Traffic Visits By Channel
The number of visits coming from each marketing channel helps you identify if there is any impact from other channels on SEO performance.
For instance, new PPC ads going online could mean the cannibalization of organic search traffic.
All Traffic And Organic Traffic Goal Completions
Have visitors completed the goals in the website’s analytics software?
Comparing organic and other traffic goal completions will again help identify if the organic traffic is completing above or below-average goal completions compared to other channels.
This could help determine if SEO activity has as much of a positive effect as hoped.
Page Level Traffic
If there are certain pages that have been worked on recently, such as new content or keyword optimization, include organic traffic metrics for them. This means going granular in your reporting.
Report on organic traffic over time, conversions on the pages (if appropriate), and actions carried out from that page. This can show if recent work has been successful in increasing organic traffic to those pages or not.
Organic Landing Page Sessions
These are the pages that visitors arrived at from the organic SERPs. They identify which pages are bringing the most organic traffic to the website.
From here, pages that have not been optimized but show potential to drive traffic can be identified.
Revenue Generated
If you can directly link the work you are carrying out to the revenue it generates, this is likely the most important metric you can include.
At the end of the day, this is what your boss and your boss’s boss likely care about. Is SEO making more money for the company?
Keyword Ranking Reports
A note on keyword rankings reports: Consider what they show before including them.
An overall report of “your site is ranking for X keywords” doesn’t give any helpful insight or fuel for a way forward.
Which keywords?
Are those keywords driving traffic to the site?
Are they worth optimizing for further?
Metrics To Include
Keyword ranking reports should demonstrate growth or decline in rankings for specific keywords the site is being optimized for.
Ideally, data should be pulled from first-party tools like Google Search Console to give as accurate an indication of ranking as possible.
Rather than focusing on individual keywords, you may want to look at trends. That is, is your site growing in visibility for terms that convert?
For example, demonstrating that the website has moved from ranking in first position for 10 terms to ranking in first position for 20 terms does not demonstrate how that might impact revenue.
In the age of generative engine optimization, brand is becoming more important.
Perhaps including a section on brand searches and how they are utilized to navigate straight to products would be beneficial.
Taking my pet store example, I might not only want to see how my website would rank for “helens pet store” but also for “helens pet store cat bowls” and “helens pet store dog beds.”
This helps you analyze how your brand is growing in reputation for your products and services. These searches show that visitors are so confident they want to buy from you that they want to navigate straight to your site.
Technical Performance Reports
Good SEO performance requires a website that can be crawled and indexed easily by search engines.
This means that regular audits need to be carried out to identify anything that might prevent the correct pages from appearing in the SERPs.
Reports are slightly different from audits in that a technical audit will look at a lot of different factors and investigate them.
A thorough technical audit can be vast. It needs to diagnose issues and methods of improving the site’s performance.
Depending on the audience of a technical report, it may need to selectively highlight the issues. It should also show the success of previous SEO work.
The key to knowing which metrics to include in a technical report is understanding what’s happened on the site so far.
If work has been carried out to fix an issue, include metrics that indicate the success of that fix.
For instance, if there has been a problem with a spider trap on the site that has been remedied, then report on crawl metrics and log files.
This might not be necessary for every technical report, but it can be useful in this instance.
If the site has problems with loading slowly, then metrics about load speed will be crucial for the technical report.
A good way to convey the metrics in a technical SEO report is by including prioritization of actions.
If the metrics show that there are some urgent issues, mark them as such. If there are issues that can wait or be fixed over time, highlight them.
Technical SEO can feel overwhelming for people who aren’t experts in it.
Breaking down the issues into priorities can make your reports more accessible and actionable.
Metrics To Include
There are certain metrics that may be useful to include as part of a technical performance report:
Server Response Codes
It can be prudent to keep track over time of the number and percentage of pages returning a non-200 response code.
An audit of the site should determine exactly which pages are not returning a 200 response code.
This information may not be useful to the recipient of the technical performance report, so it may be better to include it as an appendix or not at all.
If the volume of non-200 response codes reduces over time, this can be a good indicator that technical issues on the site are being fixed.
If it goes up, then it can be summarized that further work needs to be carried out.
Page Load Speed Times
It can be helpful to report on an average of page load speed times across the site. This can indicate if the site’s load speed is improving or not.
Perhaps, what is even more useful to report on is the average load speed of the top five fastest and five slowest pages. This can help to show if there are certain templates that are very quick, as well as the pages that might need further improvement.
Any Data That Shows A Need To Act
This is really important to include. If an error on a site will prevent it from being indexed, then this needs to be highlighted in the report.
This might be different from report to report.
Metrics could be crawl data, site downtime, broken schema markup, etc. Also, consider including these metrics in subsequent reports to show how the fixes have impacted performance.
A Word Of Warning
In my experience, technical SEO metrics can be received in one of two ways: either the metrics are not considered relatable to the stakeholder’s role, and therefore, they gloss over their importance, or they focus on them as an area of SEO they can understand.
For example, Core Web Vitals. We know that Core Web Vitals are not that critical for rankings. However, I have experienced many developers focusing only on Core Web Vitals as a measure of how well-tuned the website is from an organic search perspective.
Why? In my opinion, because SEO pros have started reporting on them more, and they are an easy technical SEO element for stakeholders to understand and influence.
They make sense, are easily measured, and can be optimized for.
Unfortunately, as a result of this, they are sometimes given undue importance. We direct engineers to spend entire sprints trying to raise the Core Web Vitals scores by tiny amounts, believing every little one counts.
When reporting on technical SEO, consider how you communicate the value of the metrics you are reporting on. Are these critical website health metrics? Or are they “nice to know”?
Make sure you give the full context of the metrics within your report.
Link Building Reports
A link building campaign can yield benefits for a website beyond boosting its authority with the search engines.
If done well, links should also drive traffic to the website. It is important to capture this information on link building reports, too, as it is a good measure of success.
Metrics To Include
URLs Of Links Gained: Which links have been gained in the reporting period?
Links Gained Through Link Building Activity: Of the links gained, which ones can be directly attributed to outreach efforts?
Links Driving Traffic: Of the links gained during the period, which ones have resulted in referral traffic, and what is the volume of visits?
Percentage Of Valuable Vs. Less Valuable Links: Of the links gained in the period, which ones are perhaps marked as “nofollow” or are on syndicated and canonicalized pages?
You may be tempted to include a page or domain strength score in these reports. If that helps to communicate the effectiveness of an outreach campaign, that’s understandable.
Remember, however, that links from highly relevant websites will still benefit your site, even if they do not have high authority.
Don’t let your outreach efforts be discarded because the links gained don’t score high with these metrics.
Conclusion
The best way to construct a report on SEO is to consider it a story. First, who is the audience? Make sure you are writing your report in a level of language they will understand.
Create a narrative. What do you want these metrics to say? Do you include all the twists and turns, and are you being honest about the metrics you comment on?
Make sure you bring the report to a conclusion. If there is action to be taken from it, what is that action? Highlight and reiterate anything you want stakeholders to remember as a key takeaway from the report.
Finally, seek reviews on your reports. Ask your stakeholders to give you feedback on the report.
Determine if it meets their needs or if additional context or data is needed. Essentially, this report is for them. If they aren’t getting value from it, then you are doing your SEO work a disservice.
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