If you think your website is far from reaching its full potential, SEO Report Template can help you with that. Very often the problem lies somewhere in the SEO and there might be some site issues holding your progress.
The question is how to identify and eradicate them. And the answer falls close to the tree. You have to do an SEO audit.
What is an SEO Report?
An SEO audit is a process where you make sure that your website meets the standards and compatibility, required by the search engines.
A lot of people prefer going through an audit report before improving their SEO strategies. This is because an SEO audit report highlights all the grey areas of your functionality. Thus, giving you a thorough understanding of where you’re going wrong.
You can’t fix a system without isolating its problem. In the same way, you cannot expect to optimize your website without an SEO audit report.
Over time, you may experience an ever-updating series of problems. This may be in the shape of some broken links or a few non-responsive commands. Whatever the cause, the effect will be the same.
Your website will start devaluing the user experience, ultimately ranking it lower on search results. Being up-to-date with your site’s SEO is as important as the primary SEO. And a report helps you in this.
Major Ingredients of an SEO Report
Conducting an audit and writing a report on it are two separate procedures. If you’re just looking to audit your website, you’ll find several tools available on the web.
They’ll help you pass the technical terms. But if you’re interested in what goes into an SEO report template, this place is for you.
First of all, let us highlight all the major objectives of your report:
1. To Guide the Client
The main purpose of writing an SEO report is to converse data in layman terminologies. Often, an SEO consultant or a digital marketing agency finds itself responsible for auditing a client’s site.
What they have to do is to identify the grey areas. And then to communicate them to the client so that he can proceed with the solutions. This whole function can only be rendered if the clients can grasp the data.
You have to make a report template that is explanatory in itself. This allows your client to be familiar with all the steps that must be taken.
2. To List SEO Factors
Reporting the entire site audit can be an extensive deal. To narrow it down, you can target certain SEO factors. And you can base your report around them.
One thing you have to keep in mind is that these factors should be related to the SEO techniques used during the site setup. You’ll find many SEO audit tools that let you:
- Analyze the keywords
- Check on-page elements
- Check off-page elements
- Navigate internal links
- Check URL structure
- Test site speed
- Test site compatibility
- Find duplicate pages
- Check indexed pages
3. To Explain the Terms
Being a professional in SEO handling, you’ll probably be able to make sense out of all the factors. But while reporting the audit, you have to make sure that the clients get the data.
They should understand what every factor holds for the site. And why they’re paying for it. So, it’s always better to add a description to the terms you’re using. This will help them make informed decisions about their business. And will give you more freedom in your work.
4. To Rate the SEO ranking Factor
Once you’ve listed all the factors it’s time to enter the damage. An efficient SEO audit tool will help you rank these factors in terms of their proficiency.
You could come up with green titles to indicate an overwhelming domain. And a red title to indicate the troublemaking areas. This helps the clients redirect their focus.
You can also use numbers to indicate progress. The very purpose of the report is to weigh the performance of the site. And you cannot achieve that unless you come up with a performance chart for the factors.
5. To Provide Your Input
At the end of the day, numbers are what they are; just numbers. A personalized input will help the clients understand their situation better. It’ll tell them how much thought you’ve put into the audit.
You can go around adding comments or suggestions, for where you realize the need. Or you can also conclude the reports with what you think will be a viable strategy to improve the ranking and traffic of the site. That is what the clients care about, in the end.
How Do I Write an SEO Report?
SEO analysis is a major stronghold of your site. It regulates the organic traffic you’re receiving from search engines. And that is why a lot of clients prefer to have their website audit every month.
Now that we’ve gone through the basic essence of an SEO report template we can head on to how to write and organize them in a report.
Before you start on the reporting bits, there are some essentials that you should be having. Firstly, you should consider using SEO tools. They help you get a clear insight that you can then reflect on in your report.
Secondly, make use of Google Analytics. It keeps you updated about the site’s performance in terms of organic traffic, marketing traffic, sales, and conversions. And lastly, you should have access credentials to the URL domain of the site. You can get that from your client, obviously.
What Should be in SEO Report?
To flow things easily, let’s make a checklist that’ll help us go through all the essentials we should be adding to our report. These components should address every component of search engine optimization.
So that the site can rank higher and get more traffic on the Google search console. These components are listed below:
1. Site Compatibility
Compatibility is a straightforward link to organic traffic, sales, and revenue. Nowadays, we see the entire world on our mobiles. The mobile internet market is currently ruling the statistics everywhere, especially on Google.
Having a site that isn’t mobile-friendly just means a formal goodbye to 56% of your prospective customers. SEO is all about user experience. And that is why site compatibility should be the first thing you should address in an SEO report template.
2. Site Indexing
Make sure that Google indexes a single version of your website. One way to do that is to list all the possible ways your site can be entered. And redirect all of them into a single index.
It helps the search engine see through what your visitors may be looking for while searching your site. Idexing also makes your site more responsive, as the server does not have to look through any other version. It automatically redirects the visitor to your site domain.
3. Page Speed
Another factor that directly falls under the compatibility of your site is its speed. Users don’t like to wait too much over an unresponsive page.
They’ll just prefer an alternative that gives the same result, but while providing a better service. Statistics have shown that you have a 123% more chance of losing your clients when your load speed goes from 1 second to 10 seconds. That just about sums why you should keep page loading speed into accounts when reporting data on SEO.
4. Internal Links on the website
As mentioned in the specifics, on-page SEO is an important deal to your SEO report template. Internal links provide value to your page as they connect your clients to what they’re looking for.
It’s a simple SEO marketing strategy, that helps add relevant links to your content. They help you attract Google algorithms. So, in a way, they provide a better user experience. And also allows you to rank your content higher on Google. Thereby, getting better organic traffic results.
5. Social Activity
A lot of businesses are now moving to the realm of social media marketing. And truth be spoken; when you combine this marketing strategy with your site SEO marketing, you get the recipe to a successful digital presence.
If your brand has its social media contributors, you’d want to include their progress in the report. It’ll give you an idea of your performance in both trajectories.
6. Tags & Descriptions on the website
Duplicated, missing, or long title tags can throw your visitor off. It not only gives a wrong impression about your content but also sways Google away from your site. You have much lesser chances of ranking on Google if you keep using irrelevant tags on your content.
In the same way, descriptions are also an important step in ranking and attracting traffic. They give a hint of the keywords in your content. Creating perfect title tags and descriptions is a key to better reachability for your business.
7. Site URL Structure
URL should be kept as simple as possible. It should not imply random words, minced together. You should keep an eye on a fixed URL structure throughout the site.
This allows your traffic to navigate your site with more ease. The URL should indicate the section and page, that the user is viewing. This helps him, in case he decides to surf through your site for more products or information.
8. Content Optimization on the website
Content is the biggest asset your site possesses. Some SEO experts are of the view that you should look to update minute details of your content on a monthly basis. What worked around at the start of the year may not be giving you much traffic now.
The basic principles remain the same; keeping the content concise, relevant, and interesting for your audience. However, the keyword and ranking technicalities rely on the Google algorithm, which suggests that you should be auditing your content every month or so.
9. Content Duplication
Content duplication is a serious concern that may give a horrible lookout to your site. It’ll not only make your dashboard confusing. But will also hurt your organic traffic and ranking on Google.
Imagine being Google; you’re seeing two pages having the exact same content. What’ll you do? Keep the both of them down, because it’s no more unique.
This issue does not only boils to the page content, but also the title tags and meta descriptions. You have to make sure that you keep your dashboard and tags free from any duplication.
10. Keywords Optimization
Keywords are what make your site stand to Google. Search engines have their own crawling and indexing mechanisms, that tell them what your site is about.
If you use the right keywords with the right placements; you’ll have higher chances of ranking to someone who searches for something relevant to your business.
This is why SEO tools specifically focus on the score of your keywords. It’s an important part of SEO and should be definitely included while reporting the audit.
11. Backlinks on the website
Backlinks are an essential component of your off-page SEO. Normally, it stays out of sight. And therefore, most of the links added to it are not checked. But when you’re sticking to a monthly audit report, you can steer clear of broken or spammy links ruining your site’s ranking.
The quality of these backlinks plays an important role in your SEO. Hence, leaving it at once may not be the best option. It’s best to include them in your monthly report.
12. Page Performances
Your site may have several pages. Some of them may rank higher than others based on their use and relevancy. An audit report should be able to gauge your page performance.
So, the clients can know which content is fairing better than the others. It gives you a direction for the SEO you’re pursuing and also tells you what your traffic prefers.
13. Competitor Profiling
Business marketing is all about studying your competitors. No matter how successful you are, you’ll always have a rival business sticking out its necks. This is a healthy trait as it gives you the motivation to outdo your sales and targets.
A lot of clients prefer to have them compared against top-performing sites. This tells them where they’re going wrong. And what they should be focusing on, in order to get on the right track.
14. Organic Traffic
As you’ve seen in the many points before, organic traffic is the most important factor in an SEO report. It tells you how well your site is doing.
If your visitors are constantly improving, it means that you’re ranking better on the search results. Hence, your strategies are working out well in the end.
15. Site Navigation
The dashboard is called the home page of your site, and rightfully so. When you’re building a website, you should display all the pages in an ordered system.
Navigation is important to your site outlook. Hence, your SEO report must tell what your site lacks in this area. It’s a concern for your business if your users can’t navigate the pages they’re looking for. Wasting their time would be the last thing you’ll want your site to do.
16. Data Analytics
Ask yourself; why do you need this report? The answer will be, to help you understand the performance of your site. So, what better way to understand your working overview than by local data analytic tools?
With the increasing competition in the digital market, you can now follow what a client does after coming onto your site. Technical SEO tools like heatmap and behavior analytics have made it easier to understand the patterns, your ideal customer exhibits.
Last: Solutions
Now comes the most important part; solutions. All the factors that you’ve discussed above will work as a reasonable performance for your clients. But what they’ll want from their SEO handler is to pour out suggestions for improvement.
They’ll be many factors where the website may not work as well as you’d hope. The clients will be concerned with your plans for working on these domains. Come up with an efficient SEO plan, based on these analytics and leads.
SEO Report Template: Conclusion
This is it. Once, you’ve made sure that all the factors are well accounted for. You can go ahead and present the report. SEO reports are important for a website. It’s like a performance chart that helps you gauge your site.
If you’re really into achieving the targets you’ve set for your site. You’ll have to stay up-to-date with search engine algorithms. And the only way to do that is through these monthly SEO audit reports.
You can write them yourselves with the help of an SEO tool. Or you can consider approaching a digital marketing agency for help. They can give you an overview, a client needs.
