Ready to put your SEO reporting for clients on autopilot? Here are 5 simple steps to set up automated reporting with minimal time and effort.
Do you dread the time-consuming process of manually creating SEO reports? If so, automated SEO reporting can save you countless hours of work and give you the power to easily stay on top of high-leverage performance insights for your clients.
In this post, we’ll explain how automated SEO reporting can transform your workflow. Then, we’ll outline five simple steps you can take to set up automated reports so you can unlock a world of crucial performance data with minimal time and effort.
Ready to put your SEO reporting for clients on autopilot? Be sure to read this post from top to bottom so you get all the basics—here’s what you need to know to get started.
What is Automated SEO Reporting?
Rather than build all your SEO reporting manually using, automated SEO reports mean fast, comprehensive reports of all your key performance indicators (KPIs) done for you. That leaves you with extra time to assess the effectiveness of your content strategy and identify areas for optimization and improvement. You can dig into more profound, time-sensitive, potentially strategy-shifting questions about KPIs, such as:
- Keyword ranking
- Traffic and engagement
- Backlink analysis
- Competitor analysis
- Technical SEO
Benefits of Automated SEO Reporting
Regularly monitoring SEO metrics and analyzing the results ensures your efforts are aligned with your marketing goals. But keeping track of all these performance metrics without the help of automation is grueling work.
That’s where automated SEO reporting comes in.
Without spending hours building reports, you can easily access actionable data and provide clients with the most reliable insights possible to achieve the best results.
How To Set Up Automated SEO Reporting in 5 Steps
Setting up automated SEO reporting can seem like a daunting task. With these five steps, you can generate high-quality, automated SEO reports in no time!
Step 1: Choose your KPIs
Your KPIs are your North Star, your Guiding Light, the beacons you follow to find your way to the top of the search engine one step at a time. Pro tip: KPIs vary depending on your business goals, so creating a KPI strategy that aligns with your specific objectives rather than monitoring generic “vanity” metrics is important.
Consider the meaning you can draw from data points like impressions, position, and clicks. For instance:
- Organic sessions/clicks: how many people are locating your content on Google and clicking through to your page?
- Organic impressions: how frequently is your content showing up in Google’s SERPS (Search Engine Results Pages)?
- Organic conversions: how many people are clicking through to your site and making purchases?
- Keyword rankings: how is your content ranking on Google for target or related keywords?
Let’s say your content has a high number of organic impressions and organic clicks but a low number of organic conversions. In that case, it could mean that your content is not engaging readers, or you have a weak call to action. That knowledge then allows you to make data-driven changes to your marketing strategy to ramp up your creative and strengthen your CTAs.
Step 2: Establish your benchmarks for success
By setting baselines, you can measure progress and track performance over time. You’ll want to select several metrics to use as benchmarks so you have multiple points of reference and get a more reliable sense of your performance. These could be organic search impressions, keyword ranking positions, organic click-through rate (CTR), or any other relevant performance indicators.
For instance, if your goal is to boost organic search traffic, you’ll set benchmarks for the number of impressions and clicks you hope to get as you track your position for a given list of keywords. This data can help you make inferences about critical questions like:
- How well is our site or content performing?
- Are we trending to hit monthly goals?
- Are we behind schedule?
- Are we writing click-worthy headlines and meta descriptions?
If you fall behind on your goals, you want to know what isn’t working ASAP so you can adjust your marketing strategy. If you surpass your monthly goals, you want to know what is working, so you know what will likely work in the future.
Step 3: Build Out a Dashboard or Report in Looker Studio
The days of manually compiling data in a gigantic spreadsheet are over. Looker Studio is a free Google tool, and we highly recommend it for Automated SEO reporting. In general, it works like this:
- The platform collects data from different platforms so that you can create graphs, tables, and other visual representations.
- You can work with metrics and dimensions to create dashboards according to your goals.
- Then, it is possible to share them with other users.
- Looker Studio allows you to track specific KPIs to quickly tell how well you’re performing for any given metric.
- You can set up Looker Studio to pull data straight from Google Analytics 4 or Universal Analytics if you insist, but we recommend switching to GA4 soon.
Looker Studio also allows you to automate your settings. For instance, you can select rolling date ranges and automate email reporting. By setting up emailing for automated SEO reports, you can automatically receive updates about your data and trends without ever having to pull reports manually.
Step 4: Choose Your Reporting Frequency
Once your SEO dashboard is built, you need to decide how often you want updates for your metrics. You can look at the data daily, weekly, monthly, or quarterly.
While you should make an effort to check in on your data regularly, more isn’t necessarily always better. You want to select a frequency that matches how often you will be analyzing and making changes to your SEO strategy.
So if you’re not going to make changes every day, you probably don’t need a daily report. The key is that you only want to see the data you need because you want everything to be actionable.
At the end of the day, an excellent automated SEO reporting system should give you peace of mind that your efforts are paying off. With the proper setup, you can get an early warning if something isn’t working and make changes quickly to avoid costly mistakes. That way, you can continue optimizing your content based on data-driven insights.
Step 5: Analyze Your Data and Make Changes
Once you have GA4 setup and the right data, it’s time to take action. Analyzing your performance metrics is only helpful if you can make changes that result in better performance.
You can use this GA4 SEO data to inform decisions about content, technical SEO, and link-building strategies. The key is finding out where you need improvement and then taking action.
For example, if you find that your organic search traffic is down, you can look at trends and insights to better understand why that might be the case. Is your content not meeting user intent? Are there any technical SEO issues preventing Google from crawling your pages properly?
Once you discover the root of the problem, you can then take steps to make the necessary changes. Whether it’s updating your content, optimizing titles and meta descriptions, or fixing indexing issues, this data-driven approach to SEO allows you to identify problems quickly and get them fixed quickly.
Automated SEO Reporting: Common Challenges
Automated SEO reports offer so many advantages, but like anything, there are potential pitfalls. Here are some common mistakes we see when it comes to automated SEO reporting—and how to avoid them.
Not looking at the right data.
The data needs to be actionable for your automated SEO reporting to be helpful. And in order to be actionable, you need to be looking at the most appropriate data. Data for data’s sake isn’t valuable—in fact, it can make the whole process needlessly complicated.
Tracking more data than you need
That brings us to our next common mistake—trying to track too much data. The key is to keep tabs on only the metrics that are useful to your SEO strategy. You only need to track data that is relevant to your established KPIs and goals.
Remember our rule: with data, sometimes less is more.
Over-automating when providing automated reporting for clients.
This is a big mistake we see some agencies make when providing automated reporting for clients: trying to automate too much.
Rather than insert meaningful insights, some agencies produce a generic template with core data that’s hard to digest. They then send it directly to the client—sometimes without even analyzing or looking at it themselves.
Interpreting data and insights is one part of this process that you want to avoid automating when providing automated client reporting.
Not using the right visualizations.
Using the right visualizations, charts, and graphs can make your report clearer and easier to understand. Make sure to set up the correct visualization in Looker Studio before receiving your automated SEO reports. Trust us; it’s worth the effort and saves you time in the long run.
How To Choose the Right Automated SEO Reporting Tool
The next big question is which automated SEO reporting tool to choose. We’ve predominantly talked about Looker Studio so far, and here’s why:
- It is highly customizable
- It can connect to multiple data sources
- It is free to get started
However, here are some alternatives and add-ons that you may find helpful in case you’d prefer to try a few different methods.
Databox
Like Looker Studio, Databox also pulls all your metrics together in one place and allows you to create automated SEO reports.
- It’s straightforward to use
- It’s easy to set up with Google Ads, Google Analytics, Social Ads, and Hubspot
Supermetrics
Supermetrics is not actually a Looker Studio competitor. Instead, it is an add-on that allows you to integrate additional tools into Looker Studio, like Facebook ads and LinkedIn ads. It’s a must-have tool for turning Looker Studio into a full reporting platform (not just a Google-focused reporting platform).
Keyword Hero
Keyword Hero is a powerful tool that unlocks access to a previous feature in Google Analytics. In addition, it allows you to track conversions from a specific keyword. However, while you can see if a keyword ranks by checking Google Search Console, you cannot track how many conversions that keyword is driving.
With Keyword Hero, you can—that’s why we highly recommend Keyword Hero as an add-on to your Google Analytics. Once you have Keyword Hero setup, you can integrate the new metrics into your Looker Studio report.
Exponential Growth
If you’re looking for a managed service that will set up your Looker Studio reports and hand write the insights for client reports, you’ll need the pros here at Exponential Growth. Our team of analysts will set up automated reporting dashboards, letting you focus on what you do best while we handle the rest. Plus, we’ll provide key insights to facilitate better decision-making for you and your clients.
Download Our Free Looker Studio Rank Tracker Template.
Looker Studio templates offer a consistent starting point for building new dashboards and reports, which can save time and reduce errors. If it sounds like automated SEO reporting through Looker Studio may be helpful to you, then download our free Looker Studio template today and start maximizing your reporting efficiency.
To recap, automated SEO reporting allows you to:
- Generate automated SEO reports so you can save time and money
- Receive automatic emails so you can easily track your progress
- Seamlessly track your KPIs and goals
- Quickly make changes to your SEO strategy
By using Looker Studio and correctly setting up your dashboard, you can pull data from several sources—all in one convenient place.
We know there’s a lot to think about when it comes to automated SEO reporting. But with the software and support of agencies like Exponential Growth by your side, it’s easier than ever to track the progress of your SEO strategy.