they care about. They don’t actually care where they rank in Google — they care about how much money it brings them. I generally like to look at this month over month and year over year. There are some great tools out there that can create dashboards showing these statistics.
You might be thinking, “But, Ron, I have lead generation clients. How can we calculate revenue?”
Well, don’t worry! It’s easy, and something good to have your clients do. If you have a lead generation site — say, like a law firm — you want to ask them how much revenue per lead they get. This isn’t too tricky and, sometimes, can be fairly easy.
If it is a small law firm, you can calculate how much their firm did in the past year and then divide that by how many leads they got from their website. Is this a perfect science? No, but it is a step in the right direction and it’s better than being completely in the dark. This works really well for lawyers who have low revenue per customer, like traffic or tax attorneys. For instance, say the firm did three million last year and had 3, 000 leads. That means every lead should equal around $1, 000 in revenue.
Now that you have that figure, you can set it up in Google Analytics as a goal completion, and you’ll know every time you get a lead from organic search engine traffic it will be around $1, 000.
Also, it is important to consider that many customers will find businesses via Google and then come back later to convert. You will need to communicate this to the client or get fancy with attribution modeling for SEO. I just communicate it as attribution modeling for SEO. In my opinion, it is like throwing darts at a dart board. You never know what you are going to get unless you are an expert dart player.
Organic Search Engine Traffic
You also want to make sure that you are reporting organic search engine traffic. This is pretty standard to report and, here, you also want to be looking at trends month over month and year over year. Throughout a one-year engagement, or whatever terms you have agreed upon, you want to see improvements in your search engine traffic and revenue.
If traffic is down but revenue is up, then this would be considered a success to report back to the client. A lot of times, customers would come to us who had previously targeted the wrong phrases, and we could change their content to the right phrases so they would convert more customers.
