Proper SEO reporting is crucial for better understanding and adapting your digital marketing strategy. SEO reports can help you determine whether your marketing efforts are working. Here’s what you should include on your website’s SEO reports.
What Should You Include in an SEO Report?
Considered a crucial part of online campaigns, an SEO report contains an overview and summary of a website’s key metrics and statistics. It shows whether your SEO efforts are working and worth the investment.
However, creating SEO reports does not start and end with generating data and inputting it into a spreadsheet to email to your client. It should contain a clear presentation of relevant data, valuable insights, and an analysis of what they entail in an easy-to-understand way.
To create SEO reports that are well crafted, here are the things you will need to include:
1. Title Card and Executive Summary
Start your report on SEO with a title card and an executive summary. This applies whether your report is a formal document or a slide presentation.
- On the title card, feature the website’s name or the campaign project you are working on.
- Include the time period that applies to your report, whether it’s monthly, quarterly, or yearly.
- Highlight the most critical findings, digital marketing trends, and analyses in the summary quickly helps provide an idea of what your report contains.
Having a title card and summary properly introduces your SEO report and its parameters.
2. Traffic Overview
Your report will also need to contain your website’s traffic overview. All websites need traffic; the more traffic you have, the more chances your websites may have conversions.
When adding a traffic overview to your report, you should discuss organic traffic, referral traffic, and direct and paid traffic performance:
Organic Traffic: page visits from unpaid (“organic”) search results.- Referral Traffic: page visits that come from links on other websites.
- Direct Traffic: page visits from users who input the web page’s URL directly into their browser.
- Paid Traffic: page visits from paying an online marketing platform that advertises your website.
SEO aims to bring traffic to your website, so tracking it reflects your strategy’s success.
3. Keyword Rankings and Performance
Keywords are the foundations of an SEO marketing strategy, so it makes sense to track their performance when reporting SEO metrics.
For this section of your report, you may do the following:
- Highlight the top-performing keywords in terms of generating traffic and conversions
- Include a record of how keyword rankings change over time to showcase whether your rankings are improving or declining.
- Point out underperforming keywords to identify opportunities for improvement.
These metrics can help you make data-supported decisions about optimizing keywords in the future.
You may use SEO reporting tools like Google Search Console to generate data on keyword rankings.
4. Backlink Overview
Links play an essential role in an SEO strategy’s performance. For Google, backlinks serve as its main ranking signals, making them a crucial part of any SEO report.
When crafting a report’s backlink overview, you should include the following:
- The number of external links that your page or website has acquired, given your report’s time
- The domain authority of those websites that link to yours.
5. Domain Authority
You must also provide SEO reports with information about your website’s domain authority. This metric shows the quality of your website according to search engines and is linked to the webpage’s ranking.
In addition to domain authority, your report should also have:
- Previous scores to showcase how your SEO efforts have improved
- Your competitors’ domain authority as a point of comparison.
6. Conversion Rate
While your website may have a lot of traffic, this traffic will not make much difference if it does not lead to conversions.
In digital marketing, a successful conversion occurs when a webpage visitor completes your campaign’s desired goal, such as submitting a form or completing a purchase.
Here’s what you can do for this section of your report:
- Define your campaign’s desired goals for your conversion.
- For a clearer picture, you can categorize this KPI based on:
- conversion rates for new and returning visitors
- cost per conversion
- pages with the best conversion rates
- conversion by device and location
Using this metric helps SEO professionals understand how website visitors execute the target action on a website. It also helps them devise data-driven strategies to improve your website’s SEO performance.
7. Technical SEO Audits
It is also best practice to include technical audits in your report on SEO.
Technical audits may include the following:
An overview of site health: These are insights from regular audits that help evaluate your website’s security, performance, and other technical factors.- Crawl errors and indexing issues: These are the issues that search engines may encounter when accessing your web page or getting it indexed on Google. Discuss the problems that may negatively affect website visibility and how to resolve them.
- Core web vitals: These are part of Google’s ranking criteria, which measures the crucial factors of user experience on your website. These vitals include page loading speed, interactivity, and visual stability.
8. Recommendations and Actionable Insights
Your SEO reporting should include recommendations and actionable insights, not only data. It helps clients or your teammates understand possible strategies that your team may undertake, given the status of your campaign.
For this section:
- Identify task priorities and which KPIs need improvement or metrics the team needs to focus on.
- Include possible future strategies and recommend the next steps your SEO efforts can undertake based on your gathered data.
- Include an explanation of how these steps align with the business goals, mentioning how the SEO strategy can leverage business objectives.
Frequently Asked Questions:
How Often Should I Generate an SEO Report?
This would vary based on the business goals your website supports. Many companies generate time frames monthly, while others create quarterly or annually. The important thing to remember is to make sure your SEO reports are done regularly.
What is the Difference Between an SEO Audit and an SEO Report?
An audit comprehensively analyzes the website’s SEO health based on numerous factors. It also helps point out issues and possible improvements. On the other hand, an SEO report tracks data that shows a website’s SEO performance over time.
What SEO Reporting Generators and Tools Can I Use to Make a Report?
SEO experts use many reliable tools to generate data for SEO reports. Some helpful tools include Google Analytics and Search Consoles, SEMrush, and Ahrefs.
Tracking SEO Progress
Regular SEO reporting is the best way to see whether your search campaign is working objectively. These reports highlight key statistics that can help inform marketers on how to maintain or improve website performance.
Need help in creating a comprehensive and insightful SEO report? We at Tanner provide digital marketing services to our clients. Call us at 844.500.1339 or get in touch with us online today!
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