to create better SEO reports for your C-suite

Marketing must return on investment in the face of a recession. It will be difficult to get buy-in when there are misalignments between the CMO’s vision of SEO and his or her SEO strategy. It is essential that you prove the importance of organic search for the business and your job.

Ever submitted a SEO report, only to be asked to “put it in the calendar” so they can go through it. Most likely, they didn’t like the length of your report and want you to give a summary.

These time-consuming dangers can be avoided by understanding what information is important to the C-suite, and what will likely go unnoticed.

What makes an SEO report insufficient for the C-suite

Poor SEO reports for the C-suite have one or more of these characteristics.

Missalignment with the larger strategy

HubSpot surveys found that 17% of marketers felt their team wasn’t aligned with the overall company strategy.

SEO should be seen as an integral part of the business. Therefore, it is important to create reports that are closely aligned with your overall business strategy.

Poor focus on revenue

This is the most important aspect of a SEO report that you send to your CMO. The C-suite may think that the report fails to highlight SEO’s impact on revenue.

If organic traffic and revenue are not tracked, then reporting on a website’s change would be insignificant for the C-suite.

Include metrics like customer acquisition, conversion rates and revenue from organic traffic to demonstrate SEO’s value in your reporting.

Forecasting myths

Forecasting is the process of making data-driven predictions about traffic, behavior, sales, and other factors.

It can be difficult to predict exact traffic and revenue for a given period in SEO due to the many variables that influence search.

These growth forecasts and other metrics can lead to confusion if they are not addressed properly.

Excessive textual and jargon

A report on SEO that contains jargon will be seen by the C-suite. They may believe that corporate fluff has been applied.

It will appear that you are trying to raise capital, and SEO won’t get taken seriously.

Avoid technical terminology and jargon that can be confusing for non-experts.

• Initialism: CWV, CSS, JS, API, GA4, XML, CTR, CMS, CPC, DA, LSI.
• Jargon: SEO-friendly, link juice, PageRank, SEO quick wins, etc.
• Corporate fluff. Contact base, circle back, contact base, agile work, low-hanging fruits, caveats and bandwidth, cascade to other businesses, take on board, use all the tools available, results-driven.

As an in-house seo, I’ve seen great pitches from people who put in the work. The overall message is distorted by excessive jargon, insufficient images/graphs, and little correlation to revenue.

To make it easy for people to understand the key points, your SEO reports should be concise and include visual aids. Simpler is better. Do not waste your time with a 60 slide deck or 32 page report.

Inadequacy of focusing on relevance

The C-suite may not be directly affected by SEO reports. It is your job to link the dots and present your reports in a way that highlights metrics that are relevant to each stakeholder’s responsibility area (e.g., financial performance of CEOs, marketing results to CMOs, etc. ).

Keep track of all changes made, campaigns launched, landing pages created, and other details. Highlight the SEO efforts that drove traffic and revenue.

This is what the C-suite needs to know. They want to know the impact of a strategy on revenue targets, and how your work as a consultant/SEO agency will help them achieve their goals.

How the best-in class communicates with the C suite

These are the steps you need to take in order to overcome these issues and make SEO reports more attractive for key decision-makers.

Demonstrate value

Executives in the C-suite want to cut costs and increase efficiency. SEO is a crucial board item. (Here’s a excellent article about effectively communicating SEO to the C-suite.

SEOs should clearly state:

• Communicate the channel’s benefits to the C-suite executives and senior managers.
• It is important to highlight the impact of SEO on key business metrics such as website traffic, revenue and customer acquisition.
• Mention instances where you have achieved positive returns on investment in paid campaigns

CMOs and other top managers can also be aided by SEOs to make sure reports are clear and easy-to-digest.

Alignment with a wider business strategy

You should focus on creating a well-documented strategy that is closely aligned to the overall business strategy. This will ensure:

• SEO is viewed as an integral part of a business and not a technical afterthought.
• Senior management will find the metrics and data in SEO reports relevant and useful.

Training and relationships

Are you in a high ranking SEO position at your agency or company? If so, is anyone in the C-suite familiar with your name? If not, it’s a great time to begin building healthy relationships with key stakeholders.

You don’t have to be a well-known person on Twitter or any other social media channels within your company. Instead, go out of your comfort zone and talk to others at social events, such as company town halls, presentations, or conferences.

Report structure for C-suite

A C-suite SEO report should be consistent in structure and provide detailed, thoughtful responses to client questions.

Important – Make it visually appealing with charts and graphs. People will instantly turn off a report that is too dense with text and ask for a meeting to go over it. ).

This is an excellent (paid Template) : Dashboard Element PowerPoint Template.

Barbara Minto, a communication expert and McKinsey’s first female consultant, is an expert in effective communication. The Pyramid Principle was created by Minto based on the belief that two things cannot be mutually exclusive or collectively exhausting (MECE).

The MECE structure guarantees that all information within every data bucket (like a single discover) is:

• Mutually exclusive (ME), which means that one set is not able to overlap with another.
• None of these groups has any information gaps or is missing critical information.

Recommendations should be concise and clear in order to give clients useful advice. These are the key points that the client should remember and be able to share with others.

You can make recommendations in the following ways when writing a management consulting report:

• “To address X we recommend that you introduce Y because Z.”
• Our data study revealed that Z can be applied to solve problem X and prevent Y from happening.
• We used [the tool/method/technology] X to investigate the issue Y and recommend Z as the best fix.

You should finish the executive summary last. You can choose the most important results or ideas by writing this summary and place them at beginning of your report.

Gerry White, Riverside FM’s in-house reporter for BBC and Just Eat, did extensive research into SEO reporting that was successful for the C-suite.

Here is the diagram he suggested.

Aleyda Solis’s compelling Learn SEO roadmap includes a section on SEO reporting. Take a look at these resources and examples and adapt them to suit the process.

Always make sure it is revenue-driven and related to the overall strategy.

Reporting for the C-suite by in-house SEOs

I reached out to in-house SEOs to get their opinions on reporting to the C suite. Here are their thoughts:

Ash New , SEO Lead, Virgin Mobile

• “A senior business leader won’t usually care about the details of which keyword group performs better than another. They want to get to the essential details.
  • What is the best way to reach our target with this channel?
  • What is the channel’s performance and why is it different?
  • What should this channel do to reach its target?
• They will listen more if you can help them cut through the noise. For any follow-up questions, it is a good idea to keep the details in order.

Numerous in-house SEOs pointed out the missing elements in agency reports.

Dixon Jones CEO, Inlinks

• “…[Lack of ‘what do you next?” actions (with a Why). One hundred actions/insights won’t help. “The next three tasks that I can do with confidence are better than the ones before.

Aymen Loukil CEO, Speetals

• Reporting to C-suites and CMOs should be brief and to the point. Include the wins and losses along with a short-term plan for addressing issues.

Martijn Scheijbeler, SVP Marketing, RVshare

• “Too much detail. Period.”

Brian Sain SEO, Razorfish

• “Data without context. A report is incomplete if it does not contain…
  • What means.
  • Why it Matters.
  • What the client/you should do.
• It probably shouldn’t exist, then.”

Search Engine Land first published the post Making better SEO reports for C-suite.