No matter if you are a full SEO agency or a freelancing SEO professional, an SEO report is relevant & significant to you. SEO report gives you a detailed breakdown of your effort & results your effort has yielded.
Yes, generating an SEO report must not be time-consuming, as you don’t want that process to waste the time you invest in creating & executing the SEO strategy.
Further on we give you detailed info on what tools you can use to generate an SEO report, what your SEO report should look like and what aspects must be covered in your SEO report.
What is an SEO Report?
In simple words, a detailed report of how your website is performing in terms of various SEO factors is termed an SEO report.
Some major areas covered by the SEO report are stats about organic traffic, conversions, site health, backlinks generated, keywords on which the site is ranking, domain authority, etc.
If you are an SEO professional, you will be definitely asked about the results that your efforts have generated. Here, you can demonstrate the results by showing the SEO report. Hence, it becomes important for you to ensure that your report is detailed, comprehensive, and explains every aspect effectively.
Some Dos & Don’ts of SEO Reporting
| Do’s | Don’ts |
| Create regular reports | Prepare a report providing just an overview of your SEO strategy & results |
| Include both, a list of targets you have achieved, and targets you desire to achieve next | Hide the aspects where your strategy didn’t work. It doesn’t maintain transparency, and eventually breaks the trust |
| Use the correct tools for preparing an SEO report | Select the SEO report tool without any research |
| Customize reports if required in order to make the report more comprehensive & detailed | Clutter the SEO report with too much unnecessary information |
| Keep the report detailed, yet simple in terms of looks | Give false promises about your future targets |
| Highlight the things that didn’t work and include your plan to rectify the loophole and overcome it | Submit the report to the client without doing a deep analysis of the generated report. |
What Makes an SEO Report Important?
No matter what domain you are in, every client expects transparency. You need to keep your client in the loop with regard to the efforts you are investing in your SEO strategy and the results your SEO strategy is yielding.
While doing so every day might not be possible, it’s better to prepare a monthly SEO report and include every key metric that improved the past month along with the metric that didn’t. Plus, an SEO report allows you to include an action plan which overcomes the loopholes in your SEO strategy.
SEO report plays that dark-horse role in terms of boosting overall customer satisfaction as you are providing them clarity about their position in search engine rankings. Plus, your organization is likely to invite more projects if your report is comprehensive enough to make potential clients believe that a set process is followed on your premises.
Key Metrics to Include in Your SEO Report
Organic Traffic
This is an obvious metric that must be incorporated in your SEO report. After all, what your client has built a website for? Traffic & leads!
Website traffic is understandable, but what is organic traffic? Well, the website traffic that has landed from SERPs and without any ads is termed organic traffic.
Organic traffic could be from Google searches, social media posts, organic backlinks or any other SEO aspect. It should just not include the black-hat SEO and ads.
Now, how do you get insights into organic traffic? Well, Google Analytics can be your useful tool here. To get information about organic traffic, just:
- Sign in to your Google Analytics dashboard.
- Select “Add segment” in the default audience overview
- Select “Organic Traffic” and click “Apply”
- You will be displayed with organic traffic percentage in the form of a graph. You can add the screenshot of this graph to your SEO report
Organic Click-through Rate (CTR)
The percentage of people landing on your site from SERPs is termed organic CTR. For instance, 100 searchers see your website on SERP and 4 of them land on your website. The CTR of your website here is 4%.
Most industries have an average CTR of 4-6%. Ideal CTR depends on your business domain, but make sure not to spam here, as Google is way too strict about it.
If your CTR is low or isn’t as expected, you need to form a specific strategy around it, starting from optimizing the meta title & description. Meta title & description always play a crucial role here, as these are the aspects that drive users to land on your website.
Google Search Console provides you with an option to monitor the organic CTR of your website. Just click the “Performance” tab, and you will be displayed with organic CTR of your website in percentage.
Change in Page Load Time
Your site speed is a significant SEO factor that plays a crucial role in providing a smooth user experience to visitors and making Google believe that your website is worth ranking.
Some crucial statistics about the page load time of a website:
- 64% of customers who leave a website due to poor loading speed of a website don’t land on the website again.
- 1 out of 4 users leave a website due to slow loading speed.
- 1 second of delay in website loading speed reduces the conversion rate by 7%& customer satisfaction by around 15%.
- A B2B site that loads in 1 second has 3X more conversions as compared to a site that loads in 5 seconds.
- For every second delay in mobile devices, the conversion rate is reduced by 20%.
- The ideal loading time of a website is 0–2 seconds, with an acceptable score of 3 seconds. Anything above 3 seconds would reduce the chances of conversions considerably.
It’s necessary to add page load time and highlight the improvement or deterioration as compared to last month in your report. It’s great if speed has improved, and if not, do include the causes and your plan to bring it back on track again.
To check the page load time of a website, you don’t require any tool. Just open the inspect window in your browser and then open the Network tab before you click a website link. Once you open the website and once the website is entirely loaded, you will be displayed with the load time in this tab.
Core Web Vitals
Google now considers Core Web Vitals a crucial element of any website. This report highlights how efficiently your website provides a smooth UX experience to the visitors landing on your platform.
Core Web Vitals report includes the metrics like DOM loading time of your site. Three crucial parameters included in this report are First Input Delay (FID), Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS), and Largest Contentful Paint (LCP).
Let’s check out some stats regarding these stats in a table.
| Good | Need Improvement | Poor | |
| LCP | ≤2.5s | ≤4s | >4s |
| FID | ≤100ms | ≤300ms | >300ms |
| INP | ≤200ms | ≤500ms | >500ms |
| CLS | ≤0.1 | ≤0.25 | >0.25 |
Keyword Rankings
Keyword rankings is another crucial aspect you must mention in your monthly SEO report. Make sure to incorporate both, the keywords with improved rankings & the keywords with degraded rankings.
The image shows Amazon rankings for the keyword “red shoes”
Do include factors like search intent, keyword position, traffic, search volume, keyword difficulty, and more. Also, do include your action plan for improving the keyword rankings for the keywords that didn’t rank as expected.
Domain Authority
Domain Authority (DA) is the overall quality of a website and plays a crucial role in terms of website rankings. You can include DA in your SEO report to show how the quality of the client’s website has changed in the past month and how your SEO strategy has played a role in it.
You can also add the comparison of clients’ website & the competitors’ website in your report along with an action plan to beat the competition.
Backlink Stats
Your client might be interested in knowing how many referrals the website has got from external sources. While the client might not know the exact concept of external & internal backlinks, you can add detailed backlink stats in an easy-to-understand way in your SEO report.
You can add how the site earned high-quality backlinks to add that transparency factor and also how the newly earned backlinks improved the overall DA score of a website.
Don’t forget to add the important anchor texts that are working well, and the list of anchor texts that you are planning to incorporate into your link building strategy.
Top Landing Pages of the Website
Including top landing pages of the website has become increasingly important in the past few years as it displays the pages that are working on a website and the pages that aren’t.
Make sure to highlight the key aspects that played a role in attracting traffic to a landing page. Also, add how your SEO strategy played a role in getting the landing page ranked and attracting more traffic.
Report on Local SEO
It’s a no-brainer that your client would like to see how the website is yielding local results. The importance of local SEO in defining the success of any SEO strategy cannot be stressed enough.
Do include the stats regarding local citations, and NAP citations, along with the results that listing on local business directories has yielded. Also, you can add results yielded with your local content marketing strategy in your SEO report. Ultimately, your client must get an idea of how the website has performed in terms of inviting more local leads in the past month & how you are planning to solidify your local SEO strategy further on.
Our Favourite SEO Report Templates
Some of the SEO report templates we highly recommend to you as SEO professionals are:
Ahrefs SEO Report Template
We find the Ahrefs SEO report template the best due to the simplicity it comes alongside and at the same time ensuring that all crucial SEO aspects are incorporated in the report.
Some crucial factors covered in the Ahrefs SEO report template are:
- Title report – to add information like the title of the report, company name, report month, etc.
- Highlights – to add an overview of the report along with crucial stats.
- SEO KPIs
- Search visibility & conversions improvement
- Ranking progress on keyword segments
- Target keywords ranking details
- Non-branded organic traffic progress
- Referring domains
- Link building stats
- Technical SEO health
- A slide for next month’s plan
Moz SEO Competitor Analysis Template
If you are into SEO, Moz won’t be an alien platform to you. As much as you can use it for your SEO analysis, you can use Moz’s competitor analysis template too to prepare a detailed report on the competitor analysis you did the previous month.
Factors included in this template are:
- Instructions – To add key aspects of your report or to summarize it
- Competitors
- Keyword Gap Analysis
- SERP Analysis
- Top Competing Content
- Link Gap Analysis
Supermetrics Google Analytics & Search Console Report
Supermetrics SEO report combines both, stats from Google Analytics and Google Search Console. All the crucial metrics like organic traffic, engagement rate, etc. are included in this report.
Some important SEO metrics incorporated in this report are:
- Organic Traffic
- Bounce Rate
- Sessions Per Channel
- Total Number of Sessions
- Conversion Rates for Every Channel
- Average Page Views
- Average Time Spent By Users on Every Page
The primary reason for us recommending this report template is the easy-to-read template offered in a tabular form.
SEO Audit Report Template by SEOptimer
SEO Audit is one of the first and a significant SEO strategies if you are starting your SEO campaign or if your SEO strategy isn’t yielding the results it should.
In case you are performing an SEO Audit, it’s crucial for you to prepare a concrete report to give a detailed insight into the process.
Key SEO metrics incorporated in this report template are:
- SEO Score
- Title & Keyword Check
- Domain Authority
- Backlink Stats
- Broken Links Information
- Schema & Site Map Details
- Social Media Presence Details
- Action Plan to Solve the SEO Gaps
Tools You Can Use for Preparing SEO Report
SEMRush
SEMRush offers you a range of built-in tools that you can use to get insights into various SEO metrics.
The tool allows you to create customized reports and incorporate all the SEO metrics like organic traffic, conversion rates, keyword rankings, etc. Also, you can give insights into competition analysis using SEMRush.
Moz
Moz is another popular SEO tool that can also be effectively used to prepare detailed SEO reports. Be it keyword analysis, tracking search engine rankings, performing site audits or anything else, Moz has everything in for SEO professionals.
Moz dashboard is quite clean, which allows you to present your report in a detailed yet clean way.
SpyFu
A bit underrated, SpyFu is a decent option for preparing detailed & customized SEO reports. From competition analysis to keyword ranking and content audit, SpyFu has built-in advanced tools for every SEO metric.
SpyFu is efficient enough to scan more than 7 billion results within a few seconds, which clearly validates the fact that you can count on the tool’s speed. Time is a crucial factor for SEO professionals, and SpyFu won’t disappoint you here.
Ahrefs
There are rarely any instances where we talk about SEO tools, and we don’t include Ahrefs. Ahrefs gives you clear insights into the areas where you can improve your SEO strategy and a detailed idea of the areas where your strategy is working aptly.
We have already provided you with an SEO report template that you can use to prepare SEO reports. Plus, the all-in-one services the tool provides to get insights into key SEO metrics is one major reason why Ahrefs is recommended everywhere.
Final Words
A detailed and solid SEO report can be your tool for not only educating clients about the progress the website has made in the past month but also for helping yourself recognize the key areas that require your attention.
If you are preparing an SEO report, make sure to use the correct SEO report template and don’t hesitate to invest your time & effort as it is absolutely worth it.
The above-listed SEO report templates and SEO report tools would make things easy for you considerably.
Rest, if you are looking for professionals to not only get help with your SEO reports but also with your SEO strategy, you need not look any further than us. Our experienced SEO team ensures that your platform not only gets a solid SEO strategy but also transparency is maintained when you work with us. Let’s connect to discuss this further.
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