When you hire an SEO agency on a monthly container, you should be expecting a report every month. Every agency does reports differently, however. But regardless of what it looks like, the report should provide you with all of the results of the agency’s work and the benefits for your business.

This often isn’t the case, however. Most SEO reports either contain too little detail or contain so much information that it is confusing for business owners. This can be very misleading for business owners and cause them to work with an SEO agency for too long even when they aren’t producing the results.

Understanding what to expect from an SEO report can help you find an SEO agency that can trust. And that’s exactly what we’re going to do here.

What are the Basics of an SEO Report

There are a few things that an SEO report should contain, they include data on:

Traffic
Conversions
Rankings

These three factors account for the main general goals of SEO: to improve visibility in Google, to increase traffic and to get more customers.

What Else to Look For in an SEO Report

This isn’t all an SEO report should contain, however. There are several other things that should be included to make the report readable and valuable.

1. SEO Metrics

Metrics allow SEO agencies to present their efforts and results in a format that is easy for clients to understand. Mapping key metrics to graphs can let business owners quickly see how successful efforts have been.

These shouldn’t just be any combination of metrics. These metrics should coincide with your business and SEO objectives. There’s no point doing SEO for the sake of it. There has to be a goal to the process and these are the metrics that should be detailed in your report.

This could include:

Traffic to particular pages or parts of your website
Rankings on particular keywords
On-page stats such as site speed
Conversion rates

2. Analysis

The metrics mentioned above should be easy enough to understand on their own. But that doesn’t mean there shouldn’t be any commentary on them. There should also be analysis provided by the SEO company that provides some commentary on the metrics and helps business owners to understand them.

This shouldn’t be too technical, however. When techical SEO jargon is used, business owners can be left confused. The more open, honest and plain the commentary is, the better the company tends to be.

3. Next Steps

If you are getting an SEO report, the chances are that you will have entered into an ongoing relationship with an SEO company. As part of the report, therefore, there should be notes on what will be happening to your site and social presence next month. If the company can’t explain what they are going to do for you, what are you paying them for.

If you’re not happy with your current SEO report, try our services instead. Get in touch today for a free consultation.