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Published at Wed Oct 30 2024 in
For Teams

Best SEO Report Template for Agencies [2024]

Alberto Manassero
Alberto Manassero, Product Growth Manager, Rows
Best SEO Report Template for Agenices in 2024-min

“How do we report our SEO work to clients and team leads?”

That's the question many SEO specialists are asking themselves. 

That's where an SEO report template comes in.

I scrolled through a thread in an SEO community on Reddit recently, and I found this comment (it got a lot of traction). It reads: 

“I have been into SEO for a while and all along, I have been presenting my findings to my clients using Excel.

I wonder if there are ways or techniques to better present my findings.”

This comment points out that this agency's SEO specialist is looking for a better way to report findings from SEO performance. But why is he finding a better way? Two reasons:

  • Excel can not pull live data directly from SEO sources, except you get third-party integrations.

  • Excel is quite complex to use and lacks a tidy UI

Discover our SEO Report template

Discover our SEO Report template

Built with Rows, synced with your Google Search Console and GA4 accounts, powered by AI.

Try it now (it's free)

Let's face it: Aggregating, calculating, and reporting all your SEO data from campaigns in one place and at scale is a challenge faced by agencies with tens or even hundreds of retail clients.

Many different reporting tools claim, in some capacity, to be able to help with SEO reporting. And even the ones with satisfactory features come pricey. 

In this piece, we state why it's important for agencies to get an SEO report template and then discuss in depth how our tool, Rows SEO report template, and a few other templates in our reserve approach each of these factors and can serve as a powerful SEO reporting tool.

Want to see how easy it is to use the Rows SEO report template? [object Object]!

Why Do Marketing Agencies Need an SEO Report Template?

When it comes to SEO reporting, there’s no need to overcomplicate it. You need a template that gives you a centralized place to plan and keep track of every aspect of your SEO performance: ideas, preparation, execution, presentation, and follow-up.

Whether it’s a solo endeavor or a team effort, you can stay organized and in control from start to finish. Below are 3 reasons why you need an SEO report template;

1. It saves you time.

SEO report templates can cut your time on complex manual reporting and delivery. When you depend on manual handling of minute talks like data aggregation and integrations, you miss out on reporting deadlines.

2. It fosters consistent reporting.

New metrics today, different metrics tomorrow—this is what happens when you report SEO performance without templates. There should be a level of consistency in your reporting, and templates solve that. What's more? You can customize it to suit your offerings.

3. It helps you build trust with clients.

Your clients can sniff from afar when it seems like your reporting is going down the drain. With templates, you can report in an organized and transparent manner.  You can boost client retention rates through clear value demonstration of their site's SEO performance.

What Should Be Included in an SEO Report Template?

There's a pool of downloadable templates on the internet. You can go to a templates’ site and find hundreds of templates for download—check out a few of them, and you'll find that they look alike, with no distinguishing feature. 

The hallmark of the challenge you'll face is that some templates can not be customized — this means you'll have to depend on an array of generic features and metrics.

On that note, let's take a look at a few standout features that must be included in an SEO report template:

1. Top-level Performance Summary: The template should contain a brief overview highlighting the key findings and overall performance. For example, our SEO report template features 3 charts that give you an overview of the last months trend of impressions, clicks, position and branded/non-branded traffic

2. Traffic Analysis: Insights into where your traffic is coming from, including the most effective pages. For example, in our core SEO report template , there is one section devoted to top (least) performing pages. These tables are filtered to show your clicks, impressions and positions per page, over a certain period of time compared to previous period or Year Over Year.

3. Content Performance: It should show metrics on how well specific topics you are writing about engage users and drives traffic.  For example, using our SEO Report template, you can gauge the performance of user-selected topic clusters by checking the trend of clicks and impressions over time. Alternatively, you can have a deep-dive with our Content Grouping Template.

4. Keyword Rankings:  It should contain a snapshot of your targeted keywords' performance in search results.  For example, Our SEO report templates can show your top-ranked keywords (both branded and non-branded). For a deeper keyword research, try our Keywords Research Template

5. Backlink Profile: An analysis of your website's backlinks, focusing on quantity and quality.  For example, at Rows, we have a Google Backlink checker that gives you a list of backlinks sending the most referral traffic to your website and analyzes which incoming links send the most active and engaged users.

6. Competitor Analysis: A comparison of your SEO performance against key competitors to identify opportunities.  For example, Say competitor X gained 30% more backlinks; we should explore similar outreach strategies. 

7. Technical SEO: A overview of your website core loading performance, including FCP, LCP and CLS, both for mobile and desktop.

8. Customization options:An effective SEO report template must include customization options for logos, colors, and other branding elements. This way, you can present reports that match your client's brand style.

9. Visualization options: What is a report template without visualization elements like graphs, tables, and charts? Go for a template that has a tidy UI as well, so you can easily customize visualization options without hassle.

Discover our SEO Report template

Discover our SEO Report template

Built with Rows, synced with your Google Search Console and GA4 accounts, powered by AI.

Try it now (it's free)

How to Create an Effective SEO Report Template for Agencies with Rows?

Rows is spreadsheet software with tens of templates, from marketing templates to SEO templates and templates for time-consuming daily business tasks.

We understand that pulling data from all your different SEO channels can be a time suck — especially when you have to pull data from each platform individually.

To perform true SEO reporting, your template needs to integrate with your preferred SEO data source.

With Rows, you can pull live data from GA4 and GSC without coding or engineering — and with fast data load time.

As you'll read in the next few paragraphs, all our templates have integrations with various data sources.

Below are some of our SEO report templates — with short descriptions of how to use them, the key metrics they measure, and why we created them.

Rows SEO report template 

Screenshot 2024-10-23 at 15.04.33

Our SEO Report template is a dashboard that consolidates all essential SEO metrics in one flexible and easy-to-manage spreadsheet interface. It is directly connected to your Google Analytics 4 and Google Search Console accounts and provides automated, real-time insights into your website's search performance, traffic patterns, content effectiveness, and backlink profile.

Step-by-step instructions on how to use our SEO report template

Step 1: To use this template, click “use template” on the page. 

SEO report template - use template

Step 2: Once you've completed this, click on “create a spreadsheet.” You'll then be taken to the dashboard page.

Step 3: You'll get a pop-up for configuration. You'll be asked to configure GSC and GA4 integrations to your Rows account. Without doing this, you'll be unable to pull out live data.

SEO report template - config panel

Step 4: Once you have confirmed integration, it's time to get to work. The next step is to enter a date range in the 'Overall' setup table. The date range will apply to the entire report, but you can overwrite it on individual pages.

Step 5: Enter your brand name in the Overall setup table. This will allow you to distinguish between branded and non-branded traffic throughout the report.

SEO report template - overall

Look on the left side of your dashboard, and you'll see a pop-up of spreadsheets with different titles.

  • The “Overall” page gives you a top-level view of your traffic metrics, such as clicks, impressions, and position.

  • The “Pages” section includes detailed insights into the performance of individual pages, highlighting their traffic, impressions, clicks, and ranking.

  • The “Topic Clusters” section lets you organize your website into four different content clusters, showing how well your grouped topics perform in terms of visibility and engagement.

  • The “Keywords” section includes an analysis of your keywords

  • The “Backlinks” section includes a review of your backlink profile, showing the number of referring domains, total backlinks, new backlinks per month and their impact on your traffic.

How to customize Rows SEO report template 

You can edit our SEO report template to fit your client's taste. 

To kick off customization, click on any of the three dotted lines on each table or chart.

Once you've done this, you'll see an array of options—you can edit the chart, rename it to fit any metric, and reset its size.

edit chart

So, feel free to tailor the charts to suit your client’s needs and service offerings. As a rule of thumb, remember to title your template. 

One of the best features you've got in your hands is our AI analyst. With this feature, you can do any task from asking questions — Rows has an OPENAI integration, which means you can use AI to analyze data. In addition to that, you can summarize tables and create more charts if you want. 

In addition to our SEO report template, we have some other templates for SEO reporting — this time around, we are looking at templates that are created for specific use cases ranging from keyword research, cannibalization, keywords clustering to CTR. Let's take a look at how to use each of these templates:

Rows Google Search Console Keyword research report

GSC keyword research-min

The next SEO report template is the GSC keyword research report. If you want to get a snapshot of Informational, navigational, commercial, and transactional keywords, look up this report template.

How to use the GSC keyword research template

Using this report template, you will identify high-value queries to leverage in your SEO strategy, find high-potential queries to work on, and spot SEO easy wins. Below are a few steps on how to use this template:

  • Step 1: On this page, click on "Use Template".

Once done, you'll see a pop-up that shows — “Select spreadsheet destination” — click on “Create a spreadsheet.”

  • Step 2: Connect your Google Search Console account to Rows.

Without connecting your account, you'll be unable to access insights and analytics about your page.

  • Step 3: Set a date range.

By specifying a date range, you can observe how your keyword rankings change over time. This allows you to identify trends, whether your rankings are improving, declining, or remaining stable

  • Step 4: Enter your brand name to filter out branded keywords.

By filtering out these terms, you can focus on how easily people find your website when searching for solutions you offer rather than when they're already looking for your brand.

For example, ours is "Rows," and when filling this space in our report template, we might ignore keywords like "rows." This helps us concentrate on how well we rank for searches like "best data aggregation software 2024" or “AI on a spreadsheet," which potential new customers are more likely to use

  • Step 5: Enter keywords to follow.

If left blank, the chart will display the trend of all keywords.

Key metrics at a glance in the Google Search Console Keyword Research Report Template

Rows GSC keyword cannibalization checker

keyword cannibalization-min

Want to check if your site suffers from keyword cannibalization issues?  Then check out our Keyword cannibalization checker. Keyword cannibalization may occur when you have duplicate content that serves the same purpose and ranks for the same keywords with search volume and common user intent, thus harming each other rankings score on search engines.

This Google Search Console Keyword Cannibalization Checker template is a powerful tool that uses insights from the Google Search Console API to investigate instances of keyword cannibalization, spotting different pages competing for the exact keywords.

All you need to do is input a keyword and see all the pages of your website that rank for that specific query. Going through the list allows you to spot relevant pages that may represent a conflict.

To gather further information, use the Page comparison deep-dive table to compare two different pages by checking for how many common relevant keywords are ranking for and in what average position.

Step 1: To use this template, click “use template” on the page. 

Step 2: Once you've completed this, click on “create spreadsheet.” You'll then be taken to the dashboard page.

Step 3: Configure integration with Google Search Console. Once done, add date and add keywords you want to look up to.

Rows Keywords Clustering report 

keyword cluster report-min

The Keyword Clustering Tool helps you group and categorize keywords based on common themes or patterns, making tracking and optimizing your SEO performance on different topics easier. By clustering keywords, you can understand how your content targets and matches your visitor search intent and uncover gaps and new content opportunities to improve your website’s visibility on Google SERP.

How to set up Rows Keywords Clustering report

  • Step 1: Use the template

On this page, click the "Use Template" button and save the template in one of your folders.

  • Step 2: Connect Google Search Console

Follow the instructions to connect your Google Search Console accounts. The template integrates directly with GSC, allowing you to import live data from your account automatically.

  • Step 3: Setup

Pick a date range that aligns with your SEO goals, and define four groups of keywords. The criterion for clustering is based on whether the keyword "contains" a specific word or phrase of your choice.

Rows content grouping tool

content grouping-min

Using page grouping, this template helps you check the search performance of your website's subfolders.

Below are steps on how to use Rows’ content grouping tool:

  • Step 1: On this page, click on "Use Template".

Once done, you'll see a pop-up that shows — “Select spreadsheet destination” — click on “Create a spreadsheet.”

  • Step 2: Connect Google Search Console integration to Rows.

Without connecting your accounts, you'll be unable to access insights and analytics about your page.

  • Step 3: Pick a “days” range.

You can observe how your keyword rankings change over time by specifying a specific number of days. This allows you to identify and map out content over that specific time.

Rows Organic CTR tool

Organic CTR Tool-min

This Organic CTR tool will help you check the search CTR performance of (a group of) pages from your website against the current market benchmarks based on each page's average position.

You can do so by filtering for specific groups of pages and types of queries (branded vs non-branded).

To use this template, all you need to do is to:

  • Connect your Google Search Console property

  • Enter the period of analysis (e.g., last 90 days)

  • Input the condition to filter pages (e.g., page contains '/templates/')

  • Input your brand name (e.g., 'Rows')

  • Use the dropdown to select if you want to check only branded vs non-branded traffic (leave blank if you're going to include both types of keywords).

Having looked at our SEO report templates, here are a few things to note:

  • Check out the pages of other specific templates for extra information like benefits and how to use each

  • You can duplicate each template and download them either as CSV or as PDF.

  • Rows offers a login less approach — all you need to do is register your account and login without having to fill any details.

Discover our SEO Report template

Discover our SEO Report template

Built with Rows, synced with your Google Search Console and GA4 accounts, powered by AI.

Try it now (it's free)

How to Customize Your SEO Report Template for Client Needs?

Customizing an SEO report template to meet client needs goes beyond incorporating brand styles and colors.

Before you customize your SEO template for client needs, there are a few questions you must ask:

What are client priorities at the moment? What's the one thing that will make them feel an “aha moment”?

For example, here's another Reddit comment— with a complaint about an unhappy client. With an emphasis on  “they don't have a clear understanding of everything we've done.”

Reddit

The client needs help understanding simply because the agency has failed to conduct a proper onboarding.

As clients differ, so do their problems.

So, the best route to take is to have a call with your client and ask them about their SEO goals. Often, these will always be revenue—centered because what matters most is the ROI. Collate their goals and create a checklist of metrics that fit each goal. This way, you can be specific in your reporting.

Below are a few steps

  • Define Client-Specific Goals and add metrics that relate to each goal

Begin by uncovering the client's core business objectives and pain points. Only some clients will prioritize traffic growth alone; some may value metrics like lead quality, user engagement, or conversion rates. 

I like how Matt Bailey, a Digital Marketing thought leader with over 25k followers, mirrors it — he says:

Matt Bailey linkedin

By establishing these goals upfront, you ensure the report isn't cluttered with extraneous data but instead hones in on what's meaningful. This prioritization of relevant metrics shows clients you understand their unique context and are committed to driving results that matter to them.

  • Craft a resonating reporting narrative with actionable insights.

Don't make reporting look boring. Data without context is easy to forget. Structure the report so that each section flows logically, with clear explanations emphasizing the metrics matter. Visuals, like annotated charts and side-by-side comparisons, can make the data more explicit. Pair each insight with a specific action: if the bounce rate on certain pages is high, suggest UX adjustments or content tweaks that could improve engagement. 

  • Give room for interactions in your report. 

An effective report doesn’t just end with metrics; it ends with momentum. Wrap up with commentary highlighting successes, improvement areas, and concrete next steps. Explain why certain areas showed improvement or remained stagnant, always tying your conclusions to the client’s primary objectives. 

Tips on Presenting Data to Your Clients

Presenting data effectively to clients requires more than having the best report template in the market.

It’s about tailoring your communication, delivering key insights, and providing actionable steps that resonate with each client’s needs.

From establishing a clear narrative to using reliable data tools and setting regular follow-ups, each step in the presentation process can build trust and deepen the impact of your insights.

Here are essential tips for creating data presentations that inform and inspire confident, data-driven decisions.

We'll take it in three forms:

Pre-presentation tips — Preparing your report data

  • Review your client's strategic goals and tie metrics back to them wherever possible.

  • Figure out who is presenting which sections.

  • Do a practice run-through with your team and incorporate feedback.

  • Brainstorm a list of potential objections you’ll get from upper management and craft a few bullet points you can use to answer them eloquently.

  • Make sure the report data is sharable via link or pdf format.

  • Ensure data accuracy in your SEO reports and ensure you carry out error-checking.

Presentation tips — Resonating with your client and audience 

  • Request people’s full attention while presenting the report.

  • Pause for questions. This is a good way to gauge how the presentation call is going and help you jump to other parts of the presentation based on people’s interests.

  • Take notes. Designate a team member to do so or use an AI tool to create and summarize a transcript.

Post-presentation tips — Strategizing and continuation of work

  • Review the notes you took and start to parse out the questions you still need to address and the new strategies or ideas you plan to pursue.

  •  Make a plan to incorporate future projects and activities into your workflow so you have results to share at your SEO reporting.

Discover our SEO Report template

Discover our SEO Report template

Built with Rows, synced with your Google Search Console and GA4 accounts, powered by AI.

Try it now (it's free)

Conclusions

A structured SEO report template can transform your client reporting process, providing consistency, clarity, and value.

With Rows' free SEO reporting template, life becomes easier. It's free to use; all you have to do is sign up to get a Rows, and viola! You are on the way to creating your best SEO reports yet.