Are you looking for reliable ways to track your organic growth in search engines?Â
Do you want to zero in on the primary SEO reports for you and your team to measure performance?
In this article, we will explore the five top reports you should be using for Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, including some of the best tools you can use to generate and analyze the data.
See How Your Website Is Doing With These SEO ReportsÂ
One of the highlights of reporting when it comes to organic search is actionable data. We are not simply looking at the numbers and going about our day; rather, we can leverage that data to inform our decisions going forward.
For example, are your previously high-ranking pages dropping consistently over time? You can decide if you want to allocate resources toward those assets. If your traffic is skyrocketing, can you track the reason and then do more of that activity for your other pages?
The following reports will help you prepare an overview of what’s happening with your website, so you can monitor organic search growth and make improvements where needed.
SEO Report #1: Rankings
By and large, the first question from many leadership teams is going to center on organic rankings. Where are we in terms of rank — are we on page 1, or are we many pages from that? Have we made any improvements over time?
The good news is there is a tool you can use to show which pages are ranking for specific keywords. It’s called Google Search Console, a.k.a. GSC, and it offers important insights into performance.
As you can see, this report shows the performance of the keyword “video call recording” over a 6-month period. You can adjust the time frame to whatever you want if you need to show growth or fluctuations. Most importantly, you can see the average position for this page in search results.
SEO Report #2: Traffic
The next question SEOs typically get is about traffic. Are we getting traffic to this page and how much?
Since the above reporting also shows “Total clicks”, you can get an idea of traffic using the same report. Again, you can adjust the time period to suit your needs or those you are giving the information.
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SEO Report #3: Sessions
Sessions is an important SEO metric because it tells you the number of unique visits to your website. It represents 1 person visiting the website regardless of the number of pages they visited. When we are talking organic sessions, it means these sessions are from users who found the website in organic search.
To view Sessions, you can use Google’s Data Studio to generate a report based on data from either Google Analytics (GA) or GSC. Since Data Studio pulls in data from these other tools, you have the option to customize how your report appears.
Like GSC, Data Studio allows you to adjust the date range if you want to show performance during certain periods. It also gives you percentage changes, which is helpful for getting an idea of improvement or decline as you monitor organic search growth.
SEO Report #4: Time on Page
Once you can show rankings, traffic, and sessions data, it is likely your team will want to know how much time people are spending on those pages.
You can easily show this in Data Studio as well. In fact, if you view the report above, you can also see that we have included the “Avg. Session Duration”, which equates to the average amount of time people are spending during their session.
This isn’t as specific as how much time is spent on a particular page, but you can always check your GA reporting for this granular data.
To pull this SEO report in GA, choose Behavior > Site Content > All Pages, and then type in the URL you want the data for in the Search field.
SEO Report #5: Bounce Rate
At this point, you may want to understand the bounce rate of your pages. Bounce rate tells you the percentage of people that leave your page without taking an action. Actions can be watching a video, clicking on a link, or filling out a form.
For example, if you are seeing decent traffic to the page but few conversions, then you may have a high bounce rate. This data can inform you on next steps, whether that is A/B testing or revisiting your on-page optimization strategy.
To view bounce rate data, you can use the same report in GA as we shared above. You can see “Bounce Rate” listed as one of the metrics.
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Learn More About SEO
These SEO reports are just the tip of the iceberg. To take a deeper dive into all facets of SEO, including reporting, check out Simplilearn’s SEO Training Course. If you want to dive deeper into all things digital marketing, you can also check out Simplilearn and Purdue University’s Post Graduate Program in Digital Marketing, co-created with Meta.