Must-Have SEO Reports to Meet Today's Search Optimization Challenges

SEO includes many activities, each with its own set of key performance indicators (KPIs). Tracking each KPI separately and then marrying them to see the big picture can seem daunting, but it doesn't have to be – if you have the right reports.

Initial Reports

Generated before an SEO campaign begins, these reports will allow you to measure results later. They can be generated repeatedly.
Keyword Research Reports should contain information that helps to evaluate the SEO budget and the potential cost, including a list of keywords, how many additional visitors the site can get if it ranks in the top 10 for the keywords reported, how difficult it will be to rank in the top 10, and whether it's cost-effective to promote highly competitive keywords.
Competition Analysis Reports will uncover the SEO strategy behind your competitors’ websites. They should tell you which keywords your competitors are promoting, whether it's necessary to target keywords used by competitors but not by you, and from what sites your competitors are getting their links.
Website Audit Reports will cover myriad factors related to on-page optimization. It's important to check these factors against industry standards in order to identify potential trouble points and elements that need to be improved. They should also include website and page statistics, such as PageRank, link popularity, and the number of indexed pages. A good Website Audit Report should provide information on different content-related issues:

• Page titles
• Meta tags
• Keyword density
• HTML formatting tags
• HTML validation errors
• Broken links

Outputs:

• A list of keywords and/or a keyword matrix
• Competitors’ backlink profiles
• A list of suggested improvements to the site

Ongoing Weekly Reports

These reports are used to track the SEO progress. You need them to make sure that the SEO team is heading in the right direction.
Keyword Rankings Reports: It's vital to track keyword rankings regularly to diagnose problems at an early stage. A decline in rankings during several weeks may indicate a problem such as backlinks whose anchors were removed or have been devalued.
It’s also good to compare your current keyword rankings not only against the previous check, but also against the best results ever achieved. You may also align rankings and traffic for the keywords to see if you are getting what you expected.
Competitors' Rankings Reports: Keep an eye on your competition. If an abnormal growth in their rankings is detected, it’s time to look into their backlink profiles and their on-page SEO again to see what they are up to. Then, steal...we mean, borrow...their strategy.
Link-Building Reports: Link-building is the most tedious of all SEO tasks, consuming time and money. To keep your expenditures to the minimum, closely follow your link providers’ activities, whether it’s an in-house link-building team or an outsourced company.
A link-building report should include:

• Link source URL
• Link destination URL
• Anchor text
• Linking page’s PageRank
• Number of external links on each linking page
• Number of backlinks on each linking page

You should also be able to compare these to older reports to see if backlinks are still in place and the backlink pages have not deteriorated.
Outputs:

• Current keyword rankings compared to the previous rank check
• Current competitors’ rankings compared to the previous rank check
• A list of links obtained during the reporting period