AlmaSEO
All-Layer Marketing Associate
Client Reporting & Billing
One report carries what the rankings did and what you did — then becomes the portal your client opens any day of the month and the invoice they pay by card, on your logo, your colors, your name. Nobody else closes that loop.
Reporting software sends the graphs: clicks up, impressions up, a rankings chart with a paragraph on top. It shows what happened, never what you did about it — which is why clients who are ranking fine still churn. They never saw the work. So you write a second email, by hand, listing the month’s work, and hope the client reads both.
Then, separately again, in different software, you try to remember what you did all month so you can bill for it. The invoice goes out late, gets paid later, and the hours you actually worked were never written down anywhere in the first place.
AlmaSEO makes those one act. The rankings, the traffic, the calls from the map listing and the work you logged land in a single branded email — the numbers say what changed, the entries underneath say why. And the same entries become line items on the invoice that charges for them. One source, every artifact, no retyping.
For the solo SEO or freelancer
You finish the month, then spend an evening reconstructing what you did, writing it up, building an invoice somewhere else, sending it, and then asking for it again in three weeks. The work was the easy part.
For the agency
They churn because nothing visibly happened. A branded portal where the month’s work is sitting there, itemized, in your colors, is the cheapest retention tool you will ever deploy — and it costs you no extra effort, because it’s built from the log you already kept.
It starts before the work does. You quote for the job, then follow a single logged entry from the timer to the money — it becomes an SEO dashboard for clients, then a report, then an invoice. Every step below is the same client relationship, wearing a different hat.
The quote you send before any of the rest of this exists.
A title, the client’s name and email, a note describing the scope, and line items with a quantity and a rate each — the retainer, the audit, the six articles. It totals as you build it, so what the client sees is the number you meant.
Send it and the client gets a branded email; the page it opens carries your business name and your primary colour. Nothing in it says AlmaSEO. If you’ve put the portal on your own domain, the proposal link lives there too.
Two buttons at the bottom of the proposal. No printing, no scanning, no “reply to this email confirming” — and the answer comes back into AlmaSEO the moment they click, rather than sitting in your inbox waiting to be filed. Accepting means typing their name, so what you end up holding is a person, a date and a time rather than the fact that somebody with the link pressed a button.
Set a percentage and the client sees it in money before they commit — $4,750.00, 50% of $9,500.00, payable by card once you accept. Accepting takes them straight to a card payment page for it. The strongest moment to ask for a deposit is the second somebody decides to hire you, and it is the moment almost every agency lets pass while they go and write an invoice.
A proposal moves from draft to sent to viewed on its own, and then to accepted or declined. The awkward follow-up question — did you get a chance to look at it? — already has an answer, so you can chase the ones that went quiet and leave alone the ones that haven’t been read yet.
The proposal already holds the client, the line items and the rates, so accepting it shouldn’t mean typing all of that again. One button turns it into an invoice carrying the same lines, your usual due days and your tax rate — as a draft, because converting isn’t sending and you should see it before your client does. It only happens once: the proposal remembers the invoice it made, so the same yes can’t be billed twice by two people or two clicks.
Plan Agency.
Powered byLine itemsRunning totalStatus timelineBranded client pageEmail sendSigned acceptanceDeposit on acceptanceOne-click invoice
Where the record starts — free on every plan.
Up to three timers going at once across different client sites, because that’s how the day actually goes.
Phone calls, client meetings, research, DNS and hosting, competitor analysis, design, admin. The unglamorous hours are the ones clients forget you worked.
Forgot to start the timer? Add the entry with its duration and date. The record matters more than the ceremony.
Plan Free on every plan — including Solo.
Powered byWork categoriesDuration on any entryPer-site logsScreenshots on entries
The month’s numbers and the month’s work, written up for someone who isn’t technical.
Search Console, Analytics, the Business Profile and Google Ads, assembled into a single branded report. Search and paid sit side by side, so the client sees what the whole budget did rather than reconciling two documents — the same Google Ads account you manage from their profile.
The report carries the client’s tracked keywords from your last Keyword Tracker check: each one with its position, the move since the check before, and the page that ranks for it, with how many sit in the top three and on page one summed at the top. It reads the check you already ran, so it adds nothing to the cost of the report — and it stays out until you have run one.
A Growth Metrics section carries the numbers behind the Growth Report: how many keywords the site ranks for and what that traffic is worth, the First Impression and AI Readiness scores, and how many articles went out in the period. It reads what AlmaSEO already recorded, so it adds nothing to the cost of the report, and each of the three is its own checkbox.
Not just “clicks are up 14%” — the actual queries behind it, biggest gains and biggest drops, measured against the period before. The number tells them something changed; this tells them what.
The comparison is a choice, not a fixture: the period before, the same period a year earlier for a business with a season, or no comparison at all — for a first report with nothing yet to measure against, or a client who reads every down-arrow as a verdict. Choose none and AlmaSEO skips the second round of fetching altogether, so the report builds faster and arrives without a single delta on it.
Tick Highlight Reel and every declining number leaves the report: the KPIs that went backwards, the Biggest Drops table, the content gaps, the keywords that slipped. What survives is what improved or held. The boxes it overrules grey out in the builder and say so, so you always know exactly what the client isn’t seeing — and the personal note at the top is where the rest of the story goes.
Hide branded searches removes every query that matches the client’s name or domain from the top queries, the biggest movers and the Business Profile searches. What’s left is discovery: people who didn’t know the client existed until Google introduced them, which is the traffic you were hired to grow. AlmaSEO works the brand terms out from the site itself; there is no list to keep.
Where the client’s Analytics has key events configured, conversions lead the traffic card and carry through to each channel — so the report opens with the number they’re actually buying.
Each source is a switch, and each table under it is its own. A client who doesn’t care which countries their traffic came from never sees that table again — the choice saves against that client and becomes their default.
Under the numbers, the work: pick the entries, group them by category, add a personal note at the top. Anything logged as an error is filtered out automatically — a retry you already fixed is not news your client needs.
Hide hours, hide dates, or both. Some clients should see effort; most should see outcomes. You decide per report.
A plain style that reads like you sat down and typed it — no template, no letterhead. For the clients who’d find a designed report cold.
Set a client to weekly, fortnightly or monthly, name the inboxes it goes to — the client, and anyone else who should see it copied in — and the summary writes itself and leaves on schedule, Monday mornings or the first of the month. The client who only ever wanted to know you were still there gets a rhythm instead of your memory.
A job marked non-billable — the goodwill fix, the call that ran long, the internal cleanup — is excluded from what the scheduled report carries, the same way it’s excluded from the retainer and the invoice. You choose that once, on the entry, and it holds everywhere after.
Plan Pro and up.
Powered byKeyword rankingsWeekly click trendYear-on-yearContent gapsSearch appearancePersonal noteCC and BCCPreview before sendWeekly, fortnightly or monthly
An SEO client dashboard on your brand, in two tabs, at your address. Open the demo portal — it’s the real thing, with no sign-in, exactly as a client would get it.
Your logo, your primary and secondary colors, your business name. The client sees your agency — there is no AlmaSEO badge to pay to remove.
The second tab is live performance, sitting there between reports. The client who wants to know how things are going on the 14th doesn’t email you and doesn’t wait for the month to end — they open the link you already gave them.
The last 30 days against the 30 before it, with a 90-day chart of clicks and sessions underneath. It updates itself from the numbers AlmaSEO already collects each day, so nobody has to remember to refresh it.
Site health with its weakest areas named first, page speed, and the Business Profile numbers that matter to a local client — views, calls, direction requests and star rating. Then what you’ve published, with the five most recent listed by name. All five sections are in the demo, filled in.
One private link, no account to create, no password reset email six months later, and generating a new link retires the old one instantly. That’s the default and it stays the default. For the client whose own IT policy treats a shareable URL as a problem, set an email and password on that client and they sign in to the same branded page instead — it’s a field in the portal panel, decided per client.
Point a hostname of your own at the portal and every link you hand a client lives there. AlmaSEO gives you the DNS records, you paste them at your registrar, and once the domain proves it’s yours we issue the certificate and serve the portal from your address. The client never sees our name in the URL bar, which is the one place white-labelling usually gives the game away.
Hours are force-hidden on every report published to the portal — not a checkbox you might forget, a rule the portal enforces. And there are no hours on the performance tab at all, because there is no hours data in it. Your margins can’t escape by accident.
Plan Agency.
Powered byReport archivePortal-only publishingTraffic trendSite healthBusiness ProfileInstant revokeBrand colorsYour own domainOptional client login
Whether the client is actually worth what you charge.
Hours agreed against hours burned, on your billing cycle — whichever day of the month that starts on. Overage can roll forward or be written off at close, and the cycle that just closed sits on a tab beside the current one with its final hours, over or under, rollover and pace.
Retainer revenue measured against the hours you actually logged, per client and across the whole book. The client who feels fine and is quietly losing you money shows up here.
The same hours feed pacing and workload signals, so an account quietly eating your week gets noticed before you burn out on it.
Plan Retainer tracking is Pro. Cross-client profitability is Agency.
Powered byBilling cycle dayOverage rolloverPeriod closePortfolio roll-up
Where the tracked hours turn into money owed.
One modal turns the work you logged into billable line items, priced at the rate implied by the retainer. Grouped or itemized, your call.
Your logo on the PDF, your business name, your reply-to address, your invoice numbering. The client never learns what software you use.
Weekly through annual. The invoice regenerates on schedule, copies its line items, and sends itself if you want it to.
One screen totals the year — revenue, expenses broken out by category, tax collected, what your own subscriptions cost, a client-by-client breakdown and a month-by-month trend — and exports as a CSV your accountant can open. The January scramble back through twelve months of PDFs stops being a job.
Plan Pro and up.
Powered byPDF attachedDiscounts and taxExpensesRevenue summaryTax summary exportVoid and waive
The part most SEO platforms leave to somebody else.
Connect your own Stripe account and client payments settle into it. AlmaSEO never sits between you and your revenue.
Your client clicks the link in the invoice email and pays by card. No account, no portal, no friction between them and paying you.
A client can save a card once and stop thinking about it. Recurring invoices then collect themselves.
Reminders before and after the due date on a schedule you set, and late fees applied automatically — flat or percentage — with a one-click waive when you’d rather be generous.
Every unpaid invoice sorted by how late it is — current, 1–30, 31–60, 61–90 and 90+ days — with the same breakdown per client and your days-sales-outstanding across the last quarter. The call you need to make this week is on the screen, instead of somewhere in your inbox.
Plan Pro and up.
Powered byYour own Stripe accountCard paymentsAutopayDunning scheduleLate feesReceivables aging
Most platforms print their name on your client’s report and then sell you the privilege of taking it off. AlmaSEO never puts it there. Fill in your business name and logo and the client-facing side is yours — at every plan that includes the feature, with no branding-removal upsell, because there is nothing to remove. The same is true of every audit you hand over: the technical, AI-search, infrastructure and local reports come out under your brand too. For the whole picture — portal, reports, audits and invoices — start with white label SEO software, or see what else belongs on an SEO dashboard for agencies.
The PDF, the email it’s attached to, the sender name and the reply-to address are all yours. Set your business name once — until you do, the invoice falls back to ours, which is the one place worth filling in on day one.
Logo, business name, and both brand colors theme the client portal — the reports tab and the performance dashboard alike, since they’re the same page. Your client opens something that looks like it belongs to your agency, because it does.
Authenticate your own domain once and every invoice, receipt, reminder and late-fee notice after that arrives from your address instead of ours. AlmaSEO hands you the three DNS records, you paste them at your registrar, and the client never sees almaseo.com in the from line — you choose the mailbox name too, so it can read billing@, invoices@ or accounts@.
Give the portal a hostname of your own — clients.youragency.com, reports.youragency.com, whatever you’d put on a business card. AlmaSEO shows you the DNS records, you add them at your registrar, and a button on the team page checks the domain is yours; once it is, we issue the certificate and serve from that address. Everything client-facing follows it: the portal, the proposals, and the pay link on your invoices. That last one is the seam most white-label tools leave open — branded all the way up to the moment the client clicks Pay and lands somewhere with the vendor’s name on it.
The quote a prospect reads is the first thing they ever see from you, and on most software it arrives wearing the vendor’s clothes. Here the proposal page carries your business name and your primary colour, the email that delivers it is branded, and if the portal is on your own domain the proposal link sits there too. Nothing tells them what you built it in — which matters most at exactly the moment they haven’t decided to hire you yet.
The only third-party name your client ever sees at checkout is the payment processor’s — and that one you want, because it’s the reason they feel safe typing a card number.
No Data Credits are involved anywhere in this area — reports, invoices and payments cost nothing per use. The performance numbers come from the client’s own Search Console, Analytics, Business Profile and Ads connections, so a report you send twice costs exactly what a report you send once costs. The only question is the plan.
Time tracking and the activity log. Tracking the work is table stakes, so it isn’t behind anything — you can start keeping the record on the cheapest plan we sell.
The Client Report Builder, reports that send themselves weekly, fortnightly or monthly, retainer tracking, invoicing and payment collection. This is the tier where the record you’ve been keeping starts producing client-facing artifacts and money.
Proposals and estimates, and the branded client portal — both its report archive and its standing performance dashboard — on your own domain, with a client login where one is wanted. Plus your own sending domain for billing email, and cross-client profitability. The things you only need once you’re running a book of clients rather than a handful.
Reports reach a client as email and as a page on the portal, and there’s a Download PDF button beside Send for the client whose process ends with a file in a shared drive. The PDF is the same document you just previewed, not a second layout — whatever you hid on screen is hidden in the file. A report can go out on a schedule or by hand, and the difference is worth keeping straight: a scheduled report assembles the work you logged for that period and sends it, so what it says is only ever what you recorded. When the month deserves a covering note, you write that one yourself. The performance dashboard on the portal is a third thing again — a page keeping itself current for whenever your client goes looking, not something delivered in your name.
Yes — the portal carries your logo, your primary and secondary colours and your business name. The client sees your agency, and there is no AlmaSEO badge to pay to remove. The same is true of the invoice: your logo on the PDF, your business name, your reply-to address and your own invoice numbering, so the client never learns what software you use. On Agency you can go one further and authenticate your own domain, so billing email leaves from your address rather than almaseo.com.
Not unless they want one. The portal is one private link by default — no account to create and no password-reset email six months later — and generating a new link retires the old one instantly. You can prove it to yourself in about four seconds: open the demo portal and you are looking at a real client-facing page, branded for the agency, without signing in to anything. Where a client does want a login — usually because their own IT policy treats a shareable URL as a risk — you set that client an email and password in the portal panel, and they sign in to the same branded page. It is decided per client, and the link keeps working either way.
Yes, on Agency. Build it from line items — description, quantity and rate, totalling as you go — add a scope note, and send it. The client gets a branded email and opens a page carrying your business name and your colour, where they accept or decline with a button. It moves from draft to sent to viewed to accepted or declined on its own, so you can tell the proposal that hasn't been opened from the one that's being thought about, which is the difference between chasing usefully and nagging. And when they accept, one click turns the proposal into an invoice: the same line items, the same rates, the same client, with your due-day and tax defaults already on it. It arrives as a draft rather than going out — converting is not sending, so you still look at it first — and a proposal remembers the invoice it produced, so nobody can bill the same yes twice. You can also ask for a deposit: set a percentage, and the client sees the amount before they commit, accepts, and lands on a card payment page for it. The one limit worth stating is that the proposal itself isn't a PDF — it's a web page on your brand, which is what makes the accept button and the status tracking possible in the first place.
Yes, and that is the second tab of the portal. Alongside the report archive there is a standing performance dashboard on the same private link: clicks, impressions, sessions and average position for the last 30 days against the 30 before them, a 90-day chart of clicks and sessions, site health with its weakest areas named first, page speed, the Business Profile numbers — views, calls, direction requests and star rating — and what you have published lately. It keeps itself current from the figures AlmaSEO already collects each day, so there is nothing for you to refresh and no per-view cost. Each section appears once the matching Google connection exists; until then the tab says the data is still being collected.
Not on the portal. Hours are force-hidden on every report published there — that is a rule the portal enforces rather than a checkbox you might forget, so your margins can’t escape by accident. On reports you send yourself you decide per report: hide hours, hide dates, or both. Some clients should see effort; most should see outcomes.
From two places at once, in one email. The performance half is assembled from the client's own Search Console, Analytics, Business Profile and Google Ads connections — rankings and clicks, traffic and channels, calls and directions from the map listing, and paid spend beside all of it — plus the tracked keywords from your last Keyword Tracker check, each with its position, its move since the check before, and the page that ranks. The work half comes from what you logged: you pick the entries, group them by category and add a personal note at the top. Anything logged as an error is filtered out automatically — a retry you already fixed is not news your client needs.
Yes, down to the individual table. Search Console, Analytics, Business Profile, Google Ads, Keyword Rankings and Growth Metrics are each a switch, and every table underneath the four connections is its own checkbox — top queries, devices, countries, landing pages and the rest. Untick what a client doesn't care about and it isn't just hidden, it's never fetched, so a shorter report is also a faster one. The selection saves against that client and becomes their default, so you set it once rather than re-trimming the same report every month.
Both, and the distinction matters less than what comes out of it. Most SEO reporting software assembles a dashboard of metrics and stops there. AlmaSEO builds the monthly SEO report your client actually receives — the performance numbers, the work you did underneath them, your branding on it — and then turns the same record into the invoice. The reporting is one step in the loop rather than the product.
Yes, by name. Alongside the headline movement in clicks and impressions, the report lists the biggest gains and the biggest drops as individual searches, with what each one did last period and how far it moved. That's the part clients actually read — "clicks are up 14%" tells them something changed, and the query list tells them what. You can compare against the previous period or against the same period a year earlier, which matters for anyone whose business has a season — or against nothing, for a first report with no period before it. And when a month deserves to be read as a win, Highlight Reel keeps only the metrics that improved or held and drops the rest, so the down-arrows never make it in; the builder greys out the tables it has overruled so you know exactly what was left out.
Yes, with one checkbox. Hide branded searches removes every query that matches the client's name or domain from the top queries, the biggest gains and drops, and the Business Profile search terms. AlmaSEO works the brand terms out from the site itself, so there is no list to maintain. What remains is the traffic from people who found the client without already knowing the name — the part of the month SEO can honestly take credit for.
Conversions appear when the client's Analytics has key events configured — where they are, conversions lead the traffic card and carry through to each individual channel, so the report opens with leads rather than sessions. Google Ads is available as its own section covering spend, clicks, conversions, cost per click and cost per conversion with a campaign breakdown; it's switched off by default, because a spend section reading zero is worse than no spend section at all.
It will if you ask it to. Set a client to weekly, every two weeks, or monthly, give it the address to send to, and the work summary for that period assembles itself and goes — Monday mornings on the weekly setting, the first of the month on monthly. Time you marked non-billable stays out of it. The safeguard is that a scheduled report only ever says what you recorded: it reports the work you logged rather than inventing a narrative around it, so nothing goes out in your name that you didn't put there. Leave the setting off and nothing sends itself, which is still the right answer for clients who need a covering note more than a rhythm. Reports go out as email and are published to the portal as a web page; the PDF in this area is the invoice.
Yes, on Agency. Put in the hostname you want — clients.youragency.com, reports.youragency.com — and AlmaSEO shows you the DNS records to add at your registrar. One of them proves the domain is yours; a Verify button checks it, and once it passes we issue the certificate and serve from your address. After that every client-facing link resolves on your domain rather than ours — the portal, the proposals you send, and the pay link on your invoices — and anything else on that hostname redirects away. It is not instant: the certificate step happens on our side once your DNS is in place. But it happens once, and after that the client never sees our name in the URL bar, including at the checkout.
One dialog turns the work you logged into billable line items, priced at the rate implied by the retainer, grouped or itemised as you prefer. Recurring invoices run weekly through annual — regenerating on schedule, copying their line items, and sending themselves if you want them to.
Into your own account. You connect your own Stripe account and client payments settle directly into it — AlmaSEO never sits between you and your revenue. The client clicks the link in the invoice email and pays by card with no login and no portal, and can save a card once so recurring invoices collect themselves.
Yes. Reminders go out before and after the due date on a schedule you set, and late fees apply automatically — flat or percentage — with a one-click waive when you’d rather not. Alongside that, retainer pacing tracks hours agreed against hours burned on your billing cycle, and profit per client measures retainer revenue against the hours you actually logged. There is more on the hours themselves in retainer tracking.
AgencyAnalytics is a reporting tool — it displays data from other software you pay for separately. AlmaSEO does the SEO work, reports on it, and bills the client for it, at a flat price rather than per client. The full side-by-side, including where AgencyAnalytics comes out ahead, is on our AgencyAnalytics alternative page.
Open a finished report end to end — the numbers, the queries that moved, the work underneath. Then open the builder behind it and see which parts you’d switch off for this client, or walk into the client portal itself the way your client would, without a login.