SEO Report Template

Why Your Agency Needs an SEO Report Template

As SEO professionals, the task of generating client reports is essential, yet often cumbersome. The challenge lies in gathering and then distilling key insights from multiple platforms into a cohesive monthly SEO report, and then presenting them in a way that resonates with clients.

This customizable template, included with all AgencyAnalytics SEO reporting software plans, provides a solid framework for assembling an in-depth, informative SEO report that impresses clients.

Quickly and easily create an SEO report bespoke for each client, tailored to their needs and preferences. Use the drag-and-drop editor to adjust the content of the reports to align with the client's goals, level of engagement, and expectations for what their monthly SEO reports should entail.

When demonstrating your marketing agency's value, an SEO report is more than a collection of numbers and data points. It's a powerful testament to your team’s SEO expertise and the tangible results your agency generates.

Leverage a robust SEO report template to highlight where your clients stand and how your efforts have improved their SEO health and elevated their organic search visibility.

Backed by professional SEO tools—including rank tracking, backlink monitoring, and automated integration with top web analytics tools—the SEO report template is a great starting point to help your marketing team showcase how the agency's strategic efforts have enhanced organic search traffic and boosted organic rankings on search engines.

Easily create SEO reports that tell a story. Present a narrative of progress based on data, mapping out the journey from the initial state of the client's website to the improvements your team has implemented. This is the value your agency brings to the table, and it's this value that an SEO report vividly illustrates.

When selecting a reporting tool, it was paramount for our team at seoplus+ to find a solution that checked multiple boxes. Ease of use was a top priority, as we wanted a tool that could be seamlessly adopted by our team members without significant training or learning curves. Equally important was the ability to generate visually appealing, professional reports that effectively conveyed the results and insights to our clients.

Alexa Rees, SEO Manager, seoplus+

10 Things to Include In Your SEO Report Template

Crafting an SEO report that effectively leverages Google Analytics data and critical SEO KPIs is key to understanding a website's standing on search engines. A well-structured SEO report showcases the achievements of your agency's SEO tactics and ranking progress, and also pinpoint areas for enhancements.

Here are nine vital elements an SEO report template must include to produce a detailed and actionable analysis. By integrating these key aspects, your report will offer clear, precise, and insightful observations, essential for advancing SEO strategies.

1. Cover Page

The cover page of an SEO report serves as the introduction to the comprehensive review of a client’s search engine performance. Using the SEO Report Cover and Section Design Customization Feature, select a background color or upload a custom image that reflects your agency's brand. To extend this branding, apply your concept throughout your page sections and customize title and image widgets throughout the SEO report.

Saving an effective design as a template ensures uniform branding and expedites the report creation process, saving you even more time and effort. 

The benefits of a well-designed report extend well beyond aesthetics. The cover page prepares clients for the detailed analysis to follow, and everything within emphasizes your agency's commitment to delivering quality services. This impression is a key factor in strengthening your agency-client relationships.

2. Report Summary

It can be intimidating to dive straight into an SEO analysis report full of charts and technical terms, so it’s best practice to first give your clients an overview of what they’ll discover in their current SEO report in plain English.

Keep it simple and concise. If your client only has a few minutes, they should be able to read this introduction and have an overall understanding of what your SEO report contains. Even if they don’t know much about the technicalities of SEO.

A good introduction lends structure and context to the rest of the SEO report, so be thorough. Provide a breakdown of the following:

• Project goals and KPIs

• Tasks completed

• Results overview

After reading the report summary, your clients should understand the project focus and results. For example, they should know from the SEO report's first page of the report that organic traffic increased by 15% and generated 500 new leads (for example).

Finish the overview with a few notes on the next steps you plan to take toward your clients’ goals.

AgencyAnalytics offers reports that are simple to understand, that a client with zero SEO knowledge can still see how the work we have done has helped benefit their website.

Guy Hudson, Founder, Bespoke Marketing Plans

3. Google Analytics Organic Traffic

Where’s your client’s traffic coming from? One key section to include in your SEO performance report is a web analytics report. Adding platforms like Google Analytics can break down which channels–such as organic search, direct traffic, referrals, and paid search–are bringing visitors to your client’s site.

Don’t just provide raw numbers for organic traffic–compare them to past periods to uncover trends on how their traffic is changing over time.

Too many SEO reports provide data right out of the SEO tools without any context. Paint the full picture of website performance to put the SEO and organic performance in perspective for your clients.

Here's a quick breakdown of some of the essential organic search metrics that are available in Google Analytics:

By monitoring these metrics, agencies refine SEO tactics to enhance site visibility, improve user engagement, and ultimately drive better search engine rankings and website usability.

Clients also want to see how organic traffic has changed since you began working on their SEO campaign. This is your chance to show just how much organic traffic you’re generating, reinforcing the value your agency is providing.

Increases in organic traffic are worth showing off, as they typically indicate that something your agency is doing is working very well. For instance, a viral blog post or new content campaign started bringing in a lot more traffic, while a decline may indicate something abruptly stopped working and needs to be fixed.

To account for these changes, it’s always a good idea to use the annotation feature. This provides explanations alongside the data points in the monthly SEO report to highlight these noteworthy increases and decreases.

4. Conversions via Organic Traffic

Ultimately, clients want to see the results that impact their bottom line. Organic traffic conversions is probably the most important section of your SEO report, as it clearly demonstrates the tangible value you're bringing to the table.

First, it’s important to set up the Goals you want to track, which measure things like leads and conversions.

For example, every time someone visits your client's post-purchase “/thankyou” page, they probably purchased something and therefore completed what you wanted them to complete. You can learn more about setting up Goals here.

Once you have your Goals set up, easily see how often web visitors from organic search completed those goals. Below illustrates an example of this type of report:

In this section, zero in on your client’s organic traffic from Google Analytics based on their Goals. Look at how these visitors behave on the site. Do they stick around, or do they bounce right away? Are conversions from organic traffic increasing, decreasing, or holding steady?

While more organic traffic is generally better than less, the key is the quality of the traffic. A low conversion rate coupled with high organic traffic might mean your client isn’t currently attracting the kind of customers they need. You should reconsider the keywords you’re targeting.

Send this SEO report with a short analysis covering these key points to help keep things clear for clients as their organic rankings, traffic, and conversions toward their end goal.

5. Organic Landing Page Report

Whether or not you’re creating content or developing new landing pages for clients, include a report section on Google Analytics landing page performance.

A landing page report provides additional insight into which pages generate the most traffic, leads, and conversions as the point of entry into the client’s website. Filter this report by “Organic” channel for a report that is specifically focused on SEO.

This is also a particularly valuable section for any client you manage a blog for, as they’ll quickly see which blog posts generate traffic, conversions, and gauge overall interest via the bounce rate.

We primarily rely on Web Analytics, and SEO reports for our clients. It's very difficult to explain the value of a service to a client without visuals. Using the web analytics report and the SEO reports side by side helps us show our clients a correlation between SEO and Traffic. We merge this data with a custom template that tracks conversions, and Stripe data to show traffic growth (from SEO and PPC) does have an impact on their bottom line.

Ruben Roel, President, Investigator Marketing

6. Keyword Rankings

Keyword rankings reports are essential. They’re a good indicator of whether your agency’s overall organic search strategy is working, or whether you need to test something else.

When you onboard a new client, identify a handful of target keywords to begin tracking from the start of the campaign. Add these keywords to your SEO client report template to easily show progress in the SERPs.

In addition to the keywords your client is ranking for, look at the search terms that bring in traffic. Is there a lot of overlap between the two groups?

Use Semrush keyword visibility tracking to easily identify the keyword ranking trends and showcase how your clients are improving in total rankings and positions.

Google Ads data can also be a great source for target keywords, as proven performers in paid search are worth targeting organically.

While keyword rankings are a strong indicator of performance, you don’t want to send a keyword ranking report alone. Including overall search results for your clients and organic conversions is a far stronger indicator of a great campaign ROI.

7. SERP Features Overview

SERP features are essential to modern SEO, as they provide enhanced visibility and engagement beyond standard organic search results. Including a dedicated column for SERP features in your SEO keyword ranking report template highlights opportunities for improving search presence.

Key SERP features to track include featured snippets, People Also Ask boxes, sitelinks, and review snippets. By monitoring these elements, agencies demonstrate how they capture valuable search real estate and explain how these features drive more clicks, increase visibility, and improve overall performance in the competitive landscape of Google’s search results.

8. Google Search Console

You know which keywords your client is ranking for now, but how many clicks are they actually generating in Google?

Google Search Console data provides tons of valuable information on how Google interacts with your client’s site. There’s plenty of information here you can quickly fold into a monthly SEO report template for clients.

Give your client information on which search terms people are clicking to find them. Find this under "Search Analytics" in your Search Console Account. It’s also accessible in your AgencyAnalytics SEO dashboard.

Google Search Console provides invaluable metrics that help marketing agencies understand the visibility and performance of their clients' websites in search results. It will also cover any keywords you aren’t currently tracking in your keyword rank tracker.

These metrics offer direct insights into how users interact with search listings, helping agencies optimize SEO strategies. Here’s a few of tge essential Google Search Console metrics:

By leveraging these metrics from Google Search Console, agencies refine keyword targeting, enhance search snippet attractiveness, and improve overall search engine rankings.

Google Search Console also provides warnings if a site has any problems, such as issues with indexing or security. If you get any of these warnings for your client’s site, include that information in your SEO report as well as a summary of how you fixed the problem.

9. Backlink Overview

Building a healthy backlink profile is one of the biggest challenges SEO professionals face. If you are providing link building services to clients, then you want to report on your progress.

However, you don't need to provide a giant list of all the backlinks a client has. Remember: too much information is only going to distract from the success of your SEO!

The backlink overview section of your SEO report template should contain:

• The number of backlinks you gained for your client that month

• The quality of the links you gained

• Top anchor texts

• The number of links lost

• How much traffic new links are bringing in (referral traffic in the Google Analytics report)

If you want to show clients the exact backlinks you built for them, check out the backlink manager tool. With it, keep track of all backlinks you've built for a website and then quickly add them to your SEO report.

Also, if you offer a service focused solely on link building, you may be interested in our dedicated link building report template.

We used to have a dedicated PC working 24/7 to create SEO reports. We also had no proper way of creating reports for our smaller customers, as it is not efficient to spend 50% of your time creating campaigns and the other 50% on reporting. Now that we have automated reporting, our smaller customers can also enjoy monthly reports.

Nico de Jong, CEO, Forward Marketing

10. SEO Audit Results

The cornerstone of a well-rounded report is a comprehensive site audit. Using an SEO audit tool, like Moz Pro, Ahrefs, or Semrush, helps your agency create advanced reports for SEO in a fraction of the time.

Quickly and easily turn those data points into easy-to-understand visuals using the Google Sheets add-on. Simply export the audit results from your favorite tool into Google Sheets and then drag and drop the data into tables, pie charts, line charts, bar charts, and sparkline widgets to keep all of your clients key SEO metrics in one cohesive SEO report.

This proactive approach demonstrates to your clients the value you add to their bottom line​. An SEO audit report should contain the following elements:

SEO Health Overview

An easy way for clients to understand their website's current SEO performance at a glance. Include clear and actionable SEO metrics, like total site score, number of issues, and passed versus failed crawl tests from Google Lighthouse. 

Technical SEO Analysis

The website's technical performance, including issues related to site speed, mobile-friendliness, HTTPS, XML sitemap, robots.txt file, URL structure, and more. These technical SEO metrics are critical for implementing improvements that drive up domain authority and organic search traffic.

On-Page SEO Analysis

A review of key on-page elements, like title tags, meta descriptions, header tags, alt text for images, keyword usage, and internal linking. Prioritize these elements based on severity, so critical issues and errors are tackled first, leading to quick wins and substantial improvements in SEO performance.

Use your favorite SEO audit tool to crawl client sites, uncover, and resolve over on-page and technical SEO errors and issues. Highlight these proactive steps in your monthly SEO report template through an embedded video or using the Google Sheets integration​.

Other Considerations

Every SEO report you create should be tailored to the individual client’s goals and understanding of SEO. That’s not to say you can’t use templates – after all, automated marketing reports and templates save you a lot of time. But don’t send the same cut-and-paste report to all your clients.

Clients that like to be more involved in their SEO will probably appreciate having more information to dig into, while more hands-off clients might simply be happy knowing their campaigns are moving along in the right direction.

To streamline client onboarding, create and clone versions of the SEO report template that work for different SEO clients, such as a local SEO report template, an eCommerce SEO report template, and more. Structure each SEO report template in a meaningful way to provide context for the numbers and data you’re reporting on. 

Demonstrate the progress of SEO efforts by comparing current data to past months’ data, and point out how this progress contributes towards a client’s goals. Show your clients how you’re increasing their organic traffic and helping them make continuous progress.

One-off monthly reporting tools simply didn't cut it anymore. Our clients wanted to be able to see results for themselves all in one place.

Brooke Lamberti, Director of SEO, RiZen Metrics

The Takeaway

Creating a process for advanced SEO reporting saves you precious hours every month. But there’s a lot of information you could include! Use SEO report templates to highlight the most important data without overwhelming a client with more information than they can process. 

There’s no question that putting together insightful SEO reports is key to retaining clients over the long term. Clear, well-written reports help your clients understand how your agency’s hard work is helping them.

These reports also give both you and your clients a clear idea of what you’ve already accomplished and what needs to happen next.

Backed by a powerful set of SEO tools for reporting, AgencyAnalytics provides an easy way to automate your data collection and visualization process to provide clients with comprehensive reports.

Show off your agency's organic traffic progress, streamline search engine optimization strategies, and win back billable hours with a simple SEO report template.

Get started with your own SEO report in minutes with our 14-day free trial today.