Whether you are providing search engine optimization (SEO) services for your clients or doing in-house SEO implementations, the importance of an SEO report is understated. It provides your clients or your management with a clear picture of your SEO efforts and how it’s helping the company. So, let’s understand the advantages of creating an SEO report on website and how you can create one!
What is the Significance of an SEO Report?
An SEO not only helps you understand what strategies are working for your website, but also they showcase the results. With an SEO report, you can show how your content or web pages are performing and how prospective clients are engaging with the content.
For instance, your client wants to increase the web traffic of their e-commerce website. An SEO report highlights the different assessments you have done along with the strategies you have implemented that have resulted in the desired results.
It’s crucial to understand that SEO is a long-term investment. Most importantly, this report helps you track the performance of your website with the aid of different metrics. This includes your search engine ranking pages (SERPs), click-through rates, landing page visits, as well as target keywords being used. You need to evaluate your strategies regularly, update them, or improve the ones that do not seem to be working.
Benefits of Creating an SEO Report
Some of the key advantages to why you need to curate SEO ranking reports are as follows:
- Have a Clear Understanding of Your SEO Strategy
An SEO report serves as a critical tool to evaluate the success of your SEO strategy. Beyond having merely a list of targeted keywords, this report helps you to understand if these keywords are generating the desired traffic. By analyzing your SEO strategy, you can identify areas where you need to improve or you need to take advantage of opportunities to enhance your traffic.
- Measure Your Performance and Identify Challenges
An SEO analysis report consists of information on different vital metrics such as organic traffic, average session duration, and conversion rates, among others. These metrics help you identify the effectiveness of your content and evaluate the user experience of your website. Based on these data, you can make data-driven decisions to elevate the engagement rate and increase consumer conversions.
Moreover, this report will also help you reflect on the challenges your website is facing. For instance, there may be issues with your technical SEO such as problems in search engine crawling or incomplete coding of your navigation bar. These issues hinder the user experience. You can easily identify these problems with an SEO report and focus on the key areas that require proper improvement.
- Keep Track of Your Competitors
One of the main aspects of an SEO report is that it consists of a performance comparison assessment with your competitors. This report highlights what keywords your competitors are using and how you can take the lead. You can utilize these insights and create a program to maximize your visibility and reach.
- Evaluate Your SEO Strategy’s ROI
SEO strategies also comprise paid marketing efforts like pay-per-click campaigns or other paid advertisements to boost your rankings. An SEO report shows you if your efforts are providing fruitful results, that is if they are providing you with the required return on investment (ROI). This helps you make the most of your marketing budget.
SEO Audit Report Template
Here is the SEO report format you need to follow to create and successfully track the SEO efforts for your website or your clients:
- Title and Summary
The foremost section of your SEO report will consist of a title and summary. For example, if you worked for a client with a goal of increasing website traffic and sales, then create your report title and summary based on this project information. Don’t forget to mention the specific period during which you ran the report.
- Highlights
An SEO report usually contains tons of data. To increase the clarity of your report, you can create a highlights section where you can mention two or three key SEO metrics and how you measured them or how you completed the biggest SEO task. This section is essentially the summary of your important findings.
- List SEO Objectives
Now comes another important section in your SEO report- the objectives. In this section, you need to list down all the major objectives of your project. It can be to high rank in SERPs, increase customer engagement, conversions, or any other metrics that help in the development of the business growth.
To establish your key objectives, you need to have a clear understanding of what your client wants. Understanding their goals can help you narrow down the approach or tools you need to use to create the SEO strategy. Communicate the objectives of your SEO campaigns early to ensure your client knows what you will be working on and how it will impact their business.
- Select SEO Metrics and KPIs
After deciding on the project objectives, you need to set metrics and KPIs that will help you track the process of your SEO efforts. The key SEO metrics every report should include are:
Traffic: Number of sessions, traffic by channel, organic traffic volume
Rankings: Search engine ranking results
Keywords: Keyword rankings, search visibility, indexed pages
Leads/Conversions: Click-through rates (CTR), conversion rate, cost per acquisition
Backlinks: Total number of backlinks, number of dimensions, authority of referring domains
Make use of different free and paid SEO audit tools like Google Analytics and Google Search Console to gather the relevant data for your website.
- Website Overview
In this section, you need to cover the overall performance of your website. You should cover:
Domain Authority: It is measured on a scale of 1-100 and reflects the overall strength of your website’s domain. The number of backlinks and their quality directly impact this metric. So, if you have a higher domain authority, that means you rank higher in search results.
Page Authority: This measures the strength of your individual pages on your website. This metric showcases the likelihood of each page’s rankings which are influenced by various internal and external factors like links, relevance, and quality of the content.
Indexing Status: According to this metric, it refers to the website pages that are included in search engine indexes. This will tell you if search engines have crawled and indexed your website’s content. If some of your pages are not indexed, then it can impact your visibility and organic search traffic.
- Keyword Performance
One of the must-have sections in SEO audit report format is an analysis of your keywords and their performance. You should identify and present the most valuable or profitable keywords and how the pages rank for them. The aim is to target keywords that have decent search volumes but low competition. This ensures your page will not get buried under established websites and will show up on SERPs.
You can further make this report more focused by showcasing how the performance of each keyword improved or decreased. Use a color system or add symbols to present the data in an easily understandable manner. Moreover, include the search volume for each keyword. This will provide an idea of how they are performing or point you toward potential keyword gaps.
- Traffic, Engagement, and Conversion Analysis
The traffic analysis section of your report identifies the number of visitors to your website and what actions they have taken. Include your overall traffic volume to understand where these visitors come from. You can further divide this section into two parts- organic and paid traffic.
Organic traffic refers to the visitors who reach your website through unpaid search engine results. Your targeted keywords play a major role in this context as it helps your web page or website rank as the relevant search result. On the other hand, paid traffic or in-organic traffic are the people who land on your website through paid ad campaigns. This can include traffic from pay-per-click ads, social media ads, email, or affiliate marketing.
Apart from this traffic, you also need to report SEO metrics on your engagement and conversions. Include valuable data metrics like the bounce rate which indicates when your visitors leave your site without any action. This helps you understand what actions you need to take like increasing the site speed or content quality.
Additionally also include conversion data in this section. A high conversion rate and conversion volume indicate how your SEO efforts pay off. Utilize the KPIs to understand which are performing the best and which needs improvement. Tweak the pages that need improvement to get the desired results.
- Backlink Overview
Providing regular updates on the ongoing link-building efforts is critical in SEO reports. Offer a comprehensive view of your site’s backlink profile including the total number of backlinks, assess the authority of these referring domains, and highlight acquired or lost links to demonstrate the progress.
You can also emphasize the relevance of anchor text to ensure content alignment that can increase SEO points. Utilize backlink tools to gather relevant data for the backlink section. This allows continuous tracking of the link-building process for effective SEO management.
- Technical SEO Overview
Apart from keywords and backlinks, you must highlight the different technical SEO challenges that you identified, how you have eliminated them, and showcase the result. Technical SEO consists of evaluating your site speed, broken links, URL structures, crawl errors, or ensuring your site is mobile-friendly or not.
Explain how these metrics impact your site performance, rank, as well as user experience. Provide a detailed summary of how you have solved the challenges and how it has improved the website’s performance/
- Competitor Overview
Your SEO report should include a comparison of your website’s performance with respect to your competitors. You can include the comparison on the basis of keyword rankings, organic visibility, backlink profiles, and more. You can check a few SEO report examples and represent this data in a visual format using graphs and charts.
- Recommendations
Lastly, include a recommendation section that highlights how you can further improve the SEO strategy to elevate your results. Point out the areas that need improvement and how your strategy can help in achieving the desired results.
Steps to Create an SEO Report
Now that you know the format of the SEO report, let’s understand the important steps you need to take to create one:
- Decide Your Reporting Frequency
The first step is to decide the frequency of running these reports. Based on the business needs and requirements, you can choose to create monthly or bi-monthly reports. You can also choose to create an SEO report every quarter.
- Pick the Most Vital KPIs
To track the success of your SEO efforts, you need to determine the KPIs to focus on in your report. Combine SEO on page reports with off page elements that showcase a comprehensive understanding of your website performance. Include data like your website traffic, page load speed, keywords, and backlinks, among others.
- Select Your Layout
Your SEO report is something your team would need to refer to frequently in order to adjust or implement the SEO strategy. Create different SEO audit report samples to see which one provides more clarity and showcases the results clearly. Make sure to simplify your report by including simple language so that it is easily understandable.
- Develop the Report
Once you have gathered all the data, you can set up the automatic SEO report-building process. Automate your process using an SEO analyzer and other tools that provide you with precise data. Be sure to include visualizations whenever possible. Use bullets to highlight a point and support the point with graphs or charts.
- Provide Recommendations
When you understand the performance of your SEO strategy, you can effectively identify the gaps to improve the process. For instance, if some keywords are not performing well, you can change and experiment with different strategies. Make appropriate recommendations based on this so that it reflects it will help in your business growth.
- Report on Performance Consistency
Remember that SEO is a consistent process. You need to track data regularly to identify how your performance changes over months and years, and how seasonality or notable events impact them. Identify challenges and opportunities based on these and modify your strategy to improve the performance.
Best Practices of SEO Report
Here are some of the best practices you can follow when creating an SEO report:
- Clarify Goals and Objectives: Identify the essential metrics and insights aligned with your business goals. Customize the report to meet the specific audience’s needs and ensure it resonates with their expectations.
- Provide Context and Analysis: Present data along with detailed efforts to improve the rankings of the website. Consider broader industry factors, adapt to changes in search engine algorithms, and highlight their impact on performance.
- Customize Your Report: Tailor the report according to your audience, their SEO knowledge, and specific interests. Create a higher-level overview for executives and an in-depth report for the marketing team.
- Use Clear and Understandable Language: Communicate your findings in clear and concise language. Avoid using unnecessary jargon that can complicate the report. Moreover, you can use formatting tools like bullet points to enhance readability.
- Develop a Plan Around the Report: Curate a strategic plan based on the insights of your reports. Identify the area of improvement and make relevant decisions to elevate the performance of your site.
Conclusion
Thus, an SEO report provides a data-driven summary of your website’s performance in the search engines. Collect all the data regarding your website traffic, conversions, backlinks, and other metrics, and select the objectives and KPIs that you will be focusing on. Use effective SEO tools and follow the detailed steps listed in this report to create your SEO report.