If the thought of starting your next monthly SEO report from scratch fills you with horror, you are not alone!

A few years ago, we asked our clients working in agencies about the most important things they want their services to be automated.

The best response with great priority was reporting, data collection for reports, and report updates.

Now think about how much time you would save and how far your business could go if you didn’t have to start every SEO report from scratch.

With Semrush, you can make your own reporting suggestions and share them with your team.

In this post, we will show you how to make your own SEO progress report template and automate the reporting process.

Semrush A tool for my reports lets you combine data from dozens of tools, create and save your own PDF report templates, and set up recurring emails.

This tool also allows you to:

• Quickly create PDFs from our preset templates in one minute
• Modify the template to suit your specific needs
• Mark your report with a trademark and white label (with the addition of the Agency Growth Kit)
• Add gadgets for the Semrush report, screenshots, text, and formatting
• Add Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and Google Business Profile data
• Create a report completely from scratch
• Save custom reports as new templates for future use
• Schedule regular delivery of reports via email to your destination email address

Why You Should Use SEO Report Templates

Creating templates for your reporting, whether you are in a company or an agency, can help you:

• Save time
• Easier to involve new team members and customers
• Establish consistency in your workflow

Of course, saving time for business is always important and the stress of starting a report from scratch every time can be overwhelming.

Another reason why you should use templates is that it will make it much easier for you to involve new team members and customers. Instead of just giving your new team members the task of preparing their report, you will give them a simple format to follow so that they feel ready to contribute.

Lastly, your customers will appreciate consistency. Using the template allows the recipient of the report to know what to expect. They won’t have to re-learn navigating your reports every month, which saves them time.

Structuring Your SEO Report Template

Each contract and campaign has its own unique set of goals and KPIs.

Your client will also want her report to be personal, with special tips and comments about their unique online experience.

So how can you make your customers happy while making the reporting process smoother?

Here are some tips:

1. Create different templates for different types of reports (SEO audit report, monthly SEO report, competitor analysis report, etc.)
2. Make your reports concrete and understandable
3. Automate your data collection
4. Customize the report with specific text areas for your comments and images / brands related to your brand and your customer
5. Build your templates with clear sections so they’re easy to insert and disassemble, depending on the focus of the month

Automate data for your report templates

The beauty of using a template for your SEO report is that automation gives you more time to customize the report.

While some can be automated SEO KPIs with dashboards and tools like Semrush, you wouldn’t want to automate your recitals and comments.

Think of KPIs and data as “what” reports, and your comment as “why”. Why is 15% growth in organic traffic important? You can explain in one of the areas for comments on your proposal.

Once you build a template on Semrush My Reports, you can automate data entry with the Semrush and Google data gadgets.

These gadgets can automatically populate your report with metrics such as:

• Competitor keyword ranking and estimated traffic from Semrush
• Website health and technical issues on the Semrush website
• Keyword visibility and voice share from Semrush
• Backlinks were reported in Semrush
• Meet Google Analytics Goals
• Users, sessions, time on page, and more from Google Analytics
• Google Search Console search performance
• User interaction and map views from Google profiles
• And much more

Customize templates with text and images

To add a personal touch to your reports, you can include space for your comments and explanations, as well as images and brand.

With Semrush, you can drag and drop text block gadgets to include your comments on each section of your report.

You can also add images, such as your client’s logo, or even fully customize your report with a theme by signing in to Agency growth kit.

Templates for each type of report

Because there are so many areas of SEO you can work on, you will report on a variety of things.

So you should have specific suggestions for the different services you offer. For example, you can set up unique templates for your:

• SEO audit reports (initial audit and monitoring)
• Monthly SEO reports
• SEO competitor analysis reports
• Organic search reports
• Link building / backlink reports
• And more

The good thing about My reports is that we have a handful of them preset templates to start.

Just open one and start adding gadgets to make the PDF report yours.

Here is an example of what you would automatically see using some of the templates above:

Monthly SEO template

This is a great starting point for general monthly SEO client reporting. Preset gadgets include:

• Google Analytics Traffic Overview
• Daily sessions
• The best traffic channels
• New compared to returning visitors
• Top pages after page views
• New and lost keywords
• Improved and Rejected Keywords
• Summary of backlinks
• New and lost backlinks

City audit: a proposal for the full report

This SEO audit report template delves into the results of a site audit, which could be great for SEO technical clients or potential clients. Preset gadgets include:

• Website health assessment
• Number of errors, warnings and notifications found
• The most important problems identified
• A complete breakdown of each individual problem identified in the audit

Complete proposals for ecological research

This template integrates into the performance of an organic search of any site, which is an easy way to create a competitive analysis report in minutes. Preset gadgets include:

• Estimated organic traffic, keywords and traffic costs
• Sort keywords by country
• Trend of unpaid traffic compared to paid traffic (all the time)
• Top keywords and position distribution
• Top competitors
• Organic branded and non-branded marketing
• New and lost keywords
• The best landing pages for organic traffic

Adapting Semrush Report Templates

What if you want to make your templates from scratch or change the preset template and save it as new?

It’s also easy to edit any report in the report creator and save it as a template on the My Reports home page.

You can add more data from Semrush or Google to your report to highlight your specific KPIs, as well as text blocks, images, and formatting to add space for your comments in each section.

To add Google Analytics data to the report, Semrush currently offers more than a dozen gadgets from the classic version of Universal Analytics GA and a few links for GA4 brands.

Universal features:

• Overview
• Measurement charts
• The best traffic channels
• New compared to returning visitors
• Conversions (e-commerce)
• Top pageviews
• Diagram of achieved goals
• location
• Language and source / medium
• Referrals
• Source / medium
• Top landing pages
• Campaigns
• Device categories

GA4 features:

• Overview
• Measurement charts
• The best traffic channels
• New compared to returning visitors
• Top pageviews

For specific steps to integrate your Google Analytics with Semrush report templates, visit our Knowledge base.

After creating the Semrush report, press the green Create PDF button to save it. You can then save this report as a new template on the My Reports home page.

Go to the report in the list on the My Reports home page, find the gear icon next to the report you created, and select Create Template.

This report will now be stored in your template list so you can access it and customize the new report for the new client, starting with the same structure.

Create and schedule your report

Once your report is ready to use, you can schedule this report to be emailed to your client on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis.

You can include a template for what you want to enter in the email text itself, and make sure you update that email text before it’s released each month.

Perfecting your template

How should you customize your template?

The minimum you will want to cover in an SEO progress report is:

• What progress has been made
• What actions do you take
• Recommendations for further growth

Based on these basics, you may want to include any links to related reading or articles that explain some of your procedures if the client is curious to learn.

Most SEO clients will not be SEO experts, so you may want to include customer education in the reporting process. Doing so can help build more trust and commitment in a relationship.

Consider a few of these actions and not make the template complete.

We have a full blog post dedicated the anatomy of a complete SEO report to delve deeper with more examples of how to report on every aspect of SEO.

Regular communication, transparency and proving that you care about your client’s success can go a long way towards positive customer relationship.