Local SEO reporting: Provide more value to your agency clients
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Many business owners feel they’re not getting the results they want. That can lead to questions about whether SEO is worth their time and, often, their small budgets.
If your agency offers local SEO services to help local businesses get found online and get more foot traffic through their doors, that number may raise a few questions. Are your own local business clients satisfied with the SEO services you deliver? And, if not, what can you do to offer them more value?
One of the answers is improving your local SEO reporting. Why is local SEO reporting so important for your clients, and how does it drive value? Let’s take a look.
Local SEO reporting convinces the client SEO is worth it
As noted, only a paltry 30 percent of local businesses are happy enough to recommend their current SEO provider. The majority—a whopping 70 percent—are going to tell their peers to look elsewhere. Those business owners might even be thinking about finding a new provider themselves.
One of the most common reasons for this kind of dissatisfaction is an inability to see results. Many business owners aren’t sure what SEO does for their business. Why do they need to be on online business directories? Why do they need online reviews? Why does their business need to be listed on Apple Maps and Waze? How is that helping them generate more revenue?
Local SEO reporting can help them see why these strategies are important for their business. Reports can show them exactly what’s changed, from month to month or even from the time they started with you. It’s easy to miss incremental day-to-day changes, but a report can tell a different story.
Showcasing results that matter through reports
<p<It’s important that your local SEO reporting focuses on the metrics that matter to the client. Many business owners say they want to drive traffic to their webpages. You might think reporting on those traffic numbers is enough. If traffic to the client’s website has grown, that should convince them that SEO works, right?
Here’s where reporting can do more. With the right analytics dashboard, you can draw direct connections. You can illustrate the relationship between your SEO efforts, higher traffic, and increased sales for the client.
Those numbers are much more convincing than website traffic statistics alone. With these numbers, you can illustrate the ROI of local SEO services for the client. In turn, they’re more likely to think SEO is “worth it”—even if they didn’t before.
How does local SEO reporting add value?
It’s easy to understand why local SEO reporting is important to your clients. It’s also important for your own team, as it can show you if your efforts are paying off.
How does it add value to what your agency offers to your local business clients, though?
We’ve seen how reporting can prove ROI and convince a client that what they’re spending on SEO is worth every penny. It can also show them how well their business is doing by comparing “before” and “after” scenarios.
Reporting for local SEO goes beyond showing higher website traffic or increased sales. Done right, local SEO reports can identify opportunities, provide strategic insight, and more.
Identifying opportunities for local SEO
Suppose you and a client have been working on a local SEO strategy for a few months now. You’ve run the reports and the numbers are in. Some of what you’re doing is working like a charm. Other parts of your strategy … not so much.
You should be upfront with the client if something isn’t working. While some people think poor results point to failure, they actually represent opportunities. If traffic isn’t growing the way you thought it would, there is an opportunity to improve. That could be better backlinking (Entrepreneur) or business listing updates in online directories. Either of these services could give the client’s local SEO a boost.
The report can show you where the strengths of the strategy are. From there, you can identify gaps in the strategy and provide solutions for the client, so they can get even more out of the SEO strategy.
Cutting through the noise and providing expertise
Another key way local SEO reporting provides value is by cutting through the noise. You could provide them with raw data, but they might not know how to interpret the information.
They might also receive so much data about their local SEO that they feel overwhelmed. They don’t know what to look at. Are they doing well or not?
Receiving curated, customized reports from your team helps the client make sense of the data. Reports illustrate what’s working and what’s not in an easily digested format. They also clear out the clutter, like data points that conflict with or confuse the results.
Most local businesses turn to a digital expert because they don’t understand the intricacies of local SEO. They know it’s supposed to help them grow their business, but they need your help and expertise to help them do that.
Not understanding SEO is one reason many people are skeptical about its importance. If clients can’t sort through the data they receive, they may not be able to make the case that SEO has helped them. If they already suspected SEO wasn’t that useful, they might put it on the chopping block.
Curated reports filter the data and let the client see the facts and figures that matter to them. Your team also has the opportunity to provide insights. That, in turn, can help the client make sense of what they see on their dashboard.
Share insights and inform strategy with better reporting
A detailed dashboard and better analytics tools do more than identify gaps in an SEO strategy. They can provide the data you need to inform the client’s long-term strategy.
With better local SEO reporting, you can move beyond the micro-analysis of what’s working in the moment. More detailed reports let you take in the bigger picture and come up with opportunities to explore. An example might be a program to help the client receive more reviews. To date, the client has wanted to focus on product reviews for their own site. What if you expanded the scope of the review strategy? Creating incentives, automating reminders, and curating reviews from around the web could help. The client would not only get more reviews for their site but for the business on the whole.
Get a leg up on the competition
Local SEO reporting also includes insights about where the client ranks compared to their competitors. In turn, you can provide insight about what the client can do to outrank them.
Maybe you can make recommendations about more strategic local keywords to rank for. After all, larger competitors and national companies might be aiming for “popular” keywords. There might be several less-competitive terms your client could rank higher for. In turn, your client could outrank the competition for terms that are more likely to turn into leads.
Knowing the competition can also show you how many ratings your client needs to rank higher in a business directory. You might have insight into how to have the client featured as part of Google’s three-pack. These are great goals for any local SEO strategy.
Branding your agency as the local SEO expert
Your clients have turned to you for SEO services because they trust you. You want to keep that trust, so positioning your team as the SEO experts is in your best interests.
White-label SEO services and customizable dashboards can help. You can sell these services, such as a detailed reporting dashboard, under your own brand. Every time the client logs in to see the data or receive a report from your team, they will see your agency name and your logo.
White-label SEO services go beyond reporting, too. They can help you offer even more to your clients, such as review management and local business listings management. Your own team will be augmented by technological tools and another team of experts. With them on your side, you can deliver outstanding service and better results.
With white-label SEO services in play, your clients will come back to you month after month. Better yet, they’ll be part of the 30 percent of local businesses that recommend their current SEO provider.
Deliver more value today
If you want to deliver more for your local business clients, it’s time to talk to a white-label SEO service provider. They can help you discover new services to offer, from better local SEO reporting to automation and more. At the same time, they can help you enhance your current offerings to help you scale your agency.