Whether you are an in-house marketer or an agency team member, reporting is one of the essential aspects of marketing. It gives you proof of results and provides you with data that you can use to make better-informed decisions on your (or your client’s) marketing strategy. It helps you understand the market trends, what your customers are looking for, and how to keep up with your competitors. For an SEO report, you should consider what is crucial for your team or client, but several elements are almost always important. Here are four elements that you should include in your SEO report.
Website Audit
First, you should take a look at your website performance. Have your eyes peeled for errors and warnings that can impact your search ranking negatively. This is a screenshot of SEMrush, one of the SEO analysis tools we use at Flawless Inbound. Some of the red-flag issues to look for include 500 server errors, 404 not found, duplicated content, and broken links. With SEMrush, you can export the details as a pdf file. This part of the report is vital because it shows you the work you are putting into fixing various issues.
Traffic Analysis
Another thing you want to know about your website performance is traffic. It is referring to the incoming and outgoing data from visitors. In other words, what matters is the source that visitors come from and their behaviour. Traffic sources can be broken into these categories:
- direct source: people directly typing the URL
- organic search: visitors using search engines
- social media: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc.
- email marketing: automated emails
- referrals: from directories
For each of these categories, look closely at new contacts created by each type as well as bounce rate and session length.
It is also good to include a graph to visualize traffic sources over a period of time. This is an example of a session graph from HubSpot. Understanding these values can better prepare you for future campaigns and website optimization. In terms of visitor behaviour, consider including device breakdown, country of visitor, and page ranking breakdown based on the number of visits. Google Analytics is an excellent tool for that.
Keyword Ranking
The next part that we are going to talk about is keyword ranking. It plays an important role in your pages display order on search engines.
This is an example of the overview of position tracking in SEMrush. It is nice to have a visual reference of how your organic keyword strategy is going.
More importantly, it would help if you had something like this. There are many metrics in this part, but you should focus on difference overtime, meaning keywords that have gone up in ranking and keywords that have gone down. It will help you make decisions on content optimization and what words to focus on. Whatever tools you work with, you should try to find out how to filter for keywords in the 11-20 position as that can make a big difference between the 2nd page, where far fewer people look at than the first page. Another metric to look at is location. For instance, if a local business is trying to expand its online presence, you should track the larger area and the local one.
Backlink Analysis
Another area that you should include is backlinking. Backlinks are links to your site from another website. The better those sites are, the more valuable the backlinks are and the higher the authority score you will get. In other words, your site will become more relevant, knowledgeable, and trusted.
In SEMrush, you can do a backlink analysis to find all the sites that have links to your site. To filter information, you should focus on new links gained and new links lost. For links lost, determine why they were lost and if it is worth pursuing them again.
Then show the new link that you have built with their authority score. You can also show the overview as well.
One thing to keep in mind is that sometimes a link will have a low authority score for local SEO but still very important in the community, so you should clear that with the client. However, toxicity is a different thing. A link is considered toxic when it’s unnatural and harms the search rankings of the website. These links should be disavowed.
In conclusion, an SEO report is a summary of your SEO effort. Every report should reflect on the business, but there are four basic elements to keep in mind. They are site audit, traffic analysis, keyword ranking, and backlinks. Need help? Contact us today to learn how we can boost your SEO!