When you provide detailed SEO reporting, it can help you see if you’re achieving your SEO goals. Yet, working on your SEO strategy is where you want to spend the most time.
However, you may soon discover that creating SEO reports takes up the bulk of your time. Still, SEO reports are a necessary part of your SEO campaign. Every decision-maker needs them to determine if their SEO strategy is effective.
Here’s what you need to know about the benefits of SEO reports and creating them with greater ease.
What Is an SEO Report?
An SEO report provides a detailed summary of the essential SEO metrics regarding the performance of an entire website. In most instances, this will include backlinks, keyword ratings, conversions, and organic traffic.
The SEO report can be used to keep track of what has been implemented and check its progress. The report needs to be clear while showing progress and how the SEO strategies you’ve employed are working.
Essentially, you need to find the simplest way to put all that data together for the decision-makers so they can make any necessary adjustments based on that data. Accuracy is important, but so is speed because you don’t want to spend all your time creating SEO reports.
Successful SEO reporting is a valuable tool for any business. It measures the efficiency of their SEO strategy and helps discover positive and negative trends. You’ll be able to key into the areas that need optimization, all while understanding what people are searching for.
Additionally, you’ll see which SEO metrics need more attention and whether the ROI is worth it.
How Do I Report SEO Performance?
When creating an SEO report, you should focus on the key metrics. This will depend on what the overall SEO goal is and what is most important to the business.
Adding too many SEO metrics gets confusing, even for those well-versed in understanding this information. With that in mind, these key metrics are often of the most importance.
Organic Search Traffic
Organic search is among the most revealing of all the data in your SEO report. This shows which pages are getting the most organic traffic and whether or not there is any need for improvement so the site can get more organic visitors.
Organic traffic should be compared to the results of the previous month. It should also be noted if the change in organic performance was a result of your SEO strategy. However, each website will always rank more highly for its own category in an organic search.
Keyword Rankings
Keyword rankings show how many keywords the website ranks for and tell the keywords driving traffic to the site. They can also help you see organic keywords.
When creating reports, especially a local SEO report, it helps to prioritize the keywords that are most important. It will benefit you in the future as it helps you to monitor your SEO efforts. You may see your SEO rankings improve or discover something that is negatively affected by Google’s algorithm changes.
Comparing rankings to historical data shows what has changed over time and provides a better perspective on marketing reports.
Organic Conversion Rate
Organic conversions are integral information when you create SEO reports. Any good SEO report needs to include them because they go beyond website traffic. A website could have a lot of traffic but without enough organic conversions, that doesn’t matter.
Sales are certainly an important factor, but organic conversion rate may also mean the download of a demo or filling out a form for more information.
Some SEO reports break down conversion data further to include new visitor conversion rate, conversion rates for returning visitors, cost per conversion, and more. Traffic that doesn’t result in conversions means that your SEO strategy has to improve. You can do this with Google Analytics, conversion tracking, or software that puts it all together for you.
However you choose to capture this data, revealing how visitors are engaging with the site is essential. They may purchase something (a hard conversion) or sign up by email (a soft conversion). You will also see how each page drives conversions and where to focus your efforts.
Backlinks
Backlinks are among the main ranking items in Google Analytics. This means that your link-building strategy needs to be top-notch. You will need to include how many new links were added to the site. You should also mention the domain authority (DA) of any site that is linked to yours.
However, there is a huge difference in the quality of links compared to the quantity of links. Make sure that the links you choose are of high authority. When you create your report for on-page optimization, it should reveal the organic presence of the business in other places online.
Achieving this can be done through different types of URLs. A source URL builds authority and relevance, while a target URL is ideal for improving the rank of landing pages. You can also use a target URL to help with your SERP rank. Anchor text is used to embed the source URL, perhaps the brand name or something else that may be relevant.
Domain Authority
Domain authority can be used to show how the website’s quality has improved via search engine optimization efforts when comparing it to previous data.
The best part is that you can track the DA of your competition and put it into the same report. The DA score is a number out of 100, which indicates how your website ranks on search engines. It takes the technical health of your website into consideration as well as the optimization and inbound link profile.
While it is great to see your DA get higher, you have to work harder to achieve a higher ranking. When that happens, you can make your website rank more highly for popular keywords or influence others in your industry to create a guest post to get a valuable backlink of their own.
Top Landing Pages
Where are the visitors going when they come to your website? While your organic traffic is critical, it’s just as important to know which landing pages they’re visiting. SEO reporting needs to include this metric because it shows what you’re doing right and where you may need to improve.
The landing pages that see the most success usually have something that makes them perform so well. When you find out why, you can use that information to improve any landing pages that aren’t bringing in enough visitors.
With Google Search Console and Google Analytics, you can filter that data to reveal your organic results. That takes the traffic driven from referrals or advertisements out of the equation to give you a clear view of your most visited landing pages and where the visitors are going.
Analysis and Recommendations
Naturally, paring down the data in SEO reporting is crucial for cutting out the clutter and getting right to the point. With SEO reporting, you should provide an analysis and an actionable plan along with the data.
Remember, the data helps, but in the end, it’s just numbers. An SEO dashboard can be a beneficial tool that tells the full story of what those numbers mean. With these tools, you can discuss the results and target what is working along with what isn’t while recommending changes for the latter.
Let the data serve as your basis for making conclusions and devising an action plan going forward. Google Sheets, Google Analytics, and intuitive software that pulls it all together are just one part of the equation in SEO reporting.
How Page Speed Plays a Role
There is one more element for the success of any website. Everyone has experienced the situation when they click on a website and the page takes forever to load. Optimizing page load times is something every business should include in their site audit.
Page speed will impact the user experience and hence, impacts search queries too. You’ll want to look at the page load times for both desktop and mobile devices. Once you improve loading speeds, you could see a growth in search traffic. Fast load speeds can help you retain and convert visitors, so you should check on this vital aspect of a website audit.
How Do I Create an SEO Report?
Once armed with the necessary information, you’re likely wondering how you create an SEO report, how you report SEO to Google Analytics, and how you write an SEO audit report. It sounds like a lot of reporting to do, and compiling this data can be time-consuming.
Plus, you’ll be more prone to human errors if you simply try to do it yourself. Using a tool that does the work for you is the foolproof way to get it all done right the first time. It also helps represent your data in a visually appealing and more meaningful way.
Using the right resources will completely transform the data into a story that means something to business owners. The data becomes simplified and more actionable, making it clear what action needs to be taken next.
Charts in your dashboard and a clean background give everything a crisp look that makes it easy to see everything at a glance. Your clients need to understand this report and how it relates to SEO traffic and other metrics. You could have all the relevant data, but without contextualizing it in a way they will understand, it won’t have any meaning.
When compiling the data into a report, you need to ensure it’s easy to digest for anyone. Finding the right SEO tool that helps you quickly generate these reports with precision and accuracy will be an asset. It will allow you to focus on the other tasks that will propel a business to greatness.
Why Use SEO Tools?
When you need to deliver SEO reports once a month (or with greater frequency) it can take up a lot of your time when all you really need to do is work smarter.
Take advantage of the best tools out there that can help you make SEO reports in a flash. Look for one that automatically pulls the data from Google Analytics and Google Search console. Additionally, you want something that has an easy-to-use interface that won’t confuse your clients.
The tools you choose should provide an executive summary of the relevant data and provide actionable insights that allow business owners to improve their campaigns. Additionally, these tools should be able to provide reports on a monthly basis to monitor progress.
Reports for SEO affect future performance because they highlight everything you need to know about your SEO campaign. You may find broken links or that your organic visibility is rather cloudy.
Make no mistake that reports are crucial for success as an SEO professional. But even if you’re the only one running your business, you have to see what’s working and what isn’t and know where to focus to improve results.
The Best Way to Track and Manage SEO
In one word, it’s all about simplicity. Choosing software that creates dashboards and reports that pull data while making sense to everybody is a smart move. You’ll have all the information you need in just a few minutes, taking the guesswork out of SEO work.
You can see the keywords that are driving your traffic while discovering ways to turn an organic search into a conversion. You can combine SEO tracking and analytics to generate your reports without spending hours of your time. This means you get to focus on other aspects of your business.
There are many options out there that can help, including some that are free. However, you may find them difficult to use or struggle to understand the data they provide. That’s why TrackRight is one of the best options because it simplifies every aspect of an SEO report.
Even if you have no experience with SEO data, it takes out the guesswork so that anyone can use it. Before you buy it, you can sign up for a free trial. This allows you to experience all the benefits of having easily and efficiently created SEO reports without any risk. More likely than not, you’ll find that this is a valuable tool you’ll want to rely on to help you achieve success with your SEO campaign.