5 Quick Ways to Streamline Your SEO Business (Blueprints included)

Whether you’re a freelancer with a few clients or an agency with dozens of clients, you will need one element to keep things organized: systems. That’s what makes a business professional, well run and scalable.

Without systems, a business will quickly become difficult to scale, manage and grow. I’ve worked at countless agencies and now run two of my own, so I know a thing or two about systems. If there’s anything I do more than once, I will build a system for it. This helps keep things organized and repeatable.

So if you’re doing client SEO, here are  tips you can implement to streamline your business:

1. Create an On-Boarding Checklist

Almost every client you sign on will have the same (or a very similar) checklist of required items. For example, every client needs to give you access to Google Analytics, Google Search Console and sometimes to their WordPress site and hosting/domain registrar. Use Google Forms to create an easy form that you can send to clients and re-use in the future.

Have trouble creating a form? Don’t worry, we have you covered. Here’s an example on-boarding questionnaire we use for local SEO clients. Just make a copy and change anything you like.

2. Create a Standard SEO Audit Template

Just like taxes, SEO audits are an integral part of every SEO’s life. Every client will request one before signing on. So this is yet another great example of systemizing a recurring process. You can find 100’s of automated SEO audit tools out there (you may even already have a favorite), but here’s a pro tip; 90% of you clients will only glance over it and even fewer will understand anything in the report. So don’t spend too much time fretting over the audit report, layout and style. The audit report has a less than 10% impact on the actual sale. So focus more the sales call or providing referrals.

Below are some cost effective solutions that provide nice looking reports you can showcase to your clients (and still at a reasonable price point):

3. Create Freelancer Templates

If you’re doing client SEO, that means you’re involved with copywriters and virtual assistances to a certain degree. And if I know once thing about freelancers, it’s that the hiring process is never ending. You ned to go through dozens of freelancers to find the right one. And even then, they tend to last a few months until they move on to their next gig or job.

That’s why it’s critical to create a job template or brief you can use over and over again on Upwork or which ever freelance platform you use. Here’s a simple brief you can start using today.

4. Create Email Templates

If you have clients, you will mostly definitely be sending out client reports on a monthly basis (at a minimum). Believe it or not, most of your clients will not have the time to go though each report. This is why it’s important to provide a summary of the report in the email itself. This will provide your clients with a quick synopsis of the campaign without having to open the report. Again, creating a copy/paste style email template will save you tons of time each month. Below is an example template I use for my monthly client reports:

Hi XYZ,

Please find attached your SEO report for Xyx month. Below is a quick overview of the campaign

Campaign Overview:

For the month of January, there were a total of 544 visits to the website. Of these, 94% were completely new visitors to the site. Each visitor saw, on average, 1.26 pages per visit.

Goals Completed:

7 Leads via the Online Chat Channel
6 Leads via the Website Form Submission
79 Phone Calls Were Made to the Business (as reported by Google)
21 Visitors Viewed the Contact Us Page of the Website
3.14K Visitors Saw Your Listing on Google Maps & Search (Data Provided by Google)

Please let me know if you have any questions regarding your campaign.

And there you have it. Within 5 minutes, your clients has a pretty good idea on how his/her campaign performed the previous month. All the above mentioned data was pulled from Google Analytics and Google My Business. Feel free to add/remove data points you think are not something you would like to report on.

Depending on the client, I sometimes also add a “Top Ten Ranking Keywords” to the email. So the email template would look something like this:

Hi XYZ,

Please find attached your SEO report for Xyx month. Below is a quick overview of the campaign

Campaign Overview:

For the month of January, there were a total of 544 visits to the website. Of these, 94% were completely new visitors to the site. Each visitor saw, on average, 1.26 pages per visit.

Goals Completed:

7 Leads via the Online Chat Channel
6 Leads via the Website Form Submission
79 Phone Calls Were Made to the Business (as reported by Google)
21 Visitors Viewed the Contact Us Page of the Website
3.14K Visitors Saw Your Listing on Google Maps & Search (Data Provided by Google)

Top 10 Ranking Keywords

Keyword 1
Keyword 2
Keyword 3
Keyword 4
Keyword 5
Keyword 6
Keyword 7
Keyword 8
Keyword 9
Keyword 10

Please let me know if you have any questions regarding your campaign.

5. Create Reporting Templates

Monthly reports are an integral part of every agency. This will showcase all the hard work you have done for the client, so it’s important to highlight all the important metrics. This includes (in no particular order):

  • Website Traffic (from Google Analytics)
  • Keyword Rankings
  • Backlink Analysis (optional)

The last metric (Backlink analysis) is completely optionally. Depending on the client’s level of knowledge, you may include or exclude this from your monthly reports.

The best way to organize the report is to take screenshots from Google Analytics, your keyword ranking tool and your backlink tool.

Here’s an example template you can download and start using right away.

And there you have it folks, five quick and easy ways you can start streamlining your SEO agency or business for higher productivity and scalability. This will make growing and managing your business much easier in the long-run.

Zain Shah

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