4 Things Every SEO Report Should Include

Last Updated on April 17, 2020 by msj484

When it comes to getting the most out of your investment of time and money as it relates to search engine optimization, making sure that you have an SEO report that is regularly updated and checked can be the difference between wasting money and growing faster than you can imagine.

Source: http://www.capsure.com/

What that means is, when you have a search engine optimization report set up to tell you how things are progressing or not… you will always be ready and equipped to take the next steps to succeed. This will enable you to ensure you are getting closer to reaching your end goal; whether that means you want to rank higher for specific keywords or improve your organic traffic to your website.

You might be wondering why we would write an article on this topic, and the short answer is that far too many people are ignoring this vital tool and truth-teller when it comes to succeeding with search engine optimization.

Of all of the different topics that are covered and professed to be “must have” SEO tactics and strategies, reporting is one of those things that seems obvious to those of us that are familiar with this aspect of digital marketing. However, newcomers to this industry, as well as most business owners, often have no idea of the importance and benefits associated with regular reporting.

With that out of the way, here are four things you cannot afford to ignore when it comes to your SEO report:

1) A Clear & Understandable Benchmark Of Your Current Organic Traffic

Source: http://pastornic.org/

More often than not, when a company is investing in SEO Services, whether it’s being done by an in-house team or an outside vendor, their aim is to increase their keyword rankings as well as how much organic traffic their website is generating. For an SEO report to accurately report on the success or the lack of, it’s important to understand and have a clear sense of where you started from. Otherwise, there is no way to know how successful or not the SEO campaign is.

2) Existing Keyword Rankings For Your Top3-5 SEO Competitors

If your aim is to improve how high you rank in the search engines and how much organic traffic you would like to bring into your website, one of the quickest ways to gauge how far you need to go to be one of the best ranking sites in your industry and business is to identify companies and their websites that are already doing it.

Source: http://www.alexamaster.com/

Once you have identified who these competitors are, it is easy for you and your marketing team to begin to set specific goals for the campaign. Aspects like which keywords should be targetted, and how you should present your content to your target audience are best selected once you have a clear understanding of what your most successful SEO competitors are doing well.

The value in that is you will always know exactly what it takes to succeed in you’re giving industry by looking at the common and unique factors that you’re most successful search engine optimization competitors already have implemented within your given industry. Sure there are SEO best practices that you should always keep in mind no matter what industry you are in, but any expert that has been doing this as long as I have, which is over 13 years, we will always tell you to look at your competition first before you create your strategy.

Another added benefit of identifying how and where your search engine optimization competitive rank is if you set up a way to continuously track how your website measures up against theirs, you can begin to see how and if your existing SEO campaign has the impact that you’re aiming for.

3) A Thorough Backlink Analysis Of Your Website & SEO Competitors’ Websites

Historically, we have seen that content and backlinks are two of the SEO metrics that have the largest impact on how well a site performs in the organic listings. It’s one thing to create content and to have a strategy in place of what you would like to do to improve your SEO presence, but if backlinks are ignored and more importantly not reported on… then you’re basically implementing this important and expensive type of digital marketing blindly.

Source: http://cdn.linkresearchtools.com/

Fortunately, it seems that from one month to the next new companies are providing online tools that will quickly gather, analyze, and compare your backlink profile to your SEO competitors. Of course, many of these platforms are not 100% accurate; but the truth is none of them are unless you are on a team within a company like Google that is historically known for indexing and identifying every single web page that is on the internet. It is only with that type of access that a business owner can get a 100% accurate backlink profile analysis of any website online. Since most of us in this industry do not have that type of access, using one of the existing publicaly accessible backlink analysis platforms is going to be all that is needed to understand what separates you from your most successful SEO competitors; from a backlink perspective.

4) Clearly Defined Next Steps For The Immediate Future

Source: https://s3.amazonaws.com

One of the things that most SEO reports are lacking is clearly defined next steps based on the data that has been presented in the given report. In most cases, doing a report once a month is more than good enough, but doing so any less frequent than that can have you going in the wrong direction for much longer than you need to. On the other hand doing this type of analysis every day or even every week could not allow the impact of your implementation of your SEO strategy to actually have a bearing on that metrics that you’re tracking.

So, once you have an SEO reporting system in place that is providing detailed information about various aspects of your SEO campaign… having clear next steps or key takeaways as to what should be done with that data it’s going to make sure that from one report to the next you can see steady progress.

That’s it, were you hoping to see more critical elements that should be included in an SEO report?

If so, feel free to let us know in the comments below or using our contact us page. If you are willing to provide us with your website URL, your most recent experience with SEO implementation, and your estimated budget we can come up with specific recommendations that you should definitely include in your ongoing reporting.

With that said, we hope this information was helpful and that you will now compare what was said here to the SEO reporting you’ve been using and making whatever adjustments are needed so you can see progress at a much rapid pace. Nomvo!

FAQs (Frequently Asked Questions):

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