What Should an SEO Report Include?

One of the most common questions we get at Demandwell is: “what are the most important SEO metrics to track and include in reports?” It’s no surprise this question is so popular. There’s a staggering number of metrics vying for your attention — so many that it’s easy to feel like you’re being buried in an avalanche of data. You want to cut out the fluff and narrow in on the metrics that actually matter.

To create informative, focused SEO reports, you should prioritize two main areas.

Macro Reporting

First, it’s essential to look at how your strategy is going overall. This high-level overview should answer questions like these:

• Are you ranking for more keywords as your activity increases?
• Is your organic footprint growing?
• Are the keywords that are showing up in your organic footprint diversifying over time or remaining stagnant?
• Is your content that’s ranking getting impressions?
• Is your content that’s ranking getting clicks?
• Are clicks resulting in conversions? In other words, is your content generating leads?

At Demandwell, we use our Need-to-Lead Funnel to help you compile answers to questions like these. The Need-to-Lead Funnel reveals a top-down overview of your content strategy’s overall performance by combining data from Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and from your own content production on Demandwell. The resulting graphs illustrate the growth of your organic search channel over time.

Micro Reporting

Inside that high-level macro funnel are many different lower-level micro funnels. These micro funnels place your content under a microscope to improve your understanding of how specific URLs or keywords are performing. Drilling further into the details can show you the reasons behind the macro-level impacts you’re seeing from your SEO strategy.

Your low-level micro funnel reporting should include metrics like:

• Impressions – the number of times your content appears in users’ search engine results.
• Clickthrough rate (CTR) – the percentage of impressions that result in the user clicking on your content.
• Keyword rankings – Which positions your content is ranking in for your target keywords (if it’s ranking at all).
• Visitors – the number of visitors who land on your site via organic search.
• Content published for keyword – the amount of content you’ve published that targets a particular keyword.

Targeted metrics like these inform your understanding of your big-picture SEO progress by telling you exactly what’s going on “under the hood.” Tracking, on a page-by-page basis, which keywords are driving traffic is a great way to break down your strategy’s macro-level successes and failures. Finding out why a certain piece of content is ranking so well for particular keywords is critical for taking actionable steps toward improving your other pieces of content.

The Takeaway

By combining top-level insights about the overall health of your content strategy with bottom-level insights about individual page metrics, you can create a well-rounded SEO report that reveals not only how your SEO strategy is playing out but why it’s playing out that way.

The metrics listed here are some of the most useful ones in general. However, every SEO strategy is a little different. If you’re not sure which metrics are most relevant to your organization’s unique content goals, our friendly, knowledgeable consultants can help you build a tailored SEO plan.