Progress Report: Your SEO Reporting Template for 2022

Monitoring your search engine optimisation performance is becoming attainable today because of the widely available online SEO tools that you can access.

There are many challenges that SEO agency or other SEO professionals face every day. One of them is translating these findings into a valuable, meaningful report. 

Monthly reporting is crucial to the success of your SEO campaign. Just like any other investment a CEO makes, it matters that there are documents they can look into when making critical decisions. 

Whether you are consultants, in-house SEO teams, web owners, and agencies, you need to understand what makes up a good or bad SEO report. 

This article will get you into it and provide you with free SEO reporting template! 

What is an SEO Report?

An SEO report is an overview that reflects how your business performs under the strategy you have implemented.

The Importance of SEO Report 

Why should one have an SEO reporting document?

You might think that it is a waste of time to compile or maintain a report of your SEO progress because everything nowadays is accessible and automated. 

SEO report is vital to your campaign because it influences your decisions on matters affecting your business, especially if it involves finances.

Understand customer’s preferences better

SEO reporting is vital because it widens your perspective and understanding of what your customers like and dislike.  

Brands that are conscious about what their customers like respond well to their current demands, which leads ultimately to higher and favourable conversions.

Maintaining an SEO report helps you develop a greater knowledge of what to create, produce, or improve on your business. 

Better Allocation of Limited Resources

One of the many challenges that organisations face is dealing with limited marketing resources. 

You can focus more on critical areas of your business if you have a document that tells you significantly the implications of your respective campaigns or strategies. 

Handling a business demands more time and energy. It is always a wise move to know where to spend these resources for your advantage.  

Updating your SEO reports every month will give you an idea of what type of content to create that generates more engagement in your perspective market. 

Improves Brand Awareness

Brands that practice monthly SEO reporting have the advantage of knowing the trends in the market. 

Through these documents, you will have statistics of what type of topics or content your buyers consume, may it be on a daily, monthly, or yearly basis. 

SEO reports back you up with insights to better perform in your specific industry. It won’t be challenging to anticipate the buying patterns and provide easily what the customer wants and prefers. 

Once people notice your site, you will be one of their top choices when it comes to the latest trends. 

Why Use a Monthly SEO Reporting Template?

Why not use annual reports or quarterly reports? You might have been contemplating the best way to come up with a tool that can help you assess and track your brand’s progress.

From our end, maintaining monthly reports is a smart move to keep your business on the right path. Monthly reports give you more benefits than one. 

Operating Under the Same Page

Monthly reports are one of the efficient ways to strategise and create a system for your organisation. 

When the team operates under the same parameters. Guided by the same metrics, it would be easy to communicate to everyone where you are heading as a company and the goals you want to achieve together. 

Urgent Attention for Critical Issues

Through monthly reports, you may uncover critical issues that surround your company. 

It enables you to analyse the possible problems and detect solutions to each of them to avoid unnecessary challenges in the future. 

Leading a Detail-Oriented Team

This is one of the biggest advantages that you can have if you keep a monthly SEO report in your organisation. 

You are operating under verified and measurable data that your team can use as their guide to perform their respective roles. 

Whether you have in-house SEO teams or work with agencies, it matters that you share findings within the team that are critical to your business. 

It would be easier for them to understand the demands of their roles and your expectations from them. 

Progress Through Data Literacy

Monthly reports show leaders of the organisation where they should improve. It is clear evidence of success, lapses, and even failures. 

Regular, consistent, and accurate reporting enables people to become acquainted with statistics, SEO terms, measurements, and tools that run every SEO campaign you have set for your brand. 

Once your team knows these data, they know where you are heading clearly and which angle to look at.  

Familiarity with the Industry’s Trends

You can get valuable insights from your monthly report throughout the year.

By generating reports every month, you will know when your sales are at their peak or if it hasn’t reached your target quota. Such a report will help you create estimates if such fluctuations in your revenue are justifiable. 

Google Tools for SEO Reporting 

Google Analytics

There are widely available online tools like Google Analytics that can help you with your SEO campaign assessment and reporting. 

Google Analytics offers you tools that analyse data to help you frame smarter and sensible decisions. 

You will have access to the following features:

• Traffic analytics reporting
• Keyword Referrals
• Custom Dashboards
• Third-party referrals
• Conversion tracking

Google Search Console

A familiar tool that almost everyone uses today is Google Search Console. 

Whether you are a pro or a newcomer to the SEO industry, Google Search Console can help you analyse your website’s performance. 

This powerful SEO toolkit carries features that ensure you a comprehensive wide range of reporting providing better context to your SEO campaign. 

Here are some features that Google Search Console gives you:

• Links to Google Search Console and Google Analytics
• Sitemaps
• Fetch as Google
• Remove URLs
• Search Console Analytics Report
• Data highlighter 

Tools like these are great support for you to fix issues, measure traffic and performance, and improve your site’s visibility in Google search results. 

Google Data Studio 

Having the skill to visualise and interpret data is an advantage for running your website in this competitive online environment.  

Google Data Studio is an online tool that helps you visualise data for free. It comes with the following features:

• Ease of Use
• Scheduled Reporting
• A Dashboard and UI that resembles Google Drive. 
• Wide Data Collection Sources
• Interactive Data Visualisation
• Real-time report and collaboration

Metrics That Should Be Included in SEO Reporting Template

When crafting your SEO report, ensure that you know what you want to see on it. There are details that you should include and exclude depending on what industry you belong to. 

It can be frustrating to develop a report that covers all the metrics that you should know. If you are in the middle of making your report, you may want to consider these metrics and check if, in the next month, this will benefit and improve your reporting. 

Executive Summary

Highlights are essential to any type of company report that you produce. 

For busy marketers or CEOs, having an executive summary that covers all the information they want saves time out of their strict and demanding schedules. 

Executive summaries are the first part that will catch your attention as they will give you critical information about what those data carries in each segment of that report.

You may include in this part the following points:

• Wins and loses
• Completed tasks and their implications
• Assignments that demand urgent attention
• Goals for the next campaign.  

KPI Overview

Search Engine Optimisation means having Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for it to run. 

Having your KPIs in managing your business is crucial as it will guide you on where to look, what to do, and how to achieve your company’s objectives.

Ensure that the KPIs that you set are quantifiable to help you better gauge your brand’s progress and point out the necessary steps to fix what needs urgent attention. 

In other words, choose KPIs that you can equate to your business’s revenue. KPIs are necessary for decision making; thus, it is a plus to include them in your SEO report. 

Monthly Organic Traffic 

Increasing organic traffic is one of the most common indicators of a healthy – done-right SEO campaign. 

You will not argue with us if we tell you that this should be on your SEO reports as it gives you a broad idea of how many people visit your website every month. 

Monthly organic traffic shows you how effective or poor your SEO efforts are. 

Ranking Progress (In-Page Level & Keyword Level)

Page-Level Traffic

If you think that the overall performance of your website is enough to know how you should strategise the next time, wait until you discover the progress of each page you have. 

Having an in-page level of traffic metric makes you understand which pages are high-performing and low-performing. 

It will be easier for you to visualise the statistics – the volume of visitors – of a particular page and check your optimisation strategies for it. 

Keyword Level 

Which keywords do your pages rank best?

Isn’t it the best question to ask when evaluating your keywords? If your pages rank for terms that lack high search volume, it doesn’t say much to your organic traffic goals. 

Knowing how your keywords are performing is an advantage. You can enhance your keyword research, modify the content on your website and include high search volume terms. 

Most Valuable Pages (MVP)

Take note that your report must be holistic – focusing on the overall health of your website and not only on certain pages. 

Include in your game plan monitoring your landing page metrics. In this way, you can identify your most valuable pages. 

Your MVP is something that converts more than you have expected. Uncover these pages and ensure that you turn every low-performing page into valuable, ranking pages. 

Link Building Report

This part of your SEO monthly reports shows a piece of detailed information about your link building campaign. 

You must ensure that it carries the following vital points:

• Insights of link building data
• The success rate of link building campaign
• New referring domains to build links
• Pages you have built links to. 

If link building is one of the major campaigns you run for your website, it matters that you know how to interact with every detail you’ll get using your SEO analytics tool. 

Technical Report 

Making notes of technical errors and issues encountered while running your SEO implementations is a critical part of your SEO reporting. 

Technical reporting is essential for you to gauge the overall SEO health of your website – current or historical technical SEO data is vital. 

If you are sending reports to clients, ensure that they don’t get too overwhelmed with the SEO jargon they barely understood. 

Show them crawling details, indexing statistics, and details about the challenges their site or the campaign are currently going through. 

Insight and Next Month Plan 

A target for the next month is a must-have for your SEO report. 

After all, what’s the point of preparing monthly reports if you don’t have goals to reach in the next 30 days?

Your clients want to have a sustainable campaign and showing them a summary of where you guys are heading is a great starting point. Create a summary of your goals so they’ll know the main focus of the campaign for the following month. 

Best SEO Reporting Template 

After absorbing what we have here in this article, you may want to start and build your SEO report. 

You may want to use Roots Digital’s SEO report template to start your reporting this month. 

Kindly access and download the Roots Digital SEO reporting FREE template at this link. 

Final Thoughts

Processing and analysing a lot of data can make you nauseous and sick. 

Whether you are a seasoned SEO professional or a starter in the business of search engine optimisation, you will have data paralysis each time you deal with these pieces of information. 

With the simple list we have, you can start crafting your SEO report to give to your clients or share with your team. 

We know that reporting is a chore for anyone. But if you want to take your SEO campaign further than where you are now, you need this as a guide to help you with decision making and trying bolder steps in the next few days. 

If we miss crucial metrics you think we should include in this SEO report template, let us know. 

Our SEO professionals at Roots Digital would love to hear from you. Find out more information on our SEO services.

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