Make your report comprehensive for local business clients. Here’s how to set up your SEO reports to help local clients. One area many agencies lack overall, especially in local SEO, is reporting.

Many local businesses primarily focus on increasing the number of customers that walk through their doors, unlike enterprise and worldwide companies that have C-level executives and stockholders.

Therefore, agencies can provide better services to local businesses and forge deeper ties by streamlining our approach and concentrating on reporting only highly pertinent data.

Here are seven suggestions to help you better service your local clients and your local SEO reporting.

1. Simplify Reports

Simplifying your SEO reporting is a recommendation that applies to all agencies in general, not simply local SEO companies.

As marketers and communicators, our natural inclination is to give as thorough of a report as we can. This is especially true when marketers must hide poor campaign results beneath a sea of data.

However, the performance of our marketing activities should be clearly and succinctly described in our reports. Complicated reports with extraneous data detract from the success of a campaign and will make some readers’ eyes glaze over.

Follow these tips to keep local SEO reports simple and easily digestible for clients:

• Set clear goals: Outline the campaigns’ goals at the top of reports and cite the most relevant metrics in communicating your progress toward those goals.
• Eliminate unnecessary metrics: For the SEO neophyte, metrics like total keyword volume, impressions, and backlinks matter very little if they aren’t driving foot traffic to the store.
• Use a single reporting period: Regardless of how many tools you use, you should stick to tracking one reporting period (e.g., the past 30 days or two weeks) based on when reports are distributed.
• Visualize data: Tools like Semrush provide pie charts and line charts for important keyword metrics that can help clients visualize campaign progress. Google Analytics also provides visuals for metrics, such as new or returning users.
• Segment reports into different sections: Don’t just skip from user metrics directly into social media metrics without clearly separating reports into sections. For example, I like to organize my reports into chapters, such as “Traffic Overview,” “Local Keyword Overview,” “Social Media Overview,” etc.
• Tell a story: Don’t just inundate clients with metric after metric. Instead, explain metrics in brief paragraphs on top of or below charts. I sometimes include a brief one-page SEO primer at the beginning of reports and audits to help people understand what value we’re adding.

2. Choose The Right Metrics

Part of telling a story with data is selecting the correct data that’s relevant to that story.

Most local businesses only really care about two vital metrics:

• Traffic.
• Conversions.

This does not imply that you should ignore any significant data; rather, it means that you should pick metrics that are pertinent to your story.

Even measurements like overall traffic do not indicate the quality of the traffic or the channels from which it comes.

That’s why I like to include the following vital metrics from Google Analytics:

• Top Landing Pages.
• Location by city (Users, New Users, Sessions, Bounce Rate, etc.).
• Overall Sessions.
• Top Traffic Channels by Sessions.
• Traffic Sources/Medium.
• New vs. Returning Customers.

These data let our clients know which campaigns and from what cities and sources the most significant traffic flow is coming.

I also prefer to track SERP (search engine results page) data from Google Search Console, such as clicks, impressions, and CTR, in my reports (click-through rate).

A tool to report keyword data, such Semrush or Ahrefs, is also required. Semrush even offers a useful tool for quickly creating reports and creating templates for future clients.

3. Segment Keywords By Location

As we delve more into local SEO, we’ll need to make sure that our reports are properly designed to just provide information on local keyword data.

You’ll need a sophisticated keyword tool for this area, such as Semrush, Moz, or Ahrefs.

In this example, I utilized Semrush to set up a new project and integrate position tracking on my most important keywords.

I configured position tracking for searches especially in the Houston metropolitan area, as you can see in the screenshot below. I may then upload keywords for reporting that I’m monitoring via Semrush or even Google Analytics.

To filter the keywords I am tracking, I can also add tags that separate them into specific categories.

You can get as granular as you wish with your list by separating your keywords by question phrases, “near me” searches, or including a city-based keyword from your list.

4. Segment Traffic By Device

The ability to filter data by the device is equally important for monitoring local SEO strategies.

I like to break down the traffic in my reports by device and even more specifically by location and device because of this.

Considering click-to-calls and mobile ordering, which are frequently done on a smartphone or other mobile device, mobile search traffic may actually be more significant for local SEO than desktop traffic.