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Despite what you may have heard, AI Overview (AIO) has not spelled the doom of search engine optimization, better known as SEO. Organic search rankings are still a major contributor to traffic, with the top search positions earning around 39% to 43% of traffic.
Yes, that's true even when there's an AIO at the top of the page. And as always, click-through rates decrease as sites drop in ranking.
Staying on top means keeping track of your SEO efforts, and SEO reporting is a crucial part of that process. It measures the ROI of digital marketing efforts and shows how website performance contributes to overall business growth.
In this article, we'll explore how to create a valuable SEO report. You'll learn how to measure keyword rankings, organic traffic, backlinks, and technical elements, including how each factor plays into conversions. But first, we need to explore why it's worth your time and resources to create these reports.
What Is SEO Reporting and Why Does It Matter?
Think of SEO like a funnel, catching online search users and channeling them to your business's website. To know how effective your website is at generating new business, you need to understand how well that funnel works.
SEO analytics and reporting can provide those answers. By measuring a website's SEO performance, you learn whether your inbound marketing efforts are generating a strong return on investment. You get a detailed look at which aspects of your SEO strategy are going well and which need improvement.
By turning those insights into a detailed site SEO report, you can communicate your findings to stakeholders. A strong report gets buy-in from stakeholders and keeps website and SEO teams on the same page, allowing growth to happen faster.
What To Include in Your Overview
The industry-standard SEO report starts with an overview, also called an executive summary. This section highlights the main points from your report, including updates on key SEO metrics such as traffic totals, visit duration, and bounce rate. Be sure to include whether those numbers have gone up or down since the last update.
It's important to structure this section for scannability, so busy stakeholders can find the information they need at a glance. Use color coding and visual representations of data to provide the most value with the least amount of clutter.
Key Metrics To Include in Your SEO Report
Once you've provided a summary, the rest of your web SEO report can go into detail about the SEO and content marketing metrics your team is tracking. Remember to touch on each element of a comprehensive SEO strategy: keywords, links, engagement, technical SEO, and user engagement.
Tracking Organic Traffic and User Behavior
Organic traffic is a core goal of SEO. This section of your report should explore how that traffic arrives at your site and what visitors do once they get there. Do they click through and explore multiple pages or bounce away after a few seconds? These metrics help paint the picture:
- Number of visits and visitors
- Visit duration and bounce rate
- Number of pages viewed per visit
- Sources of traffic, including organic and paid channels
Be sure to indicate trends for key metrics, such as organic traffic and bounce rates.
Monitoring Keyword Rankings Effectively
Even in 2025, keyword selection can make or break your SEO strategy. Google uses keywords to match your site's content with your target audience's search intent, and the best matches tend to rank highest.
It's essential to track the performance of your core keywords, but offering details on each one can make your report look crowded. Instead, focus on graphic representations of rankings for:
- Core keywords, including branded and campaign-specific phrases
- Keywords with a significant recent increase or decrease
- Keywords in the top five, 10, or 20
If you're doing content marketing for local SEO, be sure to include localized keywords for your focus area. You may also choose to include a comparative analysis, which shows how select keywords' performance stacks up against the competition.
Evaluating Backlinks and Domain Authority
The number and quality of links to your website can be a strong indicator of what SEO experts call domain authority. Websites with high domain authority have more inbound links from reputable sites and have professional, easy-to-follow layouts that inspire trust. The simplest way to track it in SEO reporting is by adding a backlink section indicating:
- Total number of backlinks
- Number of referring domains
- Gained and lost backlinks
Be sure to separate dofollow and nofollow backlinks, as Google doesn't track anything you've marked as "nofollow." Only your "dofollow" links will impact SEO.
Measuring Conversions and Goal Completions
While factors such as backlinks and keywords matter significantly to your SEO team, some stakeholders only want to see results. For them, you'll want to include a section focused on key performance indicators (KPIs), which measure a specific type of action. Valuable SEO KPIs include:
- Conversion rate: The percentage of organic-search visitors who completed a particular action, such as purchase or signup
- Total impressions: How many times your site appeared in search results
- Click-through rate: The ratio of visitors who click on your website from the search results page
- Session duration: How much time visitors spend on your site
- Bounce rate: The share of users who leave your site in less than 10 seconds
Note changes in these metrics from the last period, adding charts or graphs for those metrics that are particularly critical to your strategy.
Assessing Website Technical Health
So far, you've looked at analyzing the results of content and design choices. Comprehensive reports also require digging into technical SEO, or the optimization of a site's coding and structure. It includes elements such as:
- Page load speed
- Mobile friendliness
- Site navigation
- Internal linking
- Crawlability
Although the developers on your team will find this section handy, you don't need a coding background to write it. A high-quality SEO reporting tool can help you identify and record technical issues, which you can send to the experts to handle.
Create Actionable Insights and Opportunities
Every SEO report should end with actionable takeaways. After providing a clear and accessible breakdown of your data, close out your report with key points and suggestions for next steps. This section may include suggestions related to:
- Content optimization
- Keyword focus
- Backlink strategy
- Site structure or design
For maximum stakeholder value, include justification from the data and actionable next steps with each point.
Tools To Generate and Analyze SEO Reports
There are two ways to generate an SEO report. You can use a premade SEO template, which you can download and use with existing tools, or create a custom report from scratch. You can generate the data using one or more free or paid analytics tools, such as:
- Google Analytics 4: This free tool generates a variety of overview-style and detailed reports on website activity, such as clicks, scrolls, and purchases.
- Google Search Console: Also free, this tool provides key information about your site's performance in Search.
- Semrush: Designed to provide comprehensive digital marketing support, including valuable keyword research tools, this paid tool lets you get started with a free SEO audit and report.
- Ahrefs: This paid digital marketing platform includes a variety of SEO reporting and content optimization tools.
- ScreamingFrog: Developed by a UK-based SEO agency, ScreamingFrog's SEO spider scans your site for common issues. The paid version is more fully featured and includes an SEO analysis report.
Using SEO Reports To Drive Growth
Regular reporting keeps your SEO efforts on the right track. It tells you whether you're targeting the right keywords, structuring your site correctly, and creating the content your audiences want to see. If you're interested in getting all of this value without the legwork of digging into the analytics yourself, Compose.ly can help.
Whether you need a site audit, keyword research report, or end-to-end strategy, our search professionals can help. Check out our available SEO services today and tell us what we can help take off your plate.
