Hello everyone! I know this is probably something I should post in an SEO or marketing subreddit but I wanted to get my information straight from the source so here I am. Essentially to give you some insights I’m a new SEO agency and I’ve recently landed my first client. Now I won’t rehash my entire last post about landing the client but things have been moving pretty well for both total and organic traffic as they’ve grown by double digits since the previous month and it’s about that time when I have to showcase that in the monthly report. Now I don’t want to overwhelm my clients with tons of metrics and data that they won’t necessarily understand but I don’t want to undersell the importance and progress we are making by only including the bare minimum within the report. I know I shouldn’t be stressing so much over this type of stuff but I want to make a good first impression and seem very official so clients in the future understand who they are working with and the level of work they are receiving.
I’ve been laying things out slowly and so far I’ve added the total traffic, organic traffic, traffic channels for comparison, keyword improvements and that’s about it. Now within the report itself I’ll provide an executive summary explaining everything with paragraphs such as “Organic traffic was up 48% over the past 30 days because x y and z…” I obviously won’t just put xyz but you get the idea and then I’ll have a few extra paragraphs explaining the work for the month, it’s level of importance and how it relates to SEO, then finally cap it all of with the potential outlook for the next month. I know it’s a lot of information to take in on a random small business post without a physical example but what do you guys think? Is it too much? maybe too little? What would you want to see in a monthly report?
What I would have liked to see in graph format only is the 5 key KPIs (e.g. CPA, CTR, CPM, Total Traffic etc.) where for each of the 5 KPIs you have 2 drill downs - which could be either by date (day or month, it depends on the specific resolution) and one more drill down (e.g. demographics, geographic, sites they come from, etc.).
This will give you a set of 10-15 different takeaways, which could be valuable.