Build reports your team will actually read

Whether your SEO team spans across departments, regions, and initiatives or you’re a small-but-mighty powerhouse, automating reporting will tell the story of your SEO efforts on a weekly, monthly, or quarterly basis.

But is anyone reading the reports you built?

Creating intentional reporting with Conductor can resolve communication blocks and ignored data to support a collaborative effort across all your stakeholders.

Workspaces in Conductor help you communicate and collaborate. Use workspaces to keep your team organized and your leadership informed with up-to-date data through intentional, and automated reporting. You can also create reports to keep records for yourself to demonstrate the results of your SEO efforts. 

Identify your audience

Will one single report help to keep your whole team informed? Or should you break them down?

Where it makes sense, you can use this guide to create a standard workspace you can use across departments.

Other reports may require more granular data to support the priorities of each team. The executive team, the content writing team, the technical team, and your own team will be interested in different sets of data. Consider what you need to communicate best with each, and at what cadence best supports their workflows. Your teammates will be more likely to spend time in a report that is directly related to their role and their workflow.

Save time with templated workspaces

You can use Conductor's Report Builders to create templated workspaces for audiences like the executive team and content team. In a few clicks, you’ll have a report created for a specific audience. If you feel the report is complete, schedule it for recurring delivery. If you think the recipient of your report would benefit from other data, you can add more widgets to the report.

If a templated report won’t tell your data story the way you had planned, you can create your own report, beginning with any widget in Conductor. With a single audience in mind, determine with which widget you want to start your report. Simply use the Add to Workspace button to add the widget to a new workspace. Consider starting with a strong visual piece of data (like a graph rather than a table) to hook the recipient’s attention.

Name new workspaces effectively

Be specific in your titles to keep yourself and your team organized.

When you add your new widget to your new workspace, you’ll be prompted to “create a new workspace by typing it in above.” This is your opportunity to create a specific title that keeps the intent of the report clear for its recipient. Soon enough, you’ll have a lot of reports, so if you’re specific now, you’ll thank yourself later.

Some suggestions:

• Along with naming the report’s intent or purpose, name what topics it may cover.
• If you have multiple domains, consider adding the relevant web property.
• If you report by product or service, include the keyword groups or page groups that the report references. 

Name each widget effectively

The title of each widget should succinctly describe what the data in that widget shows.

One best practice is to name the widget based on any filters you’ve used. Then use the description box to provide context or action steps. This will help the recipient of your report to know exactly what data they’re viewing—saving them time, and preventing an email to you asking to explain your report.

Let the workspace tell a story

Starting with a visual that hooks the recipient, and then arrange your widgets to tell the story of your data. Use the outline on the left to drag-and-drop the widgets' place in the workspace if you need to. Consider starting with the most recent data at the top of the report, and end with the action-oriented data to suggest next steps. 

Use a custom widget to create a title block and headers to create sections. Spruce up your workspace by embedding images—like your logo—or videos, slides, or anything you think will help tell the data story that your audience needs to hear.

Automate with a realistic delivery cadence 

Consider how often the recipients of each report need to see updated data in their workflow. Appropriate timing will keep them engaged in the reporting process. You can choose daily, weekly, monthly, or quarterly delivery.

You can also select which day of the week reports are delivered. Mondays are a popular day because data will be fresh. But maybe Tuesdays are better at your organization because there is less noise in people's inboxes and calendars. Make it easy for them. Schedule the report when you think the recipients will have a moment to give it their attention.