A Complete Guide to the Analysis of a Perfect SEO Report

Whether you have hired an SEO agency or working in-house, SEO reports are something we all have to make. This report helps in illustrating your campaign’s progress, its ROI, and justifying why you took the approach that you did.

Usually, SEO professionals love doing SEO, but putting together SEO reports in not their preference.

This is why there is often a massive difference in how different SEO agencies and in-house teams report on their campaign progress, frequency of these reports, and the metrics they include in it.

In this guide, we will discuss how your SEO report should look like and things it should include.

What Is an SEO Report?

An SEO report is an effective means to communicate with your manager or your client about the impacts of your SEO tactics on their business.

However, most of the SEO reports do not provide enough information for the viewers. It is 2020 already, and almost every person involved in any business knows how to use Google Analytics to get their website statistics.

Therefore, sending an SEO report monthly displaying the traffic for the last month and related conversions are not enough. The authorities need more than that, but then again, no one enjoys reading a 100-page report that includes every metric on this earth, where most of them do not make any sense in context to the subject you were supposed to present.

Therefore, we are here to guide you about the analysis of a comprehensive SEO report. Now, first of all, an SEO report must contain these three metrics at least:

• The progress
• Actions that have been taken and their impacts
• Suggestions to boost their growth further

Typically, it is all about reporting on the metrics that truly matter and communicating the progress effectively, explaining things that have or have not successfully contributed towards the success, and activities implemented. A good SEO report will help you develop a better and healthier relationship with your clients or boss.

Why Should You Produce an SEO Report Regularly?

Being involved with SEO, you must be familiar with the fact of how vastly businesses are depending on it nowadays. Maintaining a reputed online presence is a necessity for every online business, and it majorly depends on how effective their SEO is. Moreover, companies have started expanding their budgets and investing more in SEO to make sure they remain a step ahead of their competitors.

Since there is a lot at stake, businesses would obviously want to see higher ROI. This is where SEO reports come into play. Providing regular SEO reports will help the stakeholders to remain updated with the progress.

Additionally, an SEO report can make your job a lot easier too. It will help you identify:

• The positive and negative trends immediately
• Areas that need more of your attention
• Gain valuable insights to help you bring required improvements

Therefore, choosing the right metrics to report on makes it easier for both you and the stakeholders as well.

Selecting the Right SEO Reporting Metrics

Concluding from the above points, you need to be careful while selecting your SEO reporting metrics to make sure that you choose exactly the ones that matter. Also, these metrics differ for every business. The metrics you are, including in your report, should clearly demonstrate success, progress, and actions.

Report on too little metrics, the information wouldn’t be enough to get a clear picture. Report on too much, anyone reading it will more probably lose interest.

The secret ingredient to creating a successful SEO report is to include metrics that mean the most to the business and their ongoing project. The SEO reporting requirements of a local company for their local SEO strategy won’t be anywhere near the SEO reporting requirements of an online business for their eCommerce SEO strategy.

Tools You Can Use to Create Your SEO Report

Undoubtedly, there are plenty of tools in the market that can help you build a useful SEO report and trust us, using spreadsheets and word documents are not enough to make a high-quality report.

Here are a few tools that you can utilize to develop better SEO reports:

• Google Data Studio
• Google Analytics
• Google Search Console

Let us dive into details and understand how these tools can come handy to pull off the right metrics and create a perfect SEO report.

Reporting On Technical SEO

Technical SEO refers to aspects such as enhancing website speed, mending broken links, solving 404 errors, etc. This part of SEO deals with ensuring the proper indexing and crawling of your website. From a reporting point of view, you should report on the technical health of your website. From a technical perspective, you need to highlight the technical issues on your website that need to be resolved to either get added in your workflow or flagged as a priority. You can use these tools to get deep insights into your website’s technical health and performance.

Reporting On Keywords and Rankings

Often the SEO community finds themselves between the confusion of whether or not they should include keyword rankings in their SEO report. However, at the end of the day, higher ranking means more traffic and conversions, but it is not as simple as that. If you are ranking for the wrong keywords, those rankings won’t be able to generate more conversions. Therefore reporting on keywords will help you to identify the keywords that are ranking better than others. Including trends in your reports will help you analyze your progress better. You can use these tools to gain insights on keyword trends and ranking positions.

Reporting On Content Marketing

More and more businesses are investing in content marketing to engage with their audience, and therefore they want to see their ROI. When making an SEO report on content marketing, make sure that your report provides answers to these questions:

• Your most viewed pages
• Pages receiving the most number of visitors from SEO
• Are there still any content gaps that need to be filled?

You can use Google Analytics to get insights on website behavior and landing pages.

Reporting On Link Building

Links are another important factor affecting your website’s rankings. Therefore, including them in your SEO report is essential too. You need to make sure that your report demonstrates:

• Excellent quality and links you have been working on
• Link profile overall health
• New and lost links
• Link profile growth

Reporting On Local SEO

As a local business owner, you must be aware of Google My Business, which is a vital platform for businesses that have a physical presence or serve their customers at their own addresses. While preparing a report on local SEO, you must add this to it. You can include these metrics in your report:

• Impressions
• Views
• Post Views
• Total actions
• Reviews
• Average review rating

These are key metrics that matter a lot to the local businesses, demonstrate your progress, and give them insights.

Reporting On Conversions

Conversions are the heart and soul of every business. Therefore, you must include them in your SEO report because the whole motive of an SEO campaign is to drive more traffic and generate conversions at the end of the day. You can use Google Analytics to gain insights on the conversions of your site.

So, this was all about the anatomy of the SEO report. As we have mentioned earlier, these metrics are different for every business. Therefore, keep in mind all the key metrics that mean the most to your client or boss, and you will be all set to create a successful SEO report. Moreover, with the help of the SEO reporting tools mentioned above, you will be able to acquire some valuable and reliable information.

Let us know your views on SEO reports by dropping them in the comments below.