4+ Agency SEO Report Tools & Resources [Slam Guide + Masterclass]

The digital marketing industry has evolved a lot in the past decade, and 2024 is shaping up to be a year of unprecedented change. While core principles like understanding your target audience and creating relevant content are as relevant as ever, the methods used to get that content in front of your target audience increasingly depend on your ability to navigate algorithms, analyze data, and crack the search engine optimization code. That’s why, when it comes to creating an agency SEO report, you need the right tools and resources to stay on top of your game.

As an award-winning SEO & design agency with over a decade of experience, we’ve seen and tried all the tools on the market. We know what works and what doesn’t, and we’re here to share that knowledge with you.

In this article, we’ll cover:

Why your agency needs SEO reporting tools
How to understand the difference between technical SEO and content SEO
Slam’s top 4 tools for a successful agency SEO report
5 steps to using Slam’s template with SEO agency reporting software
How an agency SEO report improves performance
Best practices for an agency SEO report
How to scale your SEO agency reporting with Slam’s template and course

We’ll explore some of our favorite marketing agency reporting tools and show you how to integrate them into our marketing agency report template–the perfect resource for tracking your performance and impressing your clients.

Of course, not everything can be covered in a blog article–sometimes you need a masterclass! If you’re looking for a deep dive into the science behind crafting an agency seo report (and more), we’ve got you covered with our How to Start an Agency course.

I’m Silvia Li Sam, founder of Slam Media Lab–the nation’s leading Hispanic marketing agency. When I was starting out, I didn’t have a clue about how to find and use the tools I needed to stay competitive. I swore that if and when I made it, I’d never gatekeep the information I learned along the way. That’s why I’ve worked with the Slam team to create our masterclass, templates, and other resources to help you conquer the learning curve and start slamming your goals.

Why Your Agency Needs SEO Reporting Tools

In short, your agency needs SEO reporting tools to keep track of your campaigns and strategies. Are they successfully generating the desired results? Are there problems? What is working, and what isn’t? An SEO agency report answers all these questions and more.

SEO agency reporting software is crucial for:

Performance monitoring
Efficiency and time-saving
Client retention

An agency SEO report is the secret to making the right decisions and keeping your clients happy.

How you use SEO agency reporting tools is up to you, but we highly recommend integrating them with our marketing agency report template (don’t worry–we’ll cover how to use them in more detail later in the article).

Performance Monitoring

SEO agency reporting tools help you measure the performance of your SEO campaigns. By tracking key metrics like website traffic, keyword rankings, and conversion rates, you’ll have a clear idea of whether or not your strategy is working as intended.

These days, it’s all about the data. There’s been extensive research into the many benefits of making data-driven decisions in the digital age. With the emergence of tools like AI, it’s especially important to be on top of your game when it comes to integrating data into your marketing strategies. This will make it easier to proactively address issues as they arise, improving your performance and helping you stay competitive in a fast-paced industry.

Efficiency and Time-Saving

Automating the agency reporting process with dedicated tools will save you time and resources, period.

These days, automation is the name of the game. Fortunately, there are plenty of great tools and resources available to help automate the processes involved in data collection and analysis.

Through a combination of SEO agency reporting tools and Slam’s template, you’ll have no trouble generating regular reports without wasting time on data collection and analysis. This will leave you free to focus the majority of your efforts where they matter: on strategy and execution.

Client Retention

Providing regular, insightful reports to clients is critical for building trust and strengthening the agency-client relationship. The simple fact is that clients are much more likely to continue working with your agency if you can demonstrate the positive impacts of your SEO efforts.

As with any relationship, communication is the key to a healthy long-term dynamic. With SEO reporting, your agency will communicate things like progress, challenges faced, and future strategies. This will make your client feel like they’re involved and well-informed, which will in turn make them feel secure in the returns on their investment in you!

Understanding Technical SEO vs. Content SEO

If you’ve been anywhere near the world of digital marketing, you’ve likely heard of SEO. These days, it’s everywhere–and with good reason.

SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is the magic that ensures your links secure that coveted spot on the first page of Google.

Of course, a successful SEO campaign depends less on magic and more on a well-planned strategy that effectively balances technical SEO and content SEO to improve search rankings. Understanding the difference between technical SEO and content SEO (also known as on-page SEO) is crucial because each aspect addresses distinct elements of website optimization.

In this section, we’ll take a closer look at technical SEO, and content SEO, and how to integrate them into a winning agency reporting strategy that maximizes your overall performance in search engine results.

Technical SEO

Technical SEO refers to the process of optimizing a website’s technical elements. This is done to improve its search engine visibility and ensure smooth crawling and indexing by search engines.

Here are some key aspects of technical SEO:

Website speed
Mobile responsiveness
Crawlability and indexing
Site structure
Page speed optimization

As with anything else, regular monitoring and adjustments are crucial to keeping up with evolving search engine algorithms and best practices.

Fortunately, Slam has got your back–sign up for your newsletter to stay informed about the latest news in SEO, website design, and content writing strategy.

Content SEO

Content SEO focuses on optimizing a website’s content to improve its visibility in–you guessed it–search engine results. Also known as on-page SEO, this aspect of SEO strategy is especially important for attracting a targeted audience.

Here are some key aspects of content SEO:

Keyword research and placement
High-quality content
Internal and external linking
Optimized images and multimedia
Social media integration

By focusing on these key aspects of content SEO, you’ll create a strong foundation for your website’s visibility in search engine results. You’ll also ensure your content reaches your targeted audience.

You can also check out our SEO article template and SEO keyword research template, along with our Airtable content calendar, which are all great resources for tracking your content SEO strategy.

Slam's Top 4 Tools for a Successful Agency SEO Report

As a leading web design agency, we rely on several digital tools to streamline our agency SEO reporting. If you’re in the same industry, we highly recommend checking out these valuable resources.

Here are our top 4 recommended tools for a successful agency SEO report:

Our marketing agency report template is designed to integrate flawlessly with these tools. Don’t sleep on our special $19.99 pricing–available for a limited time only!

Google Analytics

Google Analytics provides a comprehensive overview of website performance, offering crucial data on traffic, user behavior, and conversions. It’s a great way to measure SEO, understand user engagement, and track the impact of keywords on conversions.

Let’s say you need to analyze a client’s organic traffic trends over a given time period. With Google Analytics, you’ll gain nuanced insights into how visitors interact with your client’s website. This will make it easier to determine the best strategies for optimizing your content.

We like to think of Google Analytics as your data’s backbone–a must-have tool for creating client-focused agency SEO reports.

Google Tag Manager

In simple terms, Google Tag Manager (GTM) helps you implement tracking codes and improve the accuracy of your data. With GTM, your agency can manage tags, triggers, and other variables. The tool seamlessly integrates with Google Analytics, making it an excellent complementary resource.

For example, by utilizing GTM to deploy custom event tracking, you can monitor how users are interacting with your client’s forms, CTAs, and other elements of their website. This data makes it easier to more comprehensively analyze user engagement, which will in turn help you evaluate your content’s performance.

Need to know whether your conversion strategies are on-point? Look no further than GTM.

Google Search Console

When it comes to successful digital agency reporting, Google Search Console (GSC) is an invaluable tool that offers crucial insights into how your client’s website is performing in Google search results.

If you need to keep your client up-to-date on things like impressions, clicks, and click-through rates, look no further than GSC. With the collected data, you’ll be well-positioned to evaluate the effectiveness of your keyword targeting. With the Search Analytics report, you can determine which queries drive the most traffic. This will make it easier to optimize your content around high-performing keywords.

GSC also provides information on things like crawl errors, mobile usability, and indexation status, making it easier to address technical issues that might negatively impact your SEO strategy.

Ahrefs

Backlink strategy is a big part of SEO, and Ahrefs is a fantastic tool for gaining insights into backlinks, keyword rankings, and competitor analysis.

At Slam, we leverage Ahrefs to assess a backlink profile’s quality and quantity. This helps us identify opportunities for link-building strategies–critical for identifying challenges and opportunities. For example, as a B2B website and SEO agency, sometimes we need to evaluate a competitor’s authority by tracking new and lost backlinks. For this, we rely on the Ahrefs Backlink Checker.

And when we need to analyze competitor websites, we use Ahrefs’ Site Explorer, which allows us to benchmark performance, identify content gaps, and refine our SEO strategies based on what our competitors are doing.

5 Steps to Using Slam’s Template with SEO Agency Reporting Software

Now that you’re familiar with Slam’s preferred agency SEO report tools, let’s take a closer look at how to use them with our marketing agency report template. After all, each of these tools generate a ton of data–and it’s not like you can expect your clients to track the progress of your efforts by sorting through spreadsheets!

By integrating reporting software output with our template, you’ll create a fantastic agency reporting dashboard that will keep your clients well-informed and happy.

To integrate your data with our template, we recommend following these 5 steps:

Identify your key performance indicators (KPIs)
Access and export your data
Transform and clean your data
Import, align, and visualize your data
Provide a transparent narrative and data-based analysis

Let’s take a closer look at what’s involved in each of these 5 steps.

Step 1: Identify Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

The first step involves clearly defining and prioritizing the KPIs that align with your client’s goals. We recommend focusing on metrics that directly impact your client’s objectives, such as organic traffic, keyword rankings, and conversions. It’s essential to have a clear sense of which metrics you’ll use to evaluate performance before you begin.

Step 2: Access & Export Data

Next, you need to access and export your data from each of the reporting tools you’ve decided to use–we recommend using Google Analytics, Google Search Console, Google Tag Manager, and Ahrefs. Log in to each platform and export data relevant to things like traffic sources, user behavior, backlink metrics, conversion data, etc. If the data is relevant to your KPIs, it should be accessed and exported during this step.

Step 3: Transform & Clean Data

Transforming and cleaning data is a critical part of the reporting process. This involves standardizing date formats, removing duplicates, and cleaning up any irrelevant data. During this step, it’s crucial to ensure that the exported data aligns with the reporting template’s structure.

Step 4: Import, Align, & Visualize Data

Once you’ve transformed and cleaned your data, you should import it into the respective sheets you’ll use for recording data from each source–this could be Google Sheets, Microsoft Excel, or another spreadsheet software of your choice. During this step, be sure to double-check that your data accurately aligns with common dimensions like data, URL, and keyword.

With your data correctly imported and aligned, you’re ready to integrate it into our marketing agency report template so you can show it off with professional visualizations that will impress your clients.

Step 5: Narrative & Analysis

This step is possibly the most important–after all, your client is paying you to do the heavy lifting, not to send them a bunch of raw data and call it a day! During this step, you should use our template to explain trends, highlight your successes, and offer insights into the data you’ve collected. Be sure to relate the data back to your client’s business goals, so they know they’re getting a good return on their investment.

Best Practices for an SEO Agency Report

To succeed as a digital marketing agency, you should have a well-defined set of crystal-clear best practices for seo agency reporting. Whether your focus is on small business SEO, nonprofit SEO, or another target area, these best practices will ensure your efforts align with your objectives.

Here are the five key best practices we recommend for creating an effective agency SEO report:

Define your key performance indicators (KPIs)
Visually present your data
Provide actionable insights and data-based recommendations
Track your conversions
Stick to a regular reporting schedule

These best practices will ensure you stay agile and current with industry trends, which will contribute to a positive professional reputation. We also recommend taking advantage of our SEO ROI Calculator to ensure your strategy is generating your desired traffic, revenue, and profit.

For a deep dive into SEO agency report best practices and everything else related to running a digital marketing agency, check out our Slam Agency Starter Course.

Scale Your SEO Agency Reporting with Slam's Template and Course

If there’s one thing I’ve learned in the years since I started Slam Media Lab, it’s the importance of scalability. Your ability to grow your agency while optimizing your use of time and resources is critical to success. Since one of our priorities at Slam is to support founders, we’ve put a lot of effort into creating the digital tools I wish I had access to back when I first launched my agency.

Here are a few of the amazing products I’ve put together with my team that go above and beyond your typical marketing agency reporting tool:

In addition to our products and resources, we also host a blog with hundreds of great articles on everything from How to Choose a Web Design Agency to How to Partner with a Restaurant Marketing Agency.

If you’re interested in working with our digital marketing and branding agency, we’re always looking for ways to support founders in their mission toward scalability and sustainability! Here are just a few of the award-winning services we offer our clients:

Want to start your own SEO agency? Check out our How to Start an Agency course!