What should an SEO report include?

An effective SEO report should combine performance data with interpretation and prioritised actions. At a minimum, it should cover progress against agreed objectives, organic visibility, keyword rankings, traffic, conversions, technical health, content performance, backlink activity and the work completed during the reporting period. The report should make clear what changed, why it changed and what should happen next.

1. Reporting scope and objectives

Start by defining the reporting period, website or property covered, markets and search engines included, and the objectives being measured. Objectives might include increasing qualified organic traffic, improving visibility for commercial terms, generating more enquiries, supporting specific services or products, or resolving technical barriers to crawling and indexing.

Each objective should have a corresponding measure. This prevents the report from becoming a collection of disconnected metrics and helps the reader judge whether SEO activity is contributing to business priorities. Where targets have been agreed, show progress against them. If no formal target exists, explain the chosen baseline and the reason for using it.

2. Executive summary

The opening summary should state the main outcome for the period in plain language. It should identify the most important positive movement, any material decline or risk, the likely causes, and the actions that require attention. A useful summary does not simply repeat dashboard figures; it interprets them.

For example, a report might explain that visibility improved because priority service pages gained rankings, while enquiries remained unchanged because the additional traffic was concentrated in informational searches. This gives the reader a more accurate understanding than reporting traffic growth alone.

3. Organic visibility and keyword rankings

Include the search visibility measures that are relevant to the campaign, such as ranking distribution, average position, share of visibility, and the number of tracked keywords appearing in meaningful search positions. Show changes over time and segment the data where useful by:

• brand and non-brand searches;
• commercial, informational and navigational intent;
• service, product or topic groups;
• location or target market;
• device type; and
• individual landing pages.

Ranking data needs context. State whether the report uses desktop or mobile results, which location is being assessed, whether local results are included, and how the keyword set was selected. A small movement for one keyword is rarely meaningful on its own. Trends across a relevant group of terms, particularly those linked to important pages and conversions, provide a stronger basis for decisions.

4. Organic traffic and landing-page performance

Report organic sessions or users alongside landing-page data, rather than presenting a single site-wide total. Identify which pages gained or lost organic visits and relate those changes to rankings, search demand, seasonality, technical changes, content updates or changes in search results.

Traffic should normally be separated into brand and non-brand activity where the data allows. Non-brand traffic is often a more useful indicator of growth from SEO work, while brand traffic can be influenced by offline campaigns, repeat visitors, public relations or changes in brand awareness.

Include engagement measures only when they help explain performance. Engagement rate, engaged sessions, time-based measures and page views can indicate whether landing-page traffic is relevant, but they should not be treated as business outcomes without context. A page that answers a simple question may have a short visit and still perform its purpose successfully.

5. Conversions and business outcomes

An SEO report should connect organic activity to meaningful outcomes, including completed enquiries, telephone calls, form submissions, purchases, downloads, account registrations or other agreed goals. Show the conversion path where possible, from organic landing page through to the relevant action.

Explain any limitations in the tracking. Conversion data can be affected by consent settings, cross-domain journeys, telephone tracking, changes to analytics configuration, duplicate events and unattributed or incorrectly attributed sessions. If revenue or lead quality data is available, include it alongside conversion volume so that increased traffic is not mistaken for improved commercial performance.

Where conversions are too limited to support reliable comparisons, say so clearly and use supporting indicators such as qualified landing-page visits, calls, assisted conversions or progress towards a defined funnel stage.

6. Technical SEO health

Include the technical issues that can affect crawling, indexing, rendering, performance or user access. Relevant areas may include:

• indexation and crawlability;
• robots directives and XML sitemaps;
• canonical tags and duplicate URL handling;
• redirects, broken links and server errors;
• JavaScript rendering and structured data;
• mobile usability and page experience;
• site speed and key performance indicators; and
• security, hosting or availability issues.

Do not list every detected issue without prioritisation. Explain the affected templates or pages, the likely SEO impact, the recommended resolution and the current status. Separate critical issues that may prevent important pages from being crawled or indexed from lower-priority improvements that can be scheduled alongside other development work.

7. Content and landing-page performance

Show how important content is performing and what has changed. This can include newly published pages, refreshed content, pages that have gained or lost visibility, cannibalisation concerns, missing topic coverage and opportunities to improve titles, headings, internal links or calls to action.

Content recommendations should be based on search intent and the needs of the audience, not keyword repetition. Explain whether a page should be expanded, consolidated, redirected, restructured or left unchanged. If several pages target closely related searches, assess whether they serve distinct purposes before recommending a merger or rewrite.

8. Backlink and authority activity

Where link acquisition or digital PR forms part of the strategy, report relevant new and lost links, referring domains, the pages receiving links and the quality or relevance of those links. The useful question is not simply how many links were gained, but whether they support important pages and come from credible, relevant sources.

Also note changes that may affect interpretation, such as removed links, site migrations, nofollow or sponsored attributes, links pointing to redirected pages, and potentially harmful patterns requiring review. Avoid presenting third-party authority scores as definitive measures of ranking strength; they are comparative indicators rather than search engine outcomes.

9. Work completed and its effect

Record the SEO work completed during the period, including technical fixes, content changes, internal-linking updates, structured-data implementation, digital PR, outreach and measurement changes. Link each activity to the relevant objective and, where enough time has passed, describe the observed effect.

Not every change produces an immediate or isolated result. Search engines may recrawl pages at different times, several changes may affect the same URL, and external factors can influence performance. Use cautious language where attribution is uncertain and distinguish between confirmed outcomes, probable explanations and issues that still need investigation.

10. Competitor and search-result context

Context from the search results can explain why performance changed. Include relevant observations about competitor visibility, SERP features, changes in search intent, new result formats, local listings, shopping results, video or other prominent elements. The purpose is to explain the competitive environment and identify opportunities, not to produce a list of competitor metrics without a decision attached.

11. Prioritised actions for the next period

The final section should turn findings into an actionable plan. Each recommendation should include:

• the specific task;
• the page, template or process affected;
• the reason it matters;
• the expected SEO or business outcome;
• the priority and dependencies;
• the suggested owner; and
• how completion or impact will be assessed.

Prioritise actions by likely impact, confidence, effort and urgency. For example, resolving an indexing directive on an important service template may take precedence over refining copy on a page that already performs well. Keep recommendations specific enough for a marketing, content or development team to implement without having to reinterpret the finding.

How to make the report reliable

Use consistent date ranges, filters, keyword sets and attribution definitions so that comparisons remain meaningful. Annotate major website releases, migrations, tracking changes, algorithm updates and seasonal events. Reconcile figures between platforms where practical, but do not force them to match: analytics, search performance data, rank tracking and backlink tools measure different things and use different sampling or attribution methods.

A strong report balances detail with decisions. Include supporting tables or page-level data for people who need to investigate, but make the principal findings easy to find. Every important metric should answer a practical question: what happened, why does it matter, and what should we do next?