SEO Reporting Tips: 10 Things You Should Include in an SEO Report

Modern marketing strategies are unimaginable without search engine optimization. But thankfully, you can find dozens of SEO techniques and hundreds of guides on how to implement them.

If you want your SEO efforts to be based on real-world data instead of a guide that will only maybe work for your business, you must implement SEO reporting.

Here, you will learn why that is crucial for every company and pick up the basics of best SEO reporting.

Introduction to SEO Reporting – What Is It and Why It’s Important?

SEO reporting compiles the most important SEO performance data in a single report, often via a dashboard.

Like any other report, be it a sales or marketing one, the reason an SEO report is crucial is clear communication.

SEO reporting is a communication tool that streamlines SEO data and presents it in an easily understandable form.

An internal SEO report presents key aspects of how the SEO strategy is performing. This allows the company to judge its effectiveness without having to focus on specific underperforming elements.

If your business is a marketing agency, SEO reporting for clients provides a clear picture of your work’s progress.

The Purpose of SEO Reports – Understanding the Goals and Objectives

As with any report, SEO reporting shows relevant data in the most condensed form possible, providing a balance of information and a number of details to make your SEO report template informative and easy to understand.

The main goal of SEO reporting is to help the stakeholders view and understand how your SEO strategy performs. This should be the guiding principle when compiling a report.

Since organizations have different sets of stakeholders, keep the intended audience in mind when creating it. For instance, a report for a marketing agency client may be less informative and more focused on the historical growth of several KPIs than an internal report for the head of marketing.

Figure out what specific KPIs are relevant for your stakeholders before drafting a report. It’s also great to have all the SEO data stored in a data warehouse in case you decide to add more information to it, with historical data at hand.

Things to Include in SEO Report

SEO reporting informs stakeholders about the state of SEO. Ideally, you do it in an easy-to-understand, informative, and engaging way.

The best practice is not to create walls of text in a Word doc. Instead, present them in the form of a dashboard, a table, an infographic, or a short PDF with the most important statistics.

Using a dashboard is the most useful format, as it is informative and interactive. This lets multiple stakeholders view the exact data they need to form an opinion. According to the 2021 Capital Market Survey, the number of people who view reports as PDF files declines while the number of people who prefer to view them online grows.

Manually exporting data from your Google Search Console, GA4, and the SEO tool of choice takes too much time. It’s best to use an automated SEO report generator to take the unnecessary load off your team. This SEO reporting tool made by SE Ranking can generate SEO reports either from a standard SEO report template or from a custom one once you configure it.

You can generate regular SEO reports automatically, so all your team has to do is download them in the preferred format or set up scheduled emails to make them available to stakeholders.

Below is a list of the most significant aspects to include in your SEO results report. Feel free to use them all or combine them as needed for your specific report.

1. Report Overview

The perfect SEO report is accessible to all stakeholders who receive it, even ones who don’t have the time to go into details. This makes a brief report overview necessary.

This section should provide a summary of the most important aspects of the report:

• Main goals of the SEO campaign
• Reporting period
• Progress made in that period

You might also include the key takeaways or a brief assessment of the performance in this section. This can be done by visualizing whether the most important goals have been met in the reporting period.

If you create SEO reports in the form of a dashboard, you can include links to a detailed breakdown of specific metrics in the report overview.

2. Website Overview

This section should include general information on how your website fares in terms of SEO. Typically, it includes the following data points:

• Website authority
• Page authority of select important pages
• Number of referring domains
• Organic traffic numbers
• Number of website pages

Here is an example of how it could look in one of the white-label SEO reports:

Ideally, you would provide these metrics either along with historical data or with month-over-month growth. Using visual clues to show growth or decrease like colored arrows also makes these numbers more straightforward.

3. Traffic Insights

The next section you can include in your report is the SEO analysis of traffic insights. SEO as a marketing technique mainly deals with generating organic traffic and converting it, so it would make sense to include more details in this section.

Focus on these key areas in your analysis:

• Traffic change over the reporting period
• Traffic to different pages of the website
• Sources of traffic
• User behavior on the website
• Geographical and demographic details

If you present the SEO report in the form of a dashboard, include a distribution chart with a filter. This renders a more interactive report, giving the stakeholders the option to analyze a curated overview of traffic insights.

Consider including a brief analysis of why the changes are happening. For instance, the website could have received more traffic because it had a lot of new reviews on third-party sites, and referral traffic increased. Or maybe the conversion didn’t grow with the traffic because you targeted the wrong demographic with a blog post. In that case, show how you’re going to improve the strategy in the next reporting period.

4. Keyword Rankings Insights

Next, go deeper into dissecting organic traffic with keyword ranking insights. An SEO objective is to have your website rank as high as possible for the keywords relevant to your business. But SEOs have to optimize keywords in the hundreds, if not thousands. Giving all of that information may overwhelm stakeholders.

Focus on these areas in your SEO report instead.

• Core keyword positions, including brand keywords and main transactional keywords
• Keywords with the most increase or decrease in the reporting period
• Keyword position distribution: how many keywords rank 1st, in the top 10, in the top 20, etc.

If you’re reporting to a client, the last metric might not be obvious to them. Consider comparing it to the industry average or to competitors.

You can present keyword changes as a graph, this will give more insight into historical change of the metric.

A handy way to present the history of core keyword positions is with a table that shows historical changes.

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5. Organic Conversion Rate Insights

In many cases, stakeholders want to look at the bigger picture, which often includes how SEO influences sales. This makes discussing organic traffic conversion rate a very important part of an SEO report.

Tracking SEO conversions isn’t as straightforward as it can be with paid traffic or in-person sales. You have to agree on a conversion tracking system beforehand.

For instance, you could track hard conversions (visitors making a purchase right away) for landing pages and soft conversions (visitors triggering a converting action like subscribing to the newsletter) for informational pages.

The following metrics are great to include in this part of the report.

• Overall conversion rate and its MoM change
• New visitor conversion rate
• Return visitor conversion rate
• Best-performing pages
• Soft conversion rate

As always, provide insights as to why the conversion rate has changed. It gives context to the stakeholders and shows the work you’ve done.

6. Technical SEO Overview

Technical issues with the website can be a major contributor to its SEO success. But showcasing them tells the stakeholders little about the metrics they really want to see—traffic and conversions. So, this section is more about tracking progress in fixing them than communicating crucial information.

You can run a website audit and show these metrics in the technical report.

• Number of indexed pages
• Core Web Vitals metrics
• Number of issues brought up by a website audit tool
• Progress made on fixing the largest issues

7. Backlinks Insights

Building quality backlinks allows websites to receive referral traffic, increase brand awareness, and build website authority. So, most stakeholders will want an overview of link building.

Focus on these key metrics.

• Number of new links added in the reporting period
• Quality of said links
• Number of links published by the outreach team
• Total number of referring domains
• New vs. lost backlinks

Correlating gained links with an increase in organic traffic or a change in keyword positions would make the report more informative.

8. Content Performance Insights

A large part of SEO is producing informational content to increase brand awareness and organic traffic. It may not contribute as much to sales directly, so you’ll have to present other metrics that show its usefulness. Consider adding these data points to the content performance overview of your SEO report.

• Number of content pieces added
• Number of content pieces improved
• Total organic traffic to the blog
• Best-performing blog pages
• Average session duration
• Average number of pages per session
• Average soft conversion rate
• Hard conversion rate
• Number of backlinks earned through content alone
• Topic clusters covered

If you have access to a reliable brand awareness metric or conversion attribution software, include these data points as well.

9. Competitors Insights

Detailed competitor analysis is best left to the SEO team. What the report stakeholders need to see is a comparison of your site to competing ones. You can either provide insights for a list of predetermined competitors or monitor SERP and show a list of organic competitors for the main keywords.

Provide the following data points for every competitor.

• Change in domain authority
• Change in crucial keyword positions
• Overall traffic
• Best-performing keywords
• Best-performing pages

One way to present this data is with a comparison graph that shows how many keywords you compete on with the top SERP competitors.

It’s best to add more personal insight from the team to these raw numbers. Highlight findings about what the competitors do differently and how you can either borrow their strategy or beat it.

10. Key Takeaways & Recommendations

Not all stakeholders will look into each slide of the SEO report. Many will read the executive summary and this section and call it a day.

Use this section to summarize your findings in the reporting period and explain what the SEO team will focus on in the next period and why. Even if some KPIs weren’t met, explore why that’s the case and how you will fix it.

A perfect SEO report would also feature a list of tasks that can be done in the next reporting period. SEO reporting tool creates a list of SEO tasks for you, and you can show the stakeholders how much work has been done by checking the right boxes. They will also know what you’re going to be working on in the next reporting period.

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Another powerful tool to consider for your SEO reporting needs is DashClicks' InstaReports software. This platform is designed to simplify and streamline the creation of comprehensive, visually appealing reports that stakeholders can easily understand. InstaReports takes raw SEO data from various sources and transforms it into insightful, interactive reports with just a few clicks.

One of the standout features of InstaReports is its ease of use. You don't need to be a technical expert to generate detailed reports—its user-friendly interface guides you through the entire process.

The software integrates seamlessly with Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and various other SEO tools, allowing you to pull data effortlessly into your reports. This integration leads to more accurate and timely reporting, freeing up your team to focus on analysis and strategy rather than data collection.

Moreover, InstaReports comes with pre-built templates and offers customization options to match your specific reporting requirements. Whether you need a high-level overview for executives or a deep dive into metrics for your SEO team, InstaReports can accommodate both needs. Adding visual elements such as charts and graphs is also intuitive, making complex data trends easy to digest at a glance.

By leveraging the software, you ensure that your SEO efforts are communicated effectively, helping stakeholders see the value and impact of your strategies. This clarity can drive more informed decision-making and ultimately contribute to the overall success of your marketing initiatives.

Summary

Whether you’re creating a white-label SEO report for a marketing agency client or your company’s team, keep the goal of the SEO report in mind when creating it. The goal is to communicate the progress made in SEO work and how it affects the company’s bottom line.

That communication should be in an accessible, informative form for the report’s intended audience, not the SEO team. So, make sure you know the stakeholders’ expectations. If you’re reporting to stakeholders with different expectations, it’s best to make a single interactive report rather rather than two separate ones.

If possible, discuss its look and feel and what data it should include beforehand while keeping historical data in case you need to alter the report later.