There is a term called “breaking the fourth wall” which refers to the imaginary wall between a theater stage and the audience of a performance. Normally, it’s like a real wall because the actors and actresses never acknowledge the existence of the audience until the applause at the final curtain call. But some, such as the playwright who called himself Shakespeare, have been very good at directly communicating with the audience during a performance. This can make an actor, play, movie or TV show very popular. If you watched the “Deadpool” or “House of Cards” or “Fight Club”, then you have witnessed the breaking of the fourth wall. Marketers use this term to show that one must effectively talk directly to the consumer when presenting products and services.

SEO reports are often sent with a “check-box” approach that leads to losing touch with your clients. On the one hand your reports should be well-tailored for customers and on the other hand, clients should see the value they get from your SEO services. Graphs and pie charts with visitor traffic, keyword rankings and backlink quality trends are not the objective so much as the means to communicate to clients the status of their site performance.

Conducting SEO and reporting to clients is very similar to a theater production company putting on a great performance of a true story. It’s important to “break the fourth wall” and speak directly to your customers in order to engage them, earn their trust and make them take action.

In SEO reporting, breaking the fourth wall is possible. There are several customer-centric features built into the Web CEO SEO reporting software. Before breaking the fourth wall between you and your clients, don’t forget to sign up for a 14-day Free Trial in order to see our tools in action. Let’s talk about the techniques for doing this:

Ask prospective customers “How’s it going” with an Express SEO Audit Report

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Pitching your SEO services with a well-tailored express SEO audit report would be a good welcome speech to your SEO leads. How can this help you break the wall? First of all, an express SEO report is much better than a generic proposition like this:

“Hi, I am SEO expert and I can help you bring your site to the top of Google. Would you like to know what issues you have on your site?”

C’mon guys, this is usually a giant pass for many people. You will go to the spam box every time. Folks hear such propositions every day. You will not break the fourth wall this way.

What sets an express SEO Audit report apart from most initial SEO propositions is that you are providing fascinating information to people upfront while providing a professional look and personal approach. The report your prospects will be provided with should not be just a once over SEO performance overview. A good SEO lead generation report should deliver a prospect-tailored SEO analysis with coverage of important on-page and off-page SEO analysis assets. The report should help educate customers on the current SEO status of their site with detailed advice. All you need to know is their website URL and the email address to send a report to. Once you express concern about your prospects’ sites by providing real issues with possible solutions on how to fix them, the wall between you and your prospects should open up in many cases.

Using the Web CEO Lead Generation Tools which enable the automated generation of a branded SEO audit report, you can easily capture, analyze and convert high quality SEO prospects. Here you can find out how to generate qualified SEO leads and turn them into your loyal customers.

Break down the changes in your existing customer websites via the SEO Events marks on SEO report graphs

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SEO reporting has little or even no value when spikes and declines on SEO report graphs are delivered to clients without the context in which the changes took place at those specific times.

Don’t prepare and send regular SEO reports without explicit notes on the graphs which explain changes in rankings or backlinks. You should take client reporting seriously unless you want to lose customers because of a lack of transparency and poor communication about which SEO actions affected client sites.

The Web CEO Journal of Events can great improve communication and transparency within SEO reports that are automatically emailed to your clients. The journal of SEO events can be used in the following cases:

  • Make announcements to all your clients about the dates of Google Updates on the charts of SEO reports
  • Keep an SEO diary, describing your own actions in each of your projects, where you can decide at any time whether or not to make them visible to individual clients.
  • Leave SEO notes or tasks for your team for more effective and coordinated team work.
  • Auto-generate notes about when you emailed manual and automatic PDF reports.

Learn how our journal of SEO events can help you track Google Updates and all your SEO actions.

Stay alert when your clients’ websites go wrong

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Being timely, pre-emptive, empathic and decisive about dealing with any negative issues of your clients is also a strong “breaking the fourth wall” technique. A good SEO service provider should keep a close eye on the following SEO factors that negatively affect site performance:

  • Website rankings drop
  • Competitors outranking keyword positions
  • Technical SEO issues such as dropped backlinks

The Web CEO Email Alerts tool can help you get you or your SEO clients alerted as soon as a new tool scan detects negative changes in a client’s ranking positions or technical off-site/on-site SEO issues, like broken internal links and lost important backlinks. Once you set up alerts for Rank Tracking, Technical SEO issues or lost backlinks, they are sent instantly every time a specific tool scanning is complete.

Go the extra mile by speaking the translated language of your customers.

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Destroy the fourth wall inalterably by speaking in the native language of your customers. Talking with your foreign or domestic customers in their actual language will help you remove any language barrier and save a lot of time and money on translators. Besides, by providing non-English SEO services, you can take control of a new local SEO market where your competitors may have fumbled the opportunity.

WebCEO is used in 196 countries! We have built a multilanguage wiki community with the ability for everyone to crowd-translate our service interface tools and reports into 146+ languages. Read about our amazing Crowd Translation tool.  This tool is available for all subscription plans including the Free plan. You can already provide SEO services in Brazilian Portuguese (99.9 % translation completed), Spanish (88.1% translation completed), Italian (83.8% translation completed), Dutch (73.5% translation completed). View a sample of an SEO report translated into Brazilian Portuguese.

Let’s break the fourth wall together!

We are all ears and we are constantly working hard to break that fourth wall ourselves in order to hear your needs and the needs of your clients. Should you have any suggestions, feel free to contact our Support Angels at: www.webceo.com/support.htm or tweet us at @webceonews.