What to Include When Reporting for SEO

When working on your website’s SEO it’s extremely important to track your progress. From auditing the site before you begin to record what’s needed to be done, to benchmarking the website analytics before you implement the title tags, meta descriptions, and other onsite SEO work, to tracking your progression after you’ve implemented the onsite SEO work.

Tracking your SEO metrics and reporting on SEO is important for both you as the SEO Analyst and the client you are working with. This data not only helps you as the SEO to make strategic decisions backed by data but also helps the client understand their return on investment or ROI.

In this post, we will discuss the key metrics which must be tracked when reporting on SEO, as well as what each metric represents, and lastly, what SEO reporting tools you can use to track your metrics.

SEO Metrics to Track

Keywords

One of the most important metrics you will track when working on an SEO campaign is keywords. You will want to track both the total number of keywords the website ranks for and also the position of your target keywords.

The ultimate goal of any SEO campaign is to rank your website for the 1st position of any of your targeted keywords. As an SEO, we will work on certain aspects of your website or onsite SEO to help your website rank higher for these targeted keywords. We as the SEO, want to show these results, and the client will want to see that their website is ranking highly for their keywords.

If you can improve a keyword position from 10 to 1, you can drastically increase the website’s Organic Traffic and hopefully its conversions too. In many of our pitches to clients, we will estimate the traffic and revenue potential of Improving some of their bread and butter keywords. Use this data to your advantage!

Organic Traffic

Organic traffic metrics via Google Analytics are extremely insightful. As you rank for more keywords and improve your position, you will begin to see an increase in organic traffic sessions. Use this data along with the other metrics to help you understand who is coming to your website, the pages they are visiting, the time they are spending on the site, where they are bouncing or leaving the site, and ultimately if they are converting.

Integrating Google Analytics to Shopify, or another CMS as well as setting up eCommerce tracking is vital to reporting on your SEO campaigns ROI. You will need to benchmark organic revenue before you begin your SEO campaign and then track how revenue has increased throughout the campaign.

Domain Rating

Domain Rating or Domain Authority is a metric that analyzes a website’s backlink profile and compares it to other websites on a scale of 1 to 100. The higher a website’s domain rating, the more likely the website will outrank a competitor of a lower domain rating.

Google sees a high DR website as reputable, therefore as SEO we implement strategies to help raise DR. It is important to track this metric to show improvements over time. There are not many tools that track DR historically (or at least do it well) so we recommend manually tracking DR within an agenda or your SEO report.

SEO Reporting Tools

Ahrefs

Absolutely, the best SEO tool. Ahrefs allows SEOs to do anything from keyword research to keyword tracking, to site auditing. We specifically like to use Ahrefs for keyword research and domain rating reporting. Without a doubt, Ahrefs has the most accurate search volume data for organic keywords.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is the most commonly used website analytics tool. From new websites to major corporations, I’d argue that almost every website is using Google Analytics to track their organic traffic, paid traffic, referral traffic, eCommerce data, and more.

Raven Tools

Raven Tools is our favorite tool for building SEO reports. Raven Tools integrates with Google Analytics, Google Ads, Facebook, YouTube, and more, which allows us to pull metrics directly into our reports. Also, Raven Tools has a built-in keyword tracking tool, site-auditor, and more. We recommend using Raven Tools to build your SEO reports for clients.

To Sum It All Up

As you can see, building SEO reports for clients can help both you as an SEO in making strategic decisions, and help your client understand their return on investment and what exactly you are working on. Sometimes SEO can be misunderstood, so laying out all the metrics and walking your clients through the results, can help to build their understanding of SEO and their trust.

If you have a question that was not answered above, or you would like our SEO team to help you build an SEO report, feel free to schedule a free consultation!