If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it! One of the vital reasons search engine optimization is effective is that you can keep track of your marketing strategy. With people spending more time online, it’s crucial to build brand awareness and engage users on your website so that the visitors are prompted to take the intended action. From website ranking on the SERPs, organic traffic, to revenue generated and much more, you can analyze various SEO metrics and preparing an SEO report is of supreme importance in this regard. SEO reports give key insights into user activities to take the necessary steps to implement in your SEO strategy to optimize for visitors and make them stick around. It helps fill any SEO marketing void to increase impression share, decrease bounce rate, optimize click-through rate and improve conversion rate.
Types of SEO report
- Keyword report – When preparing SEO reports, you need to focus on preparing keyword reports in your SEO strategy. This would help you understand which keywords your website is ranking for. In search engine optimization strategy, you may find multiple businesses ranking for the same keyword, which keywords drive maximum traffic, which pages rank for specific keywords, etc. Preparing this keyword report would help you know what SEO metrics require optimization to improve the website’s ranking on SERPs.
With alteration in marketing trends, you can figure out what points you need to work on so that the ranking of your website is not affected by SERPs. You can find organic keyword metrics with tools such as SEMrush, Google Search Console, Ahrefs, etc. You get to know the which pages rank, keyword search volume and other organic metrics like clicks, impressions, positions, etc. The keyword report helps to have a clear view of which keywords you should continue using which keywords you need to include for better website ranking.
- Website health report – The digital marketing world is ever-evolving. You need to be in sync with the marketing trends to lure visitors to your website. To do so, you constantly need to update your website with the latest product or services. To monitor the website’s performance every time it is updated, you need to prepare a website health report. It shows website page views, SEO keywords that the website is ranking for and many other points. In your SEO strategy, you can then make the necessary changes to improve website health. The website health report presents before you some of the points discussed below.
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- Ranking of keywords on search engines.
- Organic traffic to your website.
- The health of your backlink profile.
- Technical and on-site SEO errors present on your website.
- Shows lead metrics that help you quantify the result of your SEO marketing efforts.
- Backlink report – Another point that you need to focus on while preparing an SEO report is to prepare a backlink report. Building brand awareness is also crucial in this digital era so that the users once associated with your brand name last long. You need to get more relevant links from authoritative websites to do so. Getting these links from relevant websites is easier said than done as many black hat websites are also present.
Reputation matters more than expected. You need to figure out that you build brand reputation and authority, as per the EAT guidelines. Backlinks are important metrics that you need to prepare SEO reports on. You should highlight essential points in your metrics like where you are getting links from, are the websites relevant or black hat, etc. This would help you identify whether your business meets the inbound traffic expectations.
- SEO audit report – An SEO audit report helps you evaluate the current status of your website and what improvements are required to enhance the ranking of your website. The SEO audit can be done for any size business. In your SEO strategy, you get to know what are the points of concern that you need to fix.
There are multiple SEO metrics present that you need to work on, like organic visibility, domain authority, impressions, click-through rate, etc. However, it cannot be said that none of the metrics are important but varies as per the business’s goals. The audit report can be prepared for local SEO and then take necessary steps to optimize the local SEO business’s performance. With the technical SEO audit, you can even perform audit reports for on-page and off-page SEO. Preparing an SEO audit report highlights some of the points of your website discussed below.
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- Keywords in headings and subheadings
- Internal and external linking
- Canonical URL
- Page title
- Image alt text
- Text readability score
- 301 and 302 redirects
- Broken links
- Duplicate content
- Meta description
Insights into important SEO metrics for report-making
- Reducing bounce rate – Bounce rate is defined as the percentage of visitors that leave a webpage without taking any intended action. The intended action could be clicking on the link, filling out a form, making a purchase, signing up to avail of services, etc. This is a crucial SEO metric to track deeper insights into the users’ interests. In your SEO marketing strategy, it is necessary to analyze the performance of a complete website and specific pages. Tracking bounce rate is essential for some of the reasons mentioned below:
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- Someone that bounces from your website did not convert. So, in your SEO strategy, when you work on reducing the bounce rate, ensure that the visitor on the web page stays longer, thus improving the conversion rate.
- Bounce rate is an important SEO metric that plays a crucial role in the Google ranking factor. Thus it is essential to prepare an SEO report on this metric. You can then work on optimizing the SEO metric. The lower the bounce rate, the better it is for your business.
- The bounce rate highlights specific issues on your website. This may include content on the website, user experience, page layout, call to action tabs, etc.
Preparing an SEO report on this metric helps improve your website ranking on the SERPs. In your SEO strategy, you should focus on increasing impressions and clicks on your website. You should focus on increasing the user engagement with your website and making the visitors convert into customers by taking the intended action, thus lowering the bounce rate. To prepare an SEO report on bounce rate, you can use SEO reporting tools like Google Analytics, Google Search console, etc.
In your SEO marketing strategy, it is essential to prepare an SEO report on this metric to know whether the users find the results they are looking for on the website. After having a clear insight into the users’ buying journey, you can take the necessary steps like optimizing images, working on content marketing, etc., to improve the page loading speed, improving average position, etc. You can consider some points to optimize the bounce rate mentioned below.
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- Responsive web design.
- Optimizing your website for mobile devices.
- Using content that resonates with the user.
- Perform a/b testing to determine which web page design drives more traffic.
- Improving user website navigation through different sections on the website.
- Increasing impressions – Impressions in search engine optimization are your website’s appearance on the search engine result pages for the search queries entered by the users. An impression is recorded whenever a URL link appears in the search result pages for a user. When a page from the search results is opened, an impression is recorded for the URL the search snippets point to.
When it comes to search elements that contain multiple links, impressions can be counted by URL or site, depending on which view you are looking at in the search analytics report. To increase the number of impressions on your website, you can consider some of the below-mentioned points.
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- Build brand awareness on social media
- Work on demographic targeting.
- Write guest posts.
- Work on social media posts.
- Perform keyword research to choose high-traffic keywords.
- Enhance click-through rate (CTR) – Click-through-rate (CTR) is the number of times the visitor reaches your website to the number of times that your website appeared on the SERP for the keywords or search term entered by the user. It is an important metric to prepare an SEO report to improve the website’s average position on the search engine.
In the PPC advertising world, click-through rate (CTR) tells you how many times your ad was clicked to the number of times people saw it. You then perform multiple changes in the ad campaign and work on improving the performance of the PPC campaign to increase the click-through rate. The organic click-through rate tells how many people saw your result and how many people clicked to reach the webpage.
In search engine optimization, traffic is a crucial part of your website. So, to increase impressions, you need to work on optimizing the performance of your website. Some points to include in your SEO strategy to improve the organic click-through rate (CTR) are discussed below.
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- Keyword search volume.
- Optimizing your title.
- Optimizing final and display URL.
- Avoid duplicate content.
- Fix keyword cannibalization.
Optimizing CTR is good as it helps to improve ranking on SERPs and increases organic traffic. The organic CTR can also be improved when your search result appears on various social media platforms, your partner websites, etc. So, you need to focus on affiliate marketing to get quality backlinks from relevant websites. However, you should concentrate on the point that you do not get links from black hat websites, as this would lower your website ranking and reduce organic traffic. You can also outsource SEO reseller services to improve link building and increase organic CTR.
- Analyzing session timing – A session is the user interaction with the website that takes place within a given time frame. When preparing an SEO report, you must consider taking this metric into your SEO marketing strategy. The session duration in Google Analytics is 30 minutes. The number of sessions tells you about the number of times the user has visited your website and what they are actually doing on the website. The user behavior on the website during the given session helps you analyze which sections on your webpage need to be optimized. It helps you to know what are the important points that need to be analyzed to improve the performance of your SEO campaign. Suppose you run an e-commerce website, then preparing an SEO report on the session would help to know:
- In how many sessions a product was viewed.
- In how many sessions were a product added to the cart.
- In how many sessions it buy now performed.
- In how many sessions the transaction was completed.
The session duration varies for every industry like e-commerce, gaming, news website, etc. Suppose a user spent five minutes on a website and loaded two different pages. After navigating through different sections on these two pages, the user took the intended action. So, this highlights the point that your SEO marketing efforts are meeting the user’s needs required for an SEO campaign. Like in PPC ads, marketers target the social media platforms according to the type of audience they wish to get in touch with. Like marketers use Facebook Ads to get in touch with friends and family, LinkedIn Ads to target professionals and c-level executives, Youtube Ads, etc. So, you need to choose your campaigns appropriately to get in touch with relevant audiences and avoid irrelevant clicks.
You must focus on retargeting to increase the session duration of the target audience on your website. The ones who are already engaged with your website should work on SEO marketing to make these target audiences increase their session duration. To increase impressions to your website and attract new target prospects, you can work on email marketing, content marketing, etc. You can consider providing discounts and offers to the users luring the target audience to choose your brand name over your competitors.
- Boost number of page views – Page view is the number of times the user views a page. It is the instance of a page being loaded on the browser whether the page opens or not. Suppose a visitor makes a click and reaches a webpage (whether the page load or not), Google counts it as one page view. So, the number of times a single page of a website is viewed it is known as a page view in a given time frame.
Including page views when preparing an SEO report is vital as it tells you which pages on your webpage get the most views and which do not. You can then optimize the pages with fewer views and improve the performance of pages with higher views to make the user visit multiple times already engaged with your business. When performing niche marketing, it becomes even more important to analyze what the audience is actually looking for. The page views help to work on unique selling propositions (USP) to provide the users with the relevant products or services. With the help of SEO reporting tools, you can monitor who the unique visitors are and who are just doing window shopping. So, to increase the page views trust of the users and increase impression to your website, you should focus on the points discussed below.
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- All the links are working properly.
- Optimize website for mobile devices.
- The website is appropriately indexed and redirects are working properly.
- Use relevant meta titles and meta descriptions.
- Use engaging headlines and product page descriptions.
- Lowering the bounce rate.
- Ensuring that content on the website, images of products have proper coloring and appropriate font sizes are used. Ensure that all your links are working properly, the website is optimized for mobile devices, etc.
- Average time on Page – Average time on page is a metric that measures the amount of time the user spends on a single page. It is calculated by dividing the total duration of all sessions for a specific page by the total number of sessions the page generates. You should focus on building eye-catching post-click web pages on the website to keep the user engaged with your web page. Some points to focus on to improve the average time on page are listed below.
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- Optimizing images on the website.
- Build a user-friendly website.
- Focus on internal linking.
- Include marketing trends like e-commerce trends, SEO trends, etc.
- Focus on having accelerated mobile pages.
Why prepare a SEO report
To have crystal clear insights about the performance of your SEO campaign, you need to measure various SEO metrics. The SEO report clearly focuses on your website and highlights the key areas that need improvement. You can then work on your SEO strategy and take the necessary steps to optimize them.
An SEO report is an effective way to identify the critical areas of concern and highlight various metrics’ performance. While the SEO report can be prepared in different ways depending on the type of business you are running, they all tend to focus on specific SEO metrics depending on the business goals. Preparing an SEO report helps you to have insights into some of the points mentioned below:
- What progress has been made?
- Impact of the changes made in SEO strategy
- Amplify your SEO strategy according to performance of SEO metrics related to your business.
Some of the main reasons you should prepare an SEO report are mentioned below.
- Goal reports – Any SEO company has a set goal of what they wish to achieve from SEO marketing. The goals vary as per your business. The business goal can be to build brand awareness, increase impressions, fill forms, etc. The goals can include things like:
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- Number of page visit
- Average duration on page
- Total number of conversions
- Total work completed in given time period – Preparing an SEO report helps to know what amount of work has been completed in the given period. The detailed report helps you have an idea of the essential metrics you have worked on. It helps you have a clear idea of how much time you have spent optimizing these metrics. You can then determine whether the amount you have spent is feasible or not. It helps you save time and use this to work on other parameters of SEO marketing.
- Performance of optimized pages – Once you have optimized some of the pages on your website, you can see its performance using the SEO report. You may have changed a few images, added short-engaging videos, engaging call-to-action, etc. The performance of these pages after optimization can be analyzed and if any further change is required, the necessary steps can be taken. It also helps you know which pages are optimized and which are left to be done.
- Earn high-quality links – Links are an essential metric to keep an eye on. You should focus on link building to get more backlinks from authoritative websites. As per the EAT guidelines, Google’s emphasis on reputation and authority is also important as reputation matters more than ever. The more quality links you get from your relevant website, the better it is for your business, increasing users’ trust with your brand. The more relevant links you have, the chances of the users promoting your website to friends and family increase, thus helping peer-to-peer marketing.
Tools to prepare SEO report
- Google Analytics – Google Analytics is a tool by Google to analyze the performance of various SEO metrics. Using this SEO reporting tool, your SEO data can be centrally located and help identify areas for improvement of your SEO campaign. You can take the necessary steps to improve the keyword match type and phrases you want your website and web pages to rank for. Like in PPC advertising, you can link Google Ads with Google Analytics to analyze the performance of PPC ad campaigns. Similarly, you can link Google Analytics with Google Search Console to analyze the performance of an SEO campaign. Some points that you can work on to prepare a report with Google Analytics are mentioned below.
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- Filter your referral traffic – You can get to know where your website traffic comes from and prepare an attribution report for this.
- Organic traffic – You can see where your organic traffic comes from and work on choosing relevant online platforms to drive traffic to your website.
- Engagement metrics – You can analyze the content on the website to determine engagement metrics on each web page, bounce rate, user behavior, etc.
- Review the multi-channel report – You can review the multi-channel report and identify which channels generate more leads and reach more conversion.
- Google Search Console – Another tool you need to include in your SEO strategy is Google Search Console. The Google search console is a free tool provided by Google to help digital advertisers optimize various SEO metrics. With the help of this tool, you can have a data-driven SEO report. The statistical information helps you have a clear insight into the target audience rather than just making random guesses.
On 15 May 2015, the Google webmaster tool was renamed to Google Search console. With the help of the Google search console, you get to know the performance of various SEO metrics. When performing SEO marketing using this tool, you get to know how your website is doing in terms of organic search. The SEO reporting tool helps understand what web pages drive traffic to the website. After performing a complete SEO audit and preparing an SEO report, you know where your website traffic comes from. The traffic to your website can be from social media marketing, various social media platforms, etc. So you can consider these online platforms in your SEO marketing strategy to generate leads, build brand awareness, increase visitor time on page, etc.
With this tool, you get to know the website’s domain authority and whether the relevant pages are working fine or not. If there has been any update on the website, the tool provides clear information on the 301and 302 redirects. These redirects help increase the users’ trust in your website as they believe that the business thinks from the users’ perspective. With the help of this tool, you can crawl errors, optimize final URL, display URL, etc.
With the launch of mobile-first indexing, optimizing your website for mobile devices becomes even more critical. You can conduct an SEO analysis and perform keyword research to know the keyword search volume. You can choose high-traffic keywords related to your business and include them in your strategy to improve the performance of your website. So, by having this tool in your SEO strategy, you can improve the website’s mobile responsiveness for the users. You may need to optimize images, improve page loading speed, etc., to make the users be in touch with your business in the long run. Google search console provides you to prepare SEO reports on some of the points mentioned below.
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- Track the number of users on your website.
- Which cities and traffic users come from.
- Finding out the devices used by the target audience.
- Track user interests with the help of an SEO report.
- Track conversion rate.
- Track user navigation on the website.
- Check the loading speed of your website.
- Know which pages on your website are popular.
This tool is of utmost importance in SEO marketing as it provides a clear idea about broken links. If your business deals with e-commerce marketing, it becomes more essential to improve the ranking of your website on the SERPs. The SEO trends keep evolving with the marketing trends, so does the content on your website. So, your e-commerce website needs to be adequately indexed to appear on top for the relevant keywords or search terms. Once you have determined whether your website has broken links or not, you can work on indexing. The search engine can easily crawl and index your website to make it appear to the target audience with proper indexing. To improve your online presence, you can properly index your website so that it is easily searched by Google, Bing and other search engines.
- Advanced web ranking – Another essential tool to prepare SEO reports is the advanced web ranking tool (AWR). Using this SEO reporting tool, you can create a report on keyword search volume, average monthly searches, etc. It enables the visualization of rankings and visibility for a set of keywords. This tool helps to have a clear insight into factors like keyword search volume, monthly searches, etc.
To use this tool, you need to go to the website of AWR and complete the registration process. This tool also works well for mobile devices, so it is up to your wish which service of AWR you want to use. To get details of the metric, you need to enter the keyword you want to know the search volume. You can get the keyword search volume monthly, weekly basis, etc. You can also consider preparing a custom report using this tool.
Advanced web ranking helps prepare SEO reports on some of the KPIs mentioned below.
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- Keyword search volume
- Average monthly searches
- Keyword ranking
- Website ranking
- URL ranking
To know the ranking through this tool, you can follow the following process.
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- Keyword ranking – This SEO reporting tool allows you to prepare a report on keyword ranking. You can monitor and inspect how the ranking positions and the number of searches perform at a keyword level over a selected period.
- Analyze keyword positioning – Ranking of my sites allows you to see the position of all web properties for a certain keyword in the search engine. You can filter out the report by position change, keyword search volume and many more.
- Ranking of top sites – Using this tool, you can have clear insights into the top pages for a selected keyword in the search engine. This would help you make changes in your SEO strategy and rank your website higher for the keyword or search terms entered.
You can also prepare a report on website visibility, average rank, on first-page position, visibility percent and many other essential aspects of SEO marketing. Having prepared a detailed SEO report, you can then take the necessary steps to optimize these and improve the website’s performance.
Wrap Up
Every business has different marketing goals. No matter what your business goals are, you should always prepare an SEO report to determine the performance of your website. The report can be prepared bi-weekly, monthly or yearly basis. The data-driven report helps you have a crystal-clear view of advertising efforts and removes any guesses. You can then take the necessary steps to optimize the SEO metrics. The better-performing metrics help you prompt the users to move down the marketing funnel. You can consider using an eye-catching call to action, writing great content, etc. Outsourcing SEO services help you report on essential metrics that tie most close to your business goals and increase sales. You can get in touch with a digital marketing company with expertise in SEO reports, local SEO, SEO plan & strategy, video SEO, etc.
References
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