Last Updated on May 30, 2022 by Scott Charleboix
In this post, how to make a Good SEO Report you’ll be utilizing some of the metrics which I mentioned in two previous posts called 1) How to set SEO Goals and 2) 7 Ways for How to Measure your SEO. One of the blog posts that I read recently said that it’s very valuable to learn something new every day about your niche so that you can become stronger in your field. By utilizing the suggestions in this post you’ll be able to develop a complete SEO report.
A sample SEO Report is provided at the bottom of this post for you to copy and use.
With that in mind, this post is a roundup post of several posts that mention how to make an SEO report. So that by the time that we get to the end of this post you should have a wealth of information and be that much more knowledgeable on how to make a good SEO report. Please utilize this post as an SEO report template to make perfect SEO reports for yourself and/or your clients.
This post contains affiliate links, I’ll make a commission at no extra cost
to you should you click through and make a purchase.
Table of Contents
How to make a Good SEO Report
What is an SEO Report?
There might be a time that you’ll need to explain to someone else what they can do to improve their SEO. One of the best ways to convey their overall SEO Status is with a comprehensive SEO Report.
I wanted to let you know that I don’t have any clients, so I wrote this post as if I were writing it to a client who in this case is me. At the end of this post are some suggestions for you to download a SEO Report or copy and paste the information that I have in the post.
How does an SEO Report differ from an SEO Audit?
I added this question because some of the same things that you find in an SEO Report are helpful for when you do a Site Audit and at the same time some of the things that are in an SEO Audit should be reflective in your SEO report so I wanted to see how the definitions of the two to make it easier for us to understand the difference between an SEO Report and an SEO Audit.
What is a Site Audit? – To answer this question I turned to the post called What Is an SEO Audit & What Does It Include? “An SEO audit includes powerful insights into a website’s health and the SEO factors that may be holding back a site from ranking naturally in search results.” Pepperland
What is a SEO Report? With the information obtained from above we can infer that an SEO report is your Website Audit Report and also from the Pepperland site the SEO Report “should include a full picture of the website hierarchy and all issues standing in the site’s way of improved performance.”
So simply put, how they differ is the Site Audit is the process of “gathering” the data for your SEO (from SEO Tools) and the SEO report is the “documented report” provided to you on how you can improve your SEO.
There’s also the capability that you can make SEO reports from scratch but make take a long time to make a report that looks nice and provides useful information.
What are some of the best SEO Tools to create an SEO Report?
Two of the best SEO Tools that you can use are Ahrefs and SEMRush which run slightly around $100/mo. for the basic plan.
Pro-Tip: If you own your own website you can get Ahrefs Webmaster Tools for free. It has the same information that Ahrefs uses but your not able to use all of the features.
I just got done writing a post that compares Ahrefs and SEMRush so that you can take a look at some of the features they both have to offer and then you can decide on which one you’d like to use if you want to get serious about your SEO.
I’ve been blogging for over a year and a half and I’m quite an SEO enthusiast. I’ve randomly selected 10 posts that discuss How to make an SEO report and I’ll compile in this post, the information that they’ve suggested. I’ve seen a number of SEO Tools (below) that you can utilize to make SEO Reports.
- SEMRush (this seems to be the “preferred” SEO Tool that most bloggers are recommending).
- Ahrefs (or Ahrefs Webmaster Tools for free) – This is a free version of Ahrefs that’s exclusive to website owners only. In the 2nd hyperlink I show you how to use some of the free utilities within Ahrefs (after you’ve registered your website).
- DareBoost
- Google Analytics
- Google Search Console
- Majestic SEO
- Raven Tools SEO
- Ubersuggest
- Moz
- SEOptimer
- SEO Site Checkup
- SEO PowerSuite
- Website Grader by HubSpot
- Mangools SEO – For the money this is one of the lowest priced SEO programs. It doesn’t have a lot of bells and whistles, it’s not filled with a lot of frills like Ahrefs and SEMRush but from a cursory standpoint, it’ll provide you with the SEO basics of keyword research and looking at your SEO profile.
- Zadroweb SEO Auditor – For a free program, this will give you a very good idea on the status if you’re moving in the right direction for your SEO. I’ve provided a snapshot below for you to look at.
To get an idea on how of all these reports look please visit my post called 15 SEO Audit Tools sorted by category. This post looks at programs for: 1) SEO Effectiveness, SEO plug-ins, SEO Keyword Research Programs, and Caching programs that are sorted alphabetically by the respective categories.
How long does it take to create an SEO report?
This is going to depend largely on the amount of information that you want to provide and where you are collecting the data from in the first place. Some SEO Tools provide the capability to provide you with SEO tools that you can make SEO reports from stock templates which take just a few minutes to make where you pick the template of your choice and requires for the most part that you add your domain name (not including the https:// prefix in the URL).
A secondary part is that you’ll have to connect to where your SEO data is stored (like preferably a Google Analytics, SEMRush, or Ahrefs account).
Notice that you get a lot of useful information in a single glance to look at several key factors that provides a free SEO Audit of your site very quickly. Below are some of the key factors that your SEO Report should contain:
- Page Authority (PA) Score
- Domain Authority (DA) Score
- PageSpeed (Desktop)
- PageSpeed (Mobile)
And lastly it’ll provide the Google ranking position for some of your organic keywords (in the middle).
Recommendation: Look into improving the items in yellow (Page Authority) and Red (Authority Score and Domain Authority).
Top 10 Posts on how to make an SEO Report
- 7 Essentials to Make Perfect SEO Reports for Your Clients
- The Anatomy of the Perfect SEO Report
- 8 Essential SEO Reports to Create for Your Client in 2022
- How to Build an SEO Report: 39 Metrics & Insights to Include
- How To Craft The Perfect SEO Report For Your Clients
- SEO Reporting The Right Way: 19 SEO Reports Your Boss Wants To See
- SEO reports: how to make a report that generates insights and results
- Steal Our SEO Report Template (Inspired by SEO Experts)
- The ultimate guide to Automated SEO Reporting
In this post I’m not going to go into great detail as to how you can utilize each of the SEO tools I mentioned above. Most of them with the exception of Ahrefs and SEMRush were previewed in the post 15 SEO Audit Tools sorted by category.
The SEO Tools of Ahrefs and SEMRush were thoroughly discussed in the post that I wrote called “Ahrefs vs SEMRush which SEO Tool is better?” There’s been a lot of discussion about Ahrefs vs SEMRush and it’s not an easy decision to make. This post will help you decide which one to ultimately choose.
The last few weeks I’ve been wrestling with which primary SEO Tool to use so I’m going to get both programs (SEMRush and Ahrefs) where you can try out the programs for 7-days and during that time I’m going to find which of the SEO Tools that’s better in a side-by-side comparison. The bottom line of this post is to find out what’s the best “overall” SEO tool so that you can help make your keywords rank in Google.
To get your Site Audit report from Semrush for free follow this three-step process:
1: Step 1: Go to Semrush and when it first pops up at the top where it says “Search” type in your domain name (see below).
This will bring you to a snapshot of your domain overview, but that’s not the page I’m trying to direct you to, the page I’m trying to draw your attention to is your Site Audit Report.
2. Step 2: Under ON PAGE & TECH SEO click on Site Audit, again enter your domain in the Search field which will produce this image listed below. Bear in mind that this is a one-shot deal so save your results.
There’s not much to see here but you’re almost there. In the project field where your domain is listed click on the hyperlink that’s blue and bold to get your actual Site Audit (as pictured below).
Recommendation: Look into the Top Issues (at the bottom of the report) to see what can be improved. For example, why the 1 page couldn’t be crawled.
From there you can drill down and click on View Details and see more information on your SEO in the Thematic Reports section of Crawlability, HTTPS, Core Web Vitals, Site Performance, Internal Linking, and Markup.
One of the pages that is located within there that you should take a look at for some valuable insights into your SEO is the Internal Linking section (as pictured below).
The things on this page that you should pay attention to are the ones located on the right-hand side called Internal Link Issues (see below for a closer snapshot).
Recommendation: Look into the 1 issue of the error that’s a malformed link.
If you’re inclined to do so, you could make an SEO report from your snapshots of SEMRush and do some copy and pasting. I’m one for making things easy and one of the easier ways to get comprehensive information is from an area in SEMRush called My Reports under Management.
The Template gallery will quickly allow you to make some of the following reports:
- Monthly SEO
- Organic search positions
- Site Audit: Full Report
- Backlinks: Full Report
- Site Audit: Overview
- Monthly Competitor’s Analysis
I’ve never had the opportunity to make an SEO report for anyone other than myself but if I had to provide an SEO report I’d probably combine some of the facets from SEMRush and Ahrefs into a comprehensive report and I’ve already shown you how you can get several desired results in the post called “Ahrefs vs SEMRush which SEO Tool is better?”
What minimum elements should be in an SEO Report?
In the SEO world there are so many SEO metrics to track that the SEO report you provide can have a plethora of numbers. What you need to keep in the back of your mind is that it’s probable that the numbers might be meaningless to the receiving party. Therefore, a helpful suggestion would be to provide a recap of what can be done to improve their SEO as they move forward.
We’ve spent a lot of time looking at the basics of an SEO Report, but we haven’t dived into the minimum requirements that should in your SEO report.
In the first post by Search Engine Journal, they indicated that you should have 7 essential items to make a “Perfect” SEO Report, which are:
- Traffic Channels
- Conversion Rate and Goal Completion
- Page Level Traffic
- Page Speed Insights
- Time on Site and Bounce Rate
- Rankings and Links and
- Future Recommendations & Execution Plan
Determining the numbering order:
When talking to your clients get an idea on what’s their key goal. Put the key goal that they’ve mentioned at the beginning of your SEO report. Their primary goal should determine the numbering order. They might have other metrics that aren’t listed above that they wanted reflected in the SEO report (that are important to their business).
Let’s look at each of the 7 essential items to give you some ideas as to what to pull for your SEO report.
Traffic Channels
The traffic channels report should provide an indication of where their traffic originates. The emphasis here is that the user will be able to distinguish where they should be putting their focus on for improvement in those respective areas. A useful program to gather this information is Google Analytics (GA) by going to GA > Acquisition > All Traffic > Channels.
The 1st column provides the source and medium: Source/Medium describes where your traffic comes from. The Source is the place users are before seeing your content, like a search engine or another website. The Medium describes how users arrived at your content.
Recommendation: Monitor your Goal Conversions.
Conversion Rate and Goal Completion
It’s very likely that most people will want to know how they are doing on their conversion rate. Therefore, this metric should be at the “beginning” of your SEO report.
One of the best ways to demonstrate the conversion rate is through a process called goal tracking. I’m willing to bet that if I go to Google Analytics that I don’t have any goals set up in the program therefore I’m hoping to find if I can set up a goal for how many people have provided an incoming link to my Ultimate SEO Roadmap to Learning SEO post or something similar along those lines.
To get started with Goals you’ll need to navigate to Admin (located at the bottom of Google Analytics) and then in the View (on the right) click on Goals. (Sure enough I didn’t have any goals set up in that field).
Rather than the SEO Roadmap I’m going to set up a goal for my free SEO Hurdle for Bloggers Course to find out if people signed up for the course. So under Revenue I’m selecting Register Online and then click Continue.
For the Goal Description I’ve typed Register Online for SEO Hurdle and I’ve selected “Destination” for the type (then click on Continue)
In the Goal Details field I’ve typed the URL for my SEO Hurdle for Bloggers Course – https://pinartwork.com/seo-hurdle-for-bloggers-online-course/ and then saved the results.
At the current time I don’t have any Affiliate links that are producing a steady income but if that were the case or if you have people enrolling an online course, you’d want to use this setup with the designated URL to track the conversion progress.
Another good way that just popped into my head is that I want to promote a popular post that is bringing some pretty good traffic my way called Ahrefs Webmaster Tools for free.
Basically, it’s the same set up as before; however, this time I’m going to be utilizing Inquiry instead of Revenue (because there’s no revenue associated with this goal).
I’ve just started using this new feature and haven’t used it before. But where I foresee it to be very useful is looking at the Dashboard’s daily traffic and looking for posts that are bringing consistent traffic. Those are the types of Conversions that would be helpful to track so that you can put extra effort into promoting those posts with Pinterest and/or Facebook posts.
For the time being I’ve added one last goal to see how many people land on my HomePage (PinArtwork).
Recommendation: consider adding new goals to Google Analytics.
Page Level Traffic
In this section of the report you’ll want to provide trends that indicate what people click on in order to bring traffic. It helps to focus time in improving those particular posts.
To get there in Google Analytics a good source of information is from Landing Pages accessible by GA > Behavior > Site Content > Landing Pages.
The landing pages report in Google Analytics (although it’s not visible in this image) is a good place to quickly take a cursory glance at your posts Bounce Rate percentage and decide if you want to take some time to improve that stat.
Another report that you might want to consider is a report from Ahrefs called the Top Page Report that you can sort by position or other metrics.
Recommendation: Examining your stats for the last year indicate that you should put some “increased” attention on these four Top landing pages: 1) Funny coffee cups, 2) Great images, 3) Creative photos, and 4) Star Trek TOS in order.
Page Speed Insights
There are two good programs to provide Page Speed Insights that are my go to programs which are 1) GTMetrix and 2) Google’s Page Speed Insights. The advantages with Google’s Page Speed Insights is that it will show the page speed for the desktop and the mobile where GTMetrix doesn’t show a distinction between the two programs.
There are a number of free plug-ins that will improve page speed, but nothing really compares to one of the most powerful plug-ins that will make the most improvements for your page speed called WPRocket plug-in. Please look at the video that I made about WPRocket and suggest this plug-in using my affiliate link to purchase the program if they have a slow page speed that needs improving, Thank you.
Recommendation: Great job on your Page Speed, nothing to do here, other than to find out why 16 pages have been reported as slow (that are contained elsewhere in this report).
Time on Site & Bounce Rate
One of the best indicators to use to check for Bounce Rate is Google Analytics MonsterInsights which shows up in your WordPress dashboard. The time on site metric will improve as you add more content to your site, and conversely the bounce rate should get lower. For more information regarding the Bounce Rate (and what’s a good bounce rate), read the post called 25 Tools and Suggestions on how to Lower your Bounce Rate.
Pro-Tip: As a general rule of thumb the time to act on lowering your bounce rate is when it starts exceeding 70% on a regular basis. New blogs will have a higher bounce rate because they haven’t provided a lot of content yet or aren’t using some of the suggestions within the hyperlink mentioned above.
Recommendation: Good job on your bounce rate, it’s within the average rate. Continue to create and improve “existing” content to drive more traffic which should ultimately lead to the best Bounce rate which is being under 40%.
Rankings and Links
A common practice taken by most agencies is to report on the position of keyword rankings and Search Engine Journal warns that it’s not wise to use it as a de facto performance indicator (a custom or convention that has achieved a dominant position by public acceptance or market forces).
Although there’s value in tracking the position of keywords, it shouldn’t be used as the overall performance reporting indicator or the metric that’s the most important.
As it was mentioned in one of my recent posts, Blogging for Business with Ahrefs SEO Tips what new bloggers should be focusing on is the number of orders/sales per month. This is the primary KPI (Key Performance Indicator) that you should care about. You should treat your blog as a customer acquisition channel not a traffic acquisition channel.
And one of the ways to get there when you publish (update) your articles is to make them make them rank in Google which equals a passive source of new customers.
Recommendation: Continue to look at your posts to make them rank in Google. Take a critical look at your usage of focus keywords for posts that aren’t ranking.
Future Recommendations & Execution Plan
A tip to creating the perfect SEO report was that no matter which metric you pulled within the report it should have mention of comparing time-frames within the report. The post provided that you should show examples of month to month, quarter to quarter to quarter, year to year, campaign by campaign but didn’t give an pictorial examples of an image to use for the report.
In order to move forward, the SEO report should contain an important section of what it is they need to do next to improve their SEO.
An easy way to do just that it to put a Recommendation section at the bottom of each section (1 – 7 for each of the essential items that we’ve just been discussing. I’ve provided some recommendations that are for my own information, and you’d have to deduce what’s applicable to your blog for recommendations.
Recommendation: Revisit the Ahrefs SEO plug-in to look at posts that can be improved for their usage of the focus keywords and re-optimize the post based on the new keywords selected. Keyword research is an important element to get good Google ranking results.
Now I’m turning my attention to the 2nd article mentioned at the top of this post called The Anatomy of the Perfect SEO Report from SEMRush. Much like SEMRush my driving goal for this post is to help you realize 1) how to make a perfect SEO report, 2) what it should look like, and 3) what it should include.
As I indicated earlier, a lot of time SEO reports aren’t very informative, and the reader doesn’t derive much information from the report. What the person reading the report doesn’t want to see is an SEO report that has so may overwhelming pages that goes on page after page covering meaningless information.
Earlier we looked at the 7 essential things that should be in an SEO report and here’s a good place to provide a recap to ensure that we covered the bare bones items that should show up in your report. Looking on these three things the one item that remains omitted from the report that was mentioned above is the 2nd bulleted item regarding activities undertaken and their impact. If you were making this for a client you could say something like you installed Rank Math SEO plug-in, you optimized the posts for SEO, and you installed a cache program to improve the page speed (if applicable).
Analyzing Backlinks.
Recommendation:
An SEO report should show, at a bare minimum:
- What progress has been made?
- What activities have been undertaken and their impact?
- Recommendations to drive further growth.
The last item was mentioned at the bottom of the report, and I hadn’t mentioned in this report the progress that has been made (because it was a report made for me). This is where you could show the before and after SEO scores with Rank Math, and the before and after scores from a cache program like WPRocket.
What’s the importance in regularly creating an SEO report?
The main reason for wanting to produce an SEO report is so that you’re able to recognize trends, be it positive or negative), and the items that need priority attention. An SEO report aids in seeing at a glance where you need to devote your attention (provided that you have the right report).
In one of my last articles, I wrote a post called 7 Ways for How to Measure your SEO. This post is important because you want to ensure that you’re selecting the right metrics that need to be reported which will make the report that much more valuable.
There’s a fine balance because you don’t want to report metrics that there are too few of them and on the other hand you don’t want to report too many metrics.
- Too few metrics = doesn’t represent the overall big picture
- Too many = your audience will quickly lose interest
So how do you strike a balance that’s somewhere between the two? By showcasing the metrics that mean the most to the business and are particular to their project. Keep your audience in mind for the SEO strategy from one place to another can vary.
One of the four pillars of SEO is Technical SEO. It covers many facets including the site speed, links that are broken, 404 errors, and lots more. This type of SEO is the one that’s responsible for ensuring that your site is getting properly crawled and indexed.
SEMRush Thematic Reports are a great place to start for looking at Technical SEO. From within the Site Audit that you prepare with SEMRush you can drill down to a whole bunch of SEO reports.
Here’s the Site Audit that we looked at earlier and the Thematic Reports are 7 rectangular reports in the middle of the report.
So that I’m not boring you with details, you can find out more about the Thematic Reports here.
For the SEO Report use the Keep it simple technique to show the Site Audit which is a quick snapshot depicted the site’s overall SEO health. What indicates a sign of success? Not having too many technical errors (where it says Errors). By having too many errors, I’m talking 100’s or thousands of errors. Few errors as in the one show up above is a good indicator that the site is in good SEO condition (“technically” speaking).
Showing Keyword Trends
There’s controversy over the way to display keywords. What you don’t want to do is to show single isolated instances of keywords. It’s better to have a group of keywords so that you’re able to see the growth and visibility of keywords and how they average in their Google ranking so that you get a better picture of your keywords
A useful tool to view keywords in this fashion is by using the Position Tracking Report within SEMRush to get some keyword insights. If you go to the section called Reporting on Keywords and Rankings you can find information that explains visibility, estimated traffic, average position, and rankings distribution.
At the current time I’m using SEMRush but it’s still within the 7-day trial period, so it hasn’t The turned into the Pro version yet for me to add more keywords (limited to 10 at the moment)
Recommendation: Add more keywords to SEMRush when it’s fully activated to track keywords and look at their respective rankings.
Backlink Analytics Tool
Head to the Backlink Analytics tool, and you will see a snapshot of your domain’s links profile. According to SEMRush using this overview backlink analytics tool is perhaps the most effective way to report on the profile’s overall health.
This is an item that wasn’t mentioned in the earlier report with 7 essential items that I would suggest adding to your SEO report thus making your SEO report 8 essential items. Another alternative is to mention Backlinks in section 6 (under Rankings and Links). For the purpose of my SEO report, I’m adding an 8th section and labeling it Analyzing Backlinks.
The important metrics are the ones across the top of the Backlinks Report (that are in the image located below).
In the category of Backlinks, “At a minimum, an SEO report should include referring domains,” writes Eric Mellmer of Proline Range Hoods – Databox (from the link below).
I’m now turning my attention to the 3rd article called How to Build an SEO Report: 39 Metrics & Insights to Include and I’ll be summarizing important items from that post herein.
We’ve already identified several items that need to be in an SEO Report. At Databox they talked to more than 100 professional SEOs to share their thoughts on the KPI’s that the SEO pros felt should be reported.
In this list of 39-points I’ve indicated which items we’ve already addressed earlier by putting a checkmark in the check box.
- ☒ A list of next steps – “Something which, surprisingly, many people miss off their SEO report is actions,” says Digital Quokka‘s Andy Chadwick. – Databox
- ☒ An overview
- ☐ Assisted conversions
- ☒ Average ranking position
- ☒ Backlinks
- ☒ Bounce rate
- ☐ Clicks
- ☒ Conversions from organic traffic
- ☐ Domain authority – “If I could only include one metric to indicate how well a website is performing, it would be this,” says Dan Lacey.” Databox
- ☐ Dwell time
- ☒ Goal value
- ☐ Google My Business profile views
- ☐ Internal site search queries
- ☐ Keyword impressions
- ☒ Keyword rankings
- ☐ Link value
- ☐ List of redirect chains
- ☐ Mobile organic users
- ☐ Mobile visits
- ☒ Monthly, quarterly, or yearly comparisons
- ☐ Non-branded clicks
- ☐ Number of organic keywords
- ☐ Number of pages visited
- ☐ Organic conversion rate
- ☐ Organic entrances
- ☐ Organic traffic
- ☐ Organic traffic changes by page
- ☐ Revenue
- ☐ Search traffic value
- ☐ Search volume trends
- ☐ SEO competitor analysis
- ☐ SEO tasks completed
- ☒ Site speed
- ☐ The whole story
- ☐ Top keywords – “The number of top three keywords should be included on any website SEO report,” says Tony Mastri of MARION Marketing Agency. “While this doesn’t directly translate into leads, it is an intermediate step that can indicate whether your SEO strategy is working. It is also a signal that you’re developing the necessary expertise, authority, and trust to show up for your target commercial keywords.”
- ☒ Top landing pages
- ☐ Unbranded traffic
- ☐ URL growth trends
- ☐ User behavior
Use this list of 39 points to ensure that you’ve covered these items in your SEO Report.
Important notes from Databox:
“There is nothing worse than having an in-depth SEO report that is filled with stats and data points but no actionable items or analysis. For the client to value an SEO report, it needs to communicate why the numbers are important and what can be done to see improvements,” Joshua Waller of Ontario SEO adds.
Kumo‘s Tieece Gordon agrees: “It’s always important to remember that clients generally don’t have as strong a grasp on SEO as you do, meaning it’s up to you to help them understand why things have gone the way they have – both good and bad.”
We’re steadily getting closer to crafting the perfect SEO report which brings up to a post that closely resembles just that called How To Craft The Perfect SEO Report For Your Clients.
The sole takeaway that I got from this post is that “SEO reports give an overview to help your clients see progress towards their goals and position you as the person to get them there.”
The post has a link to some sample SEO templates, none of which I’d actually recommend though for a good SEO report. The sample templates lack the information that we were discussing above.
So that post was a very quick wrap-up bringing us to article #6 called SEO Reporting The Right Way: 19 SEO Reports Your Boss Wants To See.
The name of this article is “SEO Reporting The Right Way: 19 SEO Reports Your Boss Wants To See” and the title is misleading because by reading this title I was expecting to see a variety of SEO reports to emulate. However, this article is more about the fundamentals of what clients expect to see in SEO reports.
Ignite Visibility has already provided 19 features for fundamentals that are expected to be within an SEO report. I’m not going to cover each and every item since they’ve already done that in their post. So let’s quickly review the list of items that they suggest should be mentioned:
- Clean Dashboards that show a quick snapshot of information. I like to see a dashboard like SEOptimer or Ahrefs that isn’t cluttered.
- Goal Reports – have goals been set up Google Analytics to reflect the goals that company is driving for?
- Total work completed within the time period – What exactly did you do? Outline what it is that you’ve done to improve your client’s SEO performance.
- Number of Optimized Pages – This can take considerable time to optimize pages so show a before and after of the pages to show what’s been optimized. Rank Math is a good tool to use to show before and after information. What you could do is show the number of N/A, fair, and Good SEO score posts.
- Earned high-quality links – this is one of the most important metrics that you need to be attuned to and watch carefully.
- Image Packs – not mentioned in the article but is worth noting so that your client can add image packs to their posts to boost their traffic. An easy way to find them is with the free version of Ahrefs Webmaster Tools for website owners. Read the post called Free Ahrefs to improve your SEO that discusses the free resources that you can use that’s comparable to Ahrefs.
- Overall keyword Growth – provide a report that shows how many keywords that you’ve been able to rank for. One of the easiest ways to look at “all” keyword positions is with the use of the Ahrefs SEO WordPress plug-in.
One of the features that I like within this report is the posts and pages by performance report.
Another alternative is to provide a snapshot from Rank Math to show the keyword growth as indicated below (that represents a 6-month period).
- Increase in ranking for top terms – your driving goal should be to get you or your client to the top of SERP (Search Engine Results Pages) so that their posts are clickable.
This is information that I keep in a spreadsheet to show the ranking progression, or you could use the same graphic from the one above and show it for the last three or four weeks to show progression.
| based on 6 months | Top 3 | 4 – 10 | 11 – 50 | 51 – 100 |
| Sep – Oct | 3 | 7 | 107 | 164 |
| Oct – Nov | 5 | 6 | 161 | 214 |
| Nov – Dec | 2 | 10 | 160 | 185 |
| Dec – Jan | 13 | 18 | 109 | 229 |
| Jan – Feb | 20 | 17 | 127 | 271 |
| based on 6 mo. | 23-Jan | 30-Jan | 6-Feb | 15-Feb |
| Search Clicks | 312 | 315 | 315 | 321 |
| Search Impressions | 201,504 | 210,880 | 210,880 | 231,524 |
| CTR | 0.13% | 0.13% | 0.13% | 0.12% |
| avg pos. | 55.24 | 55.36 | 55.36 | 55.58 |
| Total Keywords | 535 | 369 | 369 | 435 |
In addition, I’ve added an Excel Chart to show the information for the ranking tiers of Top 3, 4 – 10, 11 – 50, and 51 – 100 (see below) and you can explain how the growth of Top 3 posts has risen since Sept – Oct 2021 time-frame (or their lowest point).
- Traffic and Keyword Growth for Translated Pages – translating your website into another language can grow your business and help your SEO, especially if you’re able to get those pages ranked.
- Growth of Social Media – show how you’ve provided your client with a wider exposure online by providing an online presence to social media (i.e., Pinterest, Facebook, etc.). One of the easiest ways to show this information is with the Jetpack plug-in that allows you to look at daily stats, weekly, and monthly stats.
7 days
30 days
Quarter
Year
All-time
- Performance report from Google Search Console (GSC) – This is how you can show off how by investing in SEO that they can see notable results. The GSC shows a wealth of information. To access this information you go to GSC > Overview.
2. Mobile Traffic Growth – I personally like this graph to show the comparison between desktop and mobile all in one snapshot. People are starting to use their smart phones more and more so it’s important to pay attention to mobile, now more than ever and the trend is that mobile is on the rise. This information shows the total clicks as well as the impressions (how often the results are being searched and displayed).
3. Year-Over-Year Growth (YOY) – An important aspect for you to realize is that most businesses have set aside a certain amount of money in their budget for SEO that they allocate on an annual basis. If you’re able to show how your SEO results are producing results, they’re likely to increase their budget for the following year to put more money in your pocket. Off hand, I don’t know which SEO program is the best to show this information, but it should be readily assessable by researching the term YOY growth.
4. Month-Over-Month Growth – abbreviated MOM. People have a need for instant gratification, so your goal is to provide some sort of factor that you are providing results that is improving their SEO. A good source of information is a SEO Monthly report.
One of my favorite SEO programs that is visually nice and doesn’t have an overwhelming number of stats is SEOptimer. And is a good DIY SEO program.
5. Traffic by Location – SEO Traffic comes from all over the world. Show your client what country their incoming traffic is originating from to show inbound traffic. One of the easiest ways to get that information is through the Google Analytics Monster Insights Plug-in and then click on View Countries Report.
6. Traffic by Referral Source – what channels are providing the best source of traffic. This is a good way to monitor your social presence. Go to Google Analytics (GA) by going to GA > Acquisition > All Traffic > Channels. The image below represents the traffic within the last year to PinArtwork by channels.
7. Conversion rates by Channel – some day my Prince will come. But until then, I’m plugging away that hopefully one of my Affiliate Links will make an astonishing turnaround for sales. For bloggers it can take a considerable long time to get a profit. From what I’ve read the usual turning point is around the 2nd or 3rd year of blogging because the bloggers have gotten a lot underneath their belts to learn their craft.
Since I know that I don’t have a lot of income in this arena, by personal metric is looking at my Affiliate Program ShareASale and looking at the total sales to watch it steadily rise (NOT). I realize that some day it’ll turn around and when it does I’m going to have one heck of a party and then the next step is to create my own Affiliate program based around the one that is creating a steady income.
8. Conversion rates on a template-by-template basis. This is something worth mentioning if they are operating with a profit. It’s discouraging to look up this sort of information to look up this type of information but there’s information out there that will show the right sort of information on an SEO template to display this.
9. CTR for Top Pages in SERPs. The CTR stands for Click Through Rates. It’s the number of search clicks divided by the search impressions. Rank Math provides the overall CTR as well as the CTR for individual posts (see below). This is handy to see what keywords are getting some of the most clicks.
Having a high ranking doesn’t necessary equate to a good CTR for your keywords.
We’re getting close to the last of the articles to review and now we’re on article #7 called SEO reports: how to make a report that generates insights and results
I thought that was going to be a post that showed SEO reports but it’s more about things that you can provide within an SEO report. One important takeaway from this article in regards to ranking positions is that: “The positions that are between sixth and twentieth are the contents with the highest potential for rising in the SERPs, since they already rank relatively well and can improve a lot with an update.”
Moving right along, let’s turn our attention to the next article called Steal Our SEO Report Template (Inspired by SEO Experts).
This post is very important because it narrows it down to instantly be able to recognize the difference between a good and a bad SEO Report.
- “Bad SEO reports – Clients get lost in pointless data, don’t know what work was done, and get no insightful comments.
- Good SEO reports – Clients see key data summaries and easy-to-understand insights and overview of the work done.”
In this post by Ahrefs, they recommend that generally everyone wants to see five (5) elements in their SEO report (luckily we’ve already suggested that these be included in your report).
- SEO KPIs – Evaluate SEO metrics that are closely tied to revenue growth.
- Ranking progress – See how rankings of the most important keywords have changed.
- Organic traffic progress – Check how the previous two aspects translate into absolute traffic numbers.
- Backlink growth – See new, valuable referring pages that drive traffic and/or pass link equity.
- SEO health – Know that the website is doing well from the technical SEO perspective.
An important thing to realize is that an SEO template won’t work in each and every situation. An SEO Template is not meant to be one size fits all.
So far one of the best SEO Reports that I’ve seen but would require some intervention on your part to ensure that it contains everything that I’ve already mentioned in this post is one that you can Click here to make a copy of the SEO report template that is a Google Presentation (similar to PowerPoint).
This report was made by Ahrefs to cover all SEO areas for monthly reporting.
Our next article is called The ultimate guide to Automated SEO Reporting.
What are automated SEO reports?
“An automated SEO report is an aggregated report of all your SEO key performance indicators (KPIs) that is generated by a tool or application.”
Benefits of Automated SEO Reporting: “With automated SEO reporting, the benefits are many, but the major benefit is you can get the clear insights you need without having to manually dive into the data, which can be time-consuming.” (copy of an automated report is provided below).
Some good and helpful information from their free SEO program (Siteimprove).
Recommendation: Although you have a find looking site and it scores 96%, you have a low mobile score of 66% which could require some improvement on that end of the spectrum to improve the UX for your smart phone users.
Sample SEO Report Template
If you’d like to use this to use as an SEO report template, you can copy and paste it into Word. Then you “may” want to consider deleting the source of where to get the info in the heading.
* The bold-faced items below represent where you need to fill in your info.
SEO Report for Business Name
Site Overview: Domain name Date: Today’s Date
SEO Score: SEO Score Domain Authority (DA) Score: DA Score Bounce Rate: 50%
Site Speed: Desktop Score Mobile Score
98 94
1.Traffic Channels (from GA > Acquisition > All Traffic > Channels)
Recommendation: Monitor your Goal Conversions.
2. Conversion Rate and Goal Completion (from GA > Admin > View > Goals)
Recommendation:
3. Page Level Traffic (from GA > Behavior > Site Content > Landing Pages)
Recommendation:
4. Page Speed Insights (from GTMetrix or Google Page Speed)
Recommendations
5. Time On Site and Bounce Rate (from Google Analytics Monster Insights)
Recommendation:
6. Rankings and Links (from Rank Math Analytics – indicate which one)
7 days 15 days 30 days 90 days 6 months
Keywords for
Top 3 Positions: 4 – 10 Positions: 10 – 50 Positions: 51 – 100 Positions:
X X X X
Search Impressions: Total Keywords: Search Clicks:
X X X
CTR and Average Position:
% XX.XX
Recommendation:
7. Future Recommendations & Execution Plan
Provide a detailed plan for what needs to be done to improve SEO
Conclusion
I hope that by the time that you get to the bottom of this post that you’ve been able to formulate an idea for how you’re going to present your SEO Report. I’d like to know if you have a favorite program that you use to make your SEO reports. Please leave a comment. Thank you.
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