Can anyone recommend some of the best tools on the market to create SEO reports? SEO Expositor is all I've found so far. Any others that you use with your clients?
I've always just used Excel myself. It's probably not the most professional method and if you clients are paying top dollar you might not wanna go that route. However, you could possibly throw something together with images into Word and then convert it to PDF... Whatever you do/use, just make sure it will give you common format that everyone can open!
Hi! I've checked some in the past but the ones that are really good are quite expensive. I do however, would like to share with you an SEO template that I had been following. This is easier and cost effective. Ideally shows executive summary on the homepage and then also the details of the report. With this template, you should finish a report within 30 mins. Mainly you are just cutting and pasting most data you already have. Here is a dropbox link - Sample SEO Report in PDF. https://www.dropbox.com/s/ygn6ch5i1sjwypj/Sample%20SEO%20Report.pdf?dl=0
Can you tell why manual better? My opinion it is more time consuming and if you would like to track all performance in manual: like keyword positions, bloken links and etc how much time you spend? You just must use automated soft to track results. Time is money. I could make this job in manual, but nobody is willing to pay such money...
It really depends on what you want to communicate with the client. Is it KW ranking (Google Webmaster tools, ranking racking tools) Is it the backlink? (Majestic, Moz, Ahrefs) Is it the traffic (Google analytics) Depending on what you are doing for the client, you need to gather the right data to communicate that and prove there is an improvement.
I've used raven tools before (a paid one) but I don't find it really helpful, the data also comes from Google Analytics. So, now I am doing monthly reports manually. On the other hand, Thetony has a point. What type of report will you be providing?
SEO profiler is another option. You can get weekly status report from this site https://www.seoprofiler.com
I mostly use Excel. This way almost all people that even don't know much about computers can open the file.. Also, I always try to show them ONLY the info they need, nothing that is not required, enough info to show them that I had finished my work!