SEO Reports: Your Road Map to Smarter Marketing and Business Decisions

Topics Covered

·         An Introduction to SEO reporting

·        Why are regular and timely SEO reports important?

·        Top SEO reporting tools (Free and Paid)

·        How to create an impactful SEO report?

·        How to choose the best reporting Tools?

·         Wrap Up

An introduction to SEO reporting

Creating impactful and focused SEO reports for clients and stakeholders involves the utilization of the right people, processes, and tools.

In this article, we will help you understand the tips and techniques to create an impactful SEO report. We’ll also introduce ESL Rank PRO, a simple and affordable tool to create SEO reports.

Let’s begin!

SEO reports help track and analyze data related to various key performance indicators (KPIs) and metrics associated with your search engine optimization (SEO) efforts. It provides insights into your SEO strategy and SEO campaigns. It helps you better understand how well your SEO strategy is working and empowers you to make data-driven decisions to inflate your rankings, website traffic, and conversions.

A report can be in different formats, but typically it provides an overview of the work completed, key metrics, and justification for why the work was carried out.There are many SEO dimensions and metrics that can be evaluated and presented in an SEO report.

A digital marketing agency sends an SEO report to its client to communicate the progress of the SEO of their website, so they will be able to know how your search engine optimization efforts are performing, primarily with respect to:

Website traffic: the number of people visiting your site or a blog

Rankings: how well your website is ranking on the SERPs

Leads and conversions: how effective is your website at bringing in leads for your business?

Competitive analysis: what works for your competitors, and how can you use insights from competition analysis?

Backlinks: how often do other websites link to your site?

In short, an SEO report provides a summary of the key metrics so the key decision makers (including SEO experts, business owners, and stakeholder groups) can understand what is working and highlight further opportunities for growth.

It helps to track website performance and identify areas that need improvement. Effective SEO reporting can be your road map to smarter marketing and business decisions.

Why are regular and timely SEO reports important?

It takes time, dedication, and patience to reap the benefits of your SEO. However, you need timely SEO reports to keep track of the results of your SEO efforts, identify actions needed for improvement, and share the results with the clients in a concise and easy-to-understand format.

There is no way to evaluate your SEO efforts and move them in the right direction without defining, monitoring, and analyzing the SEO KPIs.

An SEO report basically serves two purposes.

1. Monitoring and analysis of your SEO efforts

2. Decision-making based on analysis of the KPIs in the report

Here are some points that will help you better understand why regular and timely SEO reports are essential for stakeholders.

Evaluate the performance

SEO reports help you evaluate the performance of your SEO efforts. They can make or break an SEO strategy. An SEO report provides you with insight into the search engine performance of a website.

It allows you to view and analyze essential data and metrics related to the SEO data, so you will be able to know which SEO techniques drive results and which don’t.

Know the ROI of SEO

The ROI of SEO is significant for any business owner to understand the impact of SEO efforts. ROI is basically a relationship between how much is spent on SEO and the results you get.

It helps to tie your SEO efforts to business goals.SEO reports play a crucial role in evaluating performance and showcasing business success to clients and stakeholders.Most businesses create a variety of reports to gauge performance and spot opportunities for growth.

Get keyword insight

SEO reports and insights help you to know and understand the organic performance of a website through keyword rankings, top-performing pages, organic traffic drops, etc.

As the report will reveal which keywords are driving traffic and conversions, it will help you refine your SEO strategy.

Enhancing client communication and credibility

An SEO report is the communication channel between you and the client or stakeholder. It helps you show value to the client in what you are doing and why it is worth doing it.

SEO reporting helps agencies convey progress in an easy-to-understand, concise, and transparent manner, which naturally fosters credibility and nurtures client relationships.

Keep in mind that even if you deliver great results, your efforts may go unnoticed if they are not properly communicated to the client.

Data-driven decision-making

SEO reports provide a clear snapshot of a website’s performance to facilitate data-driven decision-making.

For instance, by tracking fluctuations in ranking, you can relate them to Google algorithm updates. Similarly, by identifying high-performing keywords, businesses can formulate an effective content strategy. Thus, with data-backed information at hand, businesses and stakeholders can make informed and effective decisions.

Optimize your website

SEO reports and insights help you optimize the content of your site. By using these reports, you can locate popular keywords and topics, research the content of competitors, and produce informative and engaging content that responds to user searches.

A report helps you regularly check your performance and make necessary improvements to raise your search engine rankings.

Get alerts about the problems

Monitoring your SEO report and your analytics report regularly will help you know the success of your digital marketing strategy as well as alert you to problems. You cannot neglect pieces on your website, especially those that have secured your top rankings.

If your rankings appear to be dropping in SEO reports, you should inspect your page and its competition. You need to analyze who replaced you in the rankings and what optimization strategies they used.

Evaluating SEO strategy effectiveness and client retention

An SEO report helps keep your client informed at all stages. Especially when you work for (or own) a digital marketing agency, it is essential to provide a concise report in the proper format.

An agency is usually involved in handling multiple clients, so it is important to communicate results clearly and in a timely manner through the automated report creation process.

Top 10 SEO Reporting Tools 2023 (Free and Paid)

SEO reporting tools make it easy for you to understand how the SEO journey of your website is going.

From tracking your keyword rankings to improving your backlink profile and comparing the performance of your website with that of competitors, SEO reporting tools can be a road map for your website’s SEO journey.

Let’s discuss some of the best SEO reporting tools that you can rely on, depending on your case-specific SEO reporting goals.

Google Search Console

Google Search Console is a free SEO reporting tool that enables users to track a website’s performance for Google searches.

It provides a variety of reports that can be included in your SEO reporting, such as performance reports, query reports, page reports, coverage reports, mobile usability reports, rich results reports, etc.

These reports can help users identify areas where the site needs improvement to enhance users search intent and improve its SEO performance.It has an extensive data archive to aid your technical SEO analysis.

Pricing

Free

Google Analytics

Google provides a wide array of SEO reporting tools and features, such as Google Analytics. It has a range of features such as real-time activity monitoring, audience reporting, acquisition, channel, referral, site speed, behavior, and other customized reporting features. You can create custom reports to focus on specific metrics related to a business. If used properly, it can provide gold nuggets of valuable data for effective strategy and decision-making.

Pricing

Free

Google Looker Studio

The Google Looker Studio has a great interface for SEO reporting that can build interactive reports and dashboards based on your website’s performance and SEO data.

If your business is dependent on data metrics from more than one source, Google’s Data Studio can be a better fit, as it can pull information from multiple sources in one place and deliver quicker reports.

Price

Free

Semrush

Semrush is a comprehensive SEO reporting tool that provides a variety of insights and reports on SEO, keyword research, campaign management, SMM, competitive research, and content marketing metrics.

It enables users to add data from Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and other sources to their SEO reports.It offers a range of pre-built templates that can be used for creating customized reports that can be exported in various formats, such as PDF, Excel, and PowerPoint.

Price

Pro: $119.95/month

Guru: $229.95/month

Business: $449.95/month

 Moz

Moz is a comprehensive reporting software that helps you monitor the rank, traffic, and visibility of a website. It provides two options: Moz Local and Moz Pro.

Moz Local helps local businesses get listed on SERPS, and Moz Pro is a comprehensive reporting tool. It has a reliable keyword tracker program that works well for search engine optimization and reporting.It provides complex analytical tools to learn about SEO.

Price

Standard: $99/month

Medium: $179/month

Large: $299/month

Premium: $599/month

Ahrefs

Ahrefs is a comprehensive SEO reporting tool that provides powerful insights to improve and enhance your site’s performance.

It provides a tool set to aid your SEO reporting, such as keyword tracking, backlink analysis, competitor analysis, auditing, and reporting. However, only a tiny subset of its features are available as a free tool. It provides a range of pre-built and customizable reports that you can use to track the progress of your SEO campaign.

Price

Lite: Starts at $99/month

Standard: Starts at $ 199 per month

Advanced: Starts at $399/month

Enterprise: Starts at $999/month

ESL Ranks Pro

ESL Ranks Pro is a free-to-use SEO rank tracking tool that provides a variety of features to empower your SEO reporting. It has many features to track your SEO performance, such as keyword research, site audits, rank tracking, backlink analysis, SERP analysis, and customizable reports.

Users can easily export the ranking reports and other reports in CSV and PDF formats. This makes it easy to share reports with clients, colleagues, or others, or one can also easily import them into other software.

Price

Free

Siteliner

Siteliner is one of the most popular SEO reporting software tools that helps to track performance as well as discover significant issues that could affect the search engine rankings of a website.

It analyzes site structure, content, and links to identify duplicate content, broken lines, and other issues affecting the search engine rankings of a website. It is free to use Siteliner for 500 tracked keywords per month, with the option of upgrading your account afterwards.

Price

Free

Growth Bar

Growth Bar is an SEO tool that provides all the resources needed to execute the best content strategies, such as keywords, competitors, backlinks, and other metrics.

It delivers insights in a simple way through intuitive and interactive dashboards and saves you hours of manual planning and outlining your content strategy. It also enable users to export data to CSV.The 5-star-rated GrowthBar Google Chrome Extension is available for free to use with your account.

Price

Standard Plan: $29/month

Pro plan: $79/month

Agency plan: $129/month

KWFinder

KWFinder is an SEO reporting tool by Mangools that aids in the discovery of long-tail keywords with little competition. With more than 40 language possibilities, KWFinder can rapidly collect search volumes for close variant keywords and can focus research at local levels.

It leads searches towards useful keywords for ranking and avoids SEO challenges.It has features like backlink analysis, rank tracking, keyword research, SERP analysis, and SEO analytics and insights.

Basic plan: $29/month,

Premium plan:$39 per month.

Agency plan $79 per month.

How to create an impactful SEO report?

Your SEO report is a way to show your clients whether you are getting a taste of success or turning the corner. SEO reporting is much more than just pulling the numbers from different tools.

One needs to use the right visualization, the right data, and the right reporting format to turn the data into insights.

However, creating an SEO report can be overwhelming, especially when you don’t know how to write one, what data should be considered in it, or which metrics to focus on. Here we have discussed some important elements that must be considered when creating an impactful and focused SEO report.

1. Overview/Executive Summary

This section provides a summary of the content of the report and gives a high-level view of the important metrics of a website.

It is a snapshot of the content in the report, highlighting the key achievements, challenges faced, and a brief on the data provided in the report. It should cover the goals of the SEO campaign, the metrics that will be tracked, and the duration covered in it.

 Focus

• It should be straightforward, summarizing the main points.
• It is important for clients to understand the achievements and actions taken by the digital agency.
• It should include the following: project goals, tasks completed, achievements, and a results overview.

 An overview should be stated in such a way that, after reading it, the client is able to understand the progress of SEO campaigns, project focus, actions taken, and results. For example, by reading an overview of an SEO report, a client should be able to understand the number of keywords for which their website is ranking in the top 10 positions or whether there has been a 20% increase in organic traffic and 40 new leads.

Whether your client is a complete novice about SEO or has knowledge of the SEO industry, an overview should be written in a manner that helps them navigate the information easily.

2.  Traffic Analysis

Your SEO report should break down website traffic so that it is easy to determine which traffic sources are bringing in the most visits and get a better idea of how well your website is performing. Metrics like total visitors, page views, average session length, and bounce rate should be highlighted in the traffic analysis section.

Focus

• Traffic analysis should show how many visitors came to your website from organic search results.
• You can also show the traffic sources, bounce rate, and average time on page.
• Make sure to draw attention to any changes and explain how your efforts helped bring about the change.

The marketing and business teams can use it to plan their future strategies in a way that ensures the growth of the channels that are now operating well and identifies what can be done to enhance performance. If you notice any drop in traffic, you should address such changes with your client or upper management and suggest reasons for such changes and their impact on website performance as a whole.

3.   KPIs

Every SEO report you create should be customized to meet the individual client’s goals. KPIs demonstrate how successfully you are running the campaign.

Focus

The key performance indicators (KPIs) included in an SEO report depend on the specific goals of the SEO campaign and the clients’ needs. ESL Rank Pro is an easy-to-use tool for rank tracking and SEO analysis to facilitate your SEO report.

Some of the most important and common KPIs include:

• Organic traffic.
• Top keywords
• SERP features
• Conversion rate
• On-page SEO
• Off-page SEO
• Technical SEO

By measuring the KPIs, you will be able to know which strategies are working and which are not, and where you need to put more effort.

For instance, if your client’s goal is to increase conversion rate, you should emphasize KPIs like click-through rate, keyword rankings, bounce rate, and number of leads. Also, avoid vanity metrics that do not correspond to the client’s goal. For instance, if the client’s goal is conversion rate, you may omit traffic analysis.

ESL Ranks Pro can make it easy for you to measure KPIs and create a comprehensive SEO report. It is an easy-to-use and free tool for technical SEO. You can get key performance indicators through its functions like rank tracking, site audit, keyword research, and site overview. It allows you to create custom reports to track your SEO progress and share your findings with clients or colleagues.

ESL Ranks Pro is a free SEO reporting tool that offers a variety of SEO reporting features that can be helpful for both beginners and experienced SEO professionals.

Here are some additional tips to select the appropriate KPIs for your SEO report:

Select the KPIs relevant to your goals. It is important to determine what you are trying to achieve with your SEO campaigns and consider the KPIs that will help you measure your progress with regard to those goals.

• Choose measurable KPIs so you can track the progress over a period of time.
• Choose actionable KPIs so that you can make changes to your SEO strategy if necessary to improve your results.
• Choose a significant KPI from a limited number, so you can focus on important metrics only.

Visual Representations

Visual representations make the content more appealing and easy to understand. It is recommended to make your data more engaging and digestible by including graphs, charts, and other visual aids in your SEO report. It enables users to quickly grasp the content and identify the most important data and insights in it.

Some of the most common visual references used in SEO reports are

Bar charts: Bar charts can be a great way to compare different metrics over time. For instance, you can compare top pages and find which the best are performing in organic search for a website.

Pie charts: Pie charts can help you show the relative proportions of different metrics. You can use tools like Excel or Google sheet to create a pie chart. Make sure to integrate the pie chart into relevant section of the report to support your findings and recommendations.

Line graphs: Line graphs can be used to show trends over time. You can use them to display metrics like website traffic, keywords rankings, backlinks etc. It is used for showing patterns and fluctuations.

Heatmaps: Heatmaps are popularly used for showing traffic distribution on a website. It is used for showing data density and user behavior. Color gradients can be used to represent user engagement.

WordCluds: These are used to visualize the most common words on a website.

Recommendations

A brief summary of actionable next steps can be stated as recommendations in the report. In this way, you will be able to tell the clients that you will be focusing on the potential for improvement rather than the current state of things.

It tells the clients what is needed to improve the SEO’s performance. For instance, if the website is losing backlinks quickly, look for possibilities to establish links. In addition to outlining future tactics, an opportunity section in your SEO report also clarifies to your client how you’ll affect revenue. Additionally, a strong SEO strategy that is supported by credible data can help you establish your expertise.

Appendix (if required)

If you want to add any supplementary information to support the main content of the report, it should be included in the appendix. You may include additional technical details, such as page load speed and indexation status. You may provide raw data or a detailed explanation that would be helpful for your audience to understand the SEO’s performance.

How to Choose the Best Reporting Tools?

SEO reporting is an essential part of digital marketing. It shows the relationship between strategies and results for guiding future actions.

It should be created in a way that helps youknow your website’s SEO health, the performance and impact of SEO activities, and key areas to gain valuable insight for future SEO actions and strategies.

SEO reporting tools save time and add value to your reporting. However, there are a plethora of SEO reporting tools, each promising value to the customer. While your specific needs may differ, there are certain factors to keep in mind when selecting the right SEO reporting tools.

Features

An SEO reporting tool will be useless for you if it doesn’t have the features you need to create SEO reports as per your goals. It is important to determine your goals before choosing the SEO reporting tools with the desired features.

Accuracy

Thedata provided by an SEO reporting tool should be accurate, as your future decisions are dependent on it. There are many ways to choose a more reliable and accurate tool.

One should check the reviews and ratings of the tool. You can also compare it with either tool. Try the tool for free, as many SEO reporting tools offer free trials. It is a great way to test an SEO reporting tool.

Customization

Every business has unique SEO reporting goals and requirements. It is important that your chosen SEO reporting tool offers customization options so you can tailor reports to specific requirements.

It should be able to be customized as per the metrics, timeframes, and format required to meet your specific goals.

Scalability

As your business grows and expands, you will need tools that can track and analyze the SEO performance of a website.

A scalable tool will be able to accommodate more data, clients, or projects without compromising performance, and it will be able to provide you with better insights into your website’s performance.

Integration capabilities

A tool with integration capabilities helps you get a more comprehensive view of your SEO performance, including data on website traffic, keyword rankings, and other important metrics.

It is good to opt for tools that seamlessly integrate with other platforms, as it reduces manual work and ensures a smooth flow of data throughout the process.

Cost-effectiveness

It may be tempting to opt for an advanced tool, but it is important to weigh the benefits of a tool against its cost. It is important to ensure that your chosen tool offers value for money.

Support and training

It is essential to get support and training, especially when you are using complex tools. It helps users get started as well as make it easy for them to get help if they are stuck. It can be provided through documentation, tutorials, and live chat support.

Update

It is important to choose an SEO reporting tool that is regularly updated. Some tools are updated on a monthly basis, while others are updated weekly or even on a daily basis. The more updated versions are available, the more reliable and accurate the data provided by them will be. It is also essential to opt for a tool that is compatible with the latest search engine algorithms, so you can get accurate data on your website’s SEO performance.

Additional features

It is good to consider your budget and look for additional features like client integration, white label reporting, automation, quality resources, and unrestricted export access, as they can help simplify and improve the SEO reporting process.

Wrapping up

SEO reporting tools are valuable tools for any website owner or SEO professional. They can help create in-depth SEO reports for clients and improve your website’s search engine ranking and visibility, which can lead to more traffic and leads.

An impactful SEO report encourages transparency and collaboration among all stakeholders.If you are looking for assistance in your SEO reporting, use ESL Ranks Pro to gain valuable insights and outrank your competitors. Try it now and escalate your website’s performance.