If you want your website to succeed, you need to stay on top of its SEO. But that can be a challenge with so many metrics to track. That’s where creating an SEO report comes in handy.
A comprehensive report on your site’s search engine optimization collects data from various SEO tools into one place so you or your clients can put that info to work. However, if you’ve never done it before, you might not even know where to start.
That’s why we’ve put together this step-by-step guide. Below, you’ll learn how to effectively put together meaningful data to understand and improve your website’s SEO performance so you can stay ahead of your competitors.
What Is an SEO Report and Why Do You Need It?
An SEO report is essentially a thorough analysis of how your website is performing in search engines. It’s like a report card, showing how well it’s doing in terms of visibility, keyword rankings, traffic, and a whole lot more.
But it’s not just a bunch of numbers. These reports break down complex data into understandable trends, helping you pinpoint what’s working and what’s not. It helps you track specific Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) such as organic traffic, bounce rate, and conversation rates, so you can understand if you are achieving your website’s goals. If not, it will also tell you that. This allows you to make any necessary adjustments.
Essential SEO Reporting Tools
Before we begin, let’s review the essential tools you’ll need to create an effective SEO report:
- Google Analytics: Offers an at-a-glance way to see how your website is performing across many search traffic and conversion metrics. Check out our in-depth Google Analytics 4 guide for a deep dive on how to use it. You can also go for other analytics solutions.
- Google Search Console: Provides insights on search performance and keyword analysis, among other things. To make things easier, we also have a detailed article on using Google Search Console for SEO.
- Google PageSpeed Insights: Another tool in the Google suite, this one is designed to track website performance and page speed.
- Ubersuggest: Useful for keyword research and competitive analysis, it helps in identifying keyword rankings and exploring new keyword opportunities.
- Link Explorer (Moz): Finally, this tool is great for evaluating backlink quality and domain authority, which is a must for understanding and improving your website’s link profile.
Note that the tools above are all free. We wanted to show you how to create an SEO report for your site without paying any money. If you go for paid SEO tools, such as SEMrush or Ahrefs, they can often create SEO reports for you at the click of a button. However, they are also more costly. We also have a list of free marketing tools for more ideas.
Alright, now let’s get busy creating our SEO report.
Step 1: Set SEO Report Objectives and KPIs
Before collecting data, start by asking yourself, “What do I want to achieve with my SEO efforts?” Your objectives could range from boosting organic traffic to enhancing user engagement.
Be as specific as possible. For instance, instead of just aiming to increase traffic, set a target for how much you want to increase it by, say 20% in the next quarter.
Next, align your KPIs with these objectives. For example, if your goal is to boost organic traffic, the KPI you might track would be the number of new visitors from organic search. For improving keyword rankings, you would look at the positions of your targeted search terms. You get the picture.
Step 2: Gather Data From Your Selected Tools
You can’t create an SEO report without data. Here’s a brief guide on how to extract key information from each of the abovementioned tools.
1. Google Analytics
For website traffic and user engagement:
- Go to the report you want to export.
- Click on the Share button, usually found in the upper right corner.
- Select Download File and choose your preferred format (PDF, CSV, Excel, or Google Sheets).
2. Google Search Console
For search performance and keyword data:
- Access the reports related to performance, such as search queries or site performance.
- Use the Export option to download this data in various formats like Excel or Google Sheets.
- You can also create and apply filters to refine the data to specific aspects like particular countries or device types.
3. Ubersuggest
To create a concise report using Ubersuggest for competitive insights and keyword trends, follow these steps:
- Enter a competitor’s domain into the Keywords by Traffic and Top Pages by Traffic reports to see which keywords and pages are driving traffic to their site.
- Check the Content Ideas section to identify high-performing content in terms of traffic, backlinks, and social shares.
- Review the Traffic Overview for insights on organic keywords, monthly traffic, domain score, and backlinks.
- Use the Export to CSV and Copy to Clipboard buttons to export the information.
4. Link Explorer (Moz)
For backlink analysis:
- Input the URL of the website you wish to analyze. This could be your own website or that of a competitor.
- View the different generated reports, which includes the total number of backlinks, the number of linking domains, and other relevant metrics like the spam score of the backlinks and filter them as needed.
- Export the data in CSV format via the respective buttons.
Step 3: Evaluate Website and Content Performance
For evaluating your website and content performance, you can use Google Analytics and Ubersuggest. They allow you to understand user interaction, content appeal, and areas for improvement.
Using Google Analytics
You can create multiple types of reports to get a good look at how your content and website as a whole are performing.
For page views and user engagement:
- Navigate to the Reports tab in GA4 and select Engagement > Pages and screens. This report shows detailed metrics for each page and screen (in the case of mobile apps) viewed on your site.
- Analyze metrics like the number of users, views per user, and average engagement time on each page or screen.
- Compare metrics for different time periods to identify trends and changes in page performance over time.
For content performance, key metrics in Google Analytics include Active Users, Average Engagement Time, Engagement Rate, and Unique User Scrolls.
- Active Users provides a clearer view of readers genuinely engaged with your content, as opposed to the broad “total users” metric in Universal Analytics.
- Average Engagement Time, replacing the older “average session duration” gives insights into the time users spend actively engaging with your content.
- Engagement Rate is an improved metric over the often misunderstood “bounce rate” reflecting the number of engaged sessions relative to total sessions.
- Unique User Scrolls help in understanding the depth of engagement of your readers with your content.
Using Ubersuggest
Use Ubersuggest for competitive insights and keyword trends. Identify keywords your competitors are ranking for that you are not, and analyze their content to understand what they might be doing differently or better.
Ubersuggest can also help in identifying new keyword opportunities and content gaps in your strategy, guiding you to create content that addresses unmet user needs.
Step 4: Evaluate Technical SEO Aspects
This step involves analyzing factors like website speed, crawlability, and other technical issues. Tools like Google PageSpeed Insights are helpful for this process.
Using Google PageSpeed Insights
This tool is great as it offers a mix of lab and real-world data to give you a comprehensive view of your site’s performance.
It works by assigning a score from 0 to 100 to your page, with higher scores indicating better performance. This score is based on various metrics like Core Web Vitals:
The tool distinguishes between lab data (simulated performance) and field data (real-world user experience). Lab data helps spot problems like slow-loading resources, while field data gives insights into actual user interactions
Step 5: Conduct a Competitive Analysis
Ubersuggest’s Competitive Analysis tool allows you to enter a competitor’s domain to discover long-tail keywords they are ranking for. This can be fantastic for identifying potential keyword opportunities that you might be missing out on.
Then you can create a Keywords by Traffic report that rounds up all the keywords driving traffic to a site. It’s particularly useful for analyzing smaller sites. Sorting the results by position can give you an insight into the top-ranking keywords for them.
You can use Link Explorer in a similar fashion. Once you input a website URL, the tool generates a report detailing the backlink profile, including total backlinks, linking domains, and spam scores. You can also apply filters for a more targeted analysis, such as domain authority, link type (like follow or nofollow), and anchor text. This helps in identifying the most valuable backlinks and also in spotting potentially harmful links.
Step 6: Analyze Mobile Traffic and User Experience
Analyzing mobile traffic and user experience in Google Analytics focuses on understanding how people behave while on your site, what they want to see, and the actions they take while on mobile devices. You can access and interpret this information as follows:
- Go to the Reports section and check the Reports snapshot for a high-level overview. It includes metrics like the number of new users and insights into your site’s performance across different devices.
- To specifically analyze mobile traffic, look for reports under Life Cycle and then the Engagement or User sections. They provide details about device usage and demographics.
- Then to evaluate user behavior, go to Engagement > Pages and screens. This report provides data on pageviews, engagement time, and user interactions.
- You can also use the Tech report to get an overview of device categories (mobile, desktop, tablet), operating systems, browsers, and screen resolutions used by your visitors.
- GA4 is event-based, meaning all user interactions, including those on mobile, are tracked as events. You can see all automatically collected and custom events under Engagement > Events.
You can then use this collected data to make better decisions about user flow and mobile optimization.
Step 7: Put Together Your SEO Report
When creating a report, the goal is to make the “story” of the data as clear as possible. Here are some tips for putting a good one together:
- Start with the Basics: Every good story needs a title, right? Your SEO report is no different. Kick things off with a clear title and a concise summary. This isn’t just about being formal or anything, it’s just about setting the context right from the get-go.
- Highlight the Journey: Include a section dedicated to the TL;DR. This is where you showcase the wins, the hiccups, and other notable items.
- Provide Your KPIs: Just like any good story has its key moments, your report should have a section for KPIs.
- Present the Data: Here’s where you get into the specifics. Cover the website’s overall performance, keyword analysis, traffic analysis, and backlinking overview.
Using a template is a good idea here. Platforms like Visme and Databox offer customizable templates that can be a real timesaver.
And remember, most people absorb information better visually. Charts, graphs, and other visual elements can transform your data from a dry list of numbers to something that’s engaging and accessible right away.
Step 8: Develop Insights and Make Recommendations
Each data point you’ve gathered tells a part of the story about the website you’re evaluating and your job is to make sense of this narrative.
Here’s how to analyze the data you’ve collected and make recommendations based on it.
- Spot the Trends: Look at your traffic patterns, keyword performance, and backlink quality. Are there upward or downward trends?
- Contextualize the Data: Don’t just look at the numbers in isolation. Consider the broader context. Was there a Google algorithm update? Did competitors change their strategies? Understanding the “why” behind the data is a must.
- Identify Opportunities and Gaps: Use your keyword analysis to spot opportunities. Maybe there are high-potential keywords you’re not ranking for. Or perhaps there are content gaps you can fill.
- Translate Insights into Action: Turn your observations into a concrete action plan. If a particular type of content is performing well, plan more of it. If certain pages have high bounce rates, it’s time to investigate and improve user experience.
- Tailor Recommendations: Finally, your recommendations should align with your business goals. If your goal is to increase conversions, focus on strategies that drive traffic to conversion-optimized pages. And so on.
Step 9: Set a Routine for Regular SEO Reporting
Consistent and regular reporting is a must for a successful SEO strategy. A standard routine should include, at the very least, monthly reports, quarterly deep dives, and annual reviews.
More (or fewer) reports might be necessary as well – especially if there’s a major search algorithm update or something – but this frequency ought to serve you well.
Create SEO Reports with Confidence
We’ve covered a lot about SEO reporting here today, and hopefully you now have a clearer understanding of what you need to do to keep on top of your site’s performance. By following the steps outlined here, you can monitor how your site is doing and make adjustments as necessary. And over time, you should see improved performance, based on informed decisions.
What’s the most useful data point in your SEO reports? How do you use that info to make a plan of action?
