What is an SEO Report? What Does It Include?

An SEO report is an online report generated for a website that lets web developers and business owners know how a given website performs over time.

SEO Reporting Metrics

While an SEO report can be written or structured in countless different ways depending on the type of website involved and the nature of the business you’re running, they all tend to focus on a few specific metrics. 

Sales Volume and ROI

If your website provides a tangible good or service, the first item you’ll want when you’re generating an SEO report is something that will tell you exactly how much your website is contributing to the overall health of your business.

A coherent SEO report should immediately provide information on sales volume and return-on-investment. 

An SEO report that doesn’t immediately tie your website’s performance to your business’s performance is useless. Search engine optimization should improve your leads or sales, and you should be able to track those conversions. 

Organic Traffic vs. Paid Traffic

A useful SEO report should tell you where your website traffic is coming from.

Organic traffic refers to traffic arriving at your website after putting search terms into search engines such as Bing or Google.

Paid traffic refers to traffic arriving at your website after clicking on ads you paid Google or Bing to run. 

Organic traffic is not better than paid traffic; what’s truly important is knowing how to balance between organic traffic driven by effective SEO and pay-per-click traffic that relies on ads. 

Search Rankings 

If you run a Google search for “What is an SEO report?”, you’ll see a lot of content that talks about the importance of search rankings. A useful SEO report should tell you how your keywords are ranking, and it should also tell you where your business name shows up across Google and other search engines such as Bing or DuckDuckGo.

You want your business to be at or near the top of the search rankings. A useful SEO report should provide insights into your search rankings and provide actionable recommendations if the improvement is necessary.

If you’re new to SEO, check out this article from Moz, which dives into the relationship between search engine ranking and SEO. 

Backlink Credibility

A backlink to your website refers to a link from another website to your website. Most of the time, backlinks are a good thing because having backlinks to your website means you’re doing your job or providing exceptional service.

However, occasionally you can get backlinks from malicious actors who are trying to appear legitimate. 

When you’re generating an SEO report, you’ll want information on how credible your backlinks are. If you see that there are suspicious backlinks, you need to begin the process of disavowing those links.

An SEO report should alert you if there are suspicious backlinks to your website. 

Final Thoughts

If you’ve hired a reputable SEO company, they should offer regular reporting that covers the metrics we mention above. SEO reporting may also touch on page speed, top pages on your website, leads and customer acquisition, and more.

If you’re new to SEO and you’re wondering about what an SEO report contains, be sure to include the basics like traffic and backlinks! Visit our blog for more digital marketing and SEO expertise.