5 Tips For Better Local SEO Reporting

Local business clients will appreciate the comprehensiveness of your report. This is how to set up SEO reports for local clients.

Reporting is a crucial area that many agencies are lacking, especially in local SEO.

Local businesses are more concerned about getting customers than international and multinational businesses with C-level executives or shareholders.

Agencies can serve local businesses better and establish stronger relationships by simplifying their approach and reporting only the most relevant data.

These five tips will support you improve your local SEO reporting to serve your local clients better.

1. Simplify Reports

Local SEO agencies should follow this tip, and all agencies should.

As communicators and marketers, our first instinct is to give as much detail as possible. This is even more true when marketers have to hide lousy campaign results beneath a mountain of information.

Our reports must tell a straightforward, concise story about the effectiveness of our marketing campaigns.

Reports that contain unnecessary data and are too complicated will hinder campaign success.

These tips will help you keep your local SEO reports easy to understand for clients.

• Clear goals: Clearly outline the campaign’s plans at the top and mention the most relevant metrics to communicate your progress towards those goals.
• Remove unnecessary metrics: SEO novices don’t need to know that metrics such as total keyword volume, impressions, and backlinks are necessary if they don’t drive foot traffic to their store.
• Only use one reporting period. Regardless of the number of tools you use, tracking one reporting period (e.g., past 30 days or two weeks) is essential based on when reports were distributed.
• Visualize data Tools such as Semrush offer lines and pie charts that show crucial keyword metrics. This can be used to help clients track campaign progress. Google Analytics provides visuals of metrics such as returning or new users.
• Separate reports into different sections – Don’t simply jump from user metrics into social media metrics. My pieces can be organized into chapters like Traffic Overview, Local Keyword Overview, Social Media Overview, etc.
• Tell a Story: You don’t need to overwhelm clients with metric after statistic. Instead, use short paragraphs to explain metrics on top or below charts. To help people understand the value we are adding, I often include a one-page SEO primer in audits and reports.

2. Select the Right Metrics

Data is only part of telling a story. You must choose the correct data to tell that story.

Local businesses care only about two essential metrics:

• Traffic.
• Conversions.

This doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t use every vital metric. However, you should select metrics that are relevant for your story.

Even metrics such as overall traffic won’t tell you how qualified the traffic is, or where it originated from.

This is why I love to include these vital metrics from Google Analytics.

• Top Landing Pages
• Locate by city (Users and New Users, Sessions or Bounce Rate), etc. ).
• All Sessions
• Top Traffic Channels By Sessions
• Traffic Sources/Medium
• Returning Customers vs. Returning customers.

These metrics show our clients which campaigns generate the highest traffic flow and from what cities and sources.

I like to include Google Search Console data to track SERP data (search engine result page), such as clicks and impressions.

A tool that reports keyword data, such as Semrush and Ahrefs, is also required. Semrush also offers a handy tool that allows you to create reports and make templates for your future clients quickly.

3. Segment Keywords By Location

We’ll be looking at more local SEO aspects and need to optimize our reports to report only on the relevant keywords.

This section will require an advanced keyword tool such as Ahrefs, Moz, or Semrush.

I used Semrush for a new project to track positions on the most strategic keywords.

You can see that I set up position tracking to track searches in Houston. To report on keywords that I follow from Semrush and Google Analytics, I can then upload them.

You can add tags to filter keywords that you are tracking.

By separating keywords by question phrases or “near me” searches, you can make your list as detailed as you want. You may also include a city-based keyword in your inventory.

Once position tracking and tags are set up, exporting or adding these keywords to a CSV file or Semrush’s reporting tool is easy.

4. Segment Traffic by Device

Filtering data by a device is equally important for local SEO campaigns.

This is why I include sections in my reports that detail traffic by device and even go as granularly as location and device.

Local SEO is more important than desktop traffic. This is especially true when you consider click-to-calls and mobile ordering. These are often done on a mobile phone or another mobile device.

5. Get Local SERP Results

Google’s approach to local search is also different, using tools such as the LocalSearch Pack or Google Business Profile.

Google Business Profile listings are a great source of foot traffic and conversions for many local businesses.

To track Google Business Profile data with any other reporting tool, you will need to sign up for a connector

Many keyword tools, like Semrush, offer keyword information on local search results, such as local pack results or featured snippets.

This information is very relevant for businesses who want to rank in “near me” searches that bring a lot of traffic.

This data / information can be exported to a CSV file or uploaded directly to Semrush’s reporting tool.