5 Free Templates for Your Next SEO Report
It’s a cutthroat world out there for SEO. Businesses are putting tons of resources into content production, SEO consulting, and even dedicated agencies — all to get that top spot in Google’s search results. But with resources come expectations, and if you’re part of these efforts, you might be expected to draft up an SEO report, and a template is definitely going to make that a lot easier.
Whether you’re an expert or your company’s closest thing, here’s a guide to getting your SEO reports right with a few templates to get you started.
What is an SEO report?
Whether you’re an aspiring search engine optimization (SEO) expert, a consultant, or a marketer who happens to work with SEO as part of your role, you might need to report on a website’s SEO performance. Your target audience might be a department head, other marketers, or even a CEO, and your mission is to communicate SEO performance in a way that suggests actionable insights — or at least helps people gauge the effectiveness of previous initiatives.
The actual form of this report can vary, depending on the type of team you’re working with, the kind of performance they’re looking for, and even how big their business is.
Let’s look at some things you’ll want to include in your own report.
What does an SEO report need to include?
Before you build your report, it’s always a good idea to ask the recipient what they want to see. Usually, they’ll be able to give you an idea of what they need. But if they just give you blank stares when you ask, here’s where you should start.
SEO KPIs
A KPI (key performance index) is a metric used to track performance. They’re used for performance reviews, project management, reporting on a team’s effectiveness, and more. In the SEO world, you can use KPIs to share how SEO efforts have a direct impact on business goals. For a software product, that might be signups that began on a specific blog post. For a brick-and-mortar business, you might look at the number of promotional codes that were redeemed after being given away on a website.
Keyword rankings
All SEO efforts are ultimately aimed at helping webpages get the top rankings in search results for specific keywords — usually directly related to the product or service you’re offering. So, naturally, an SEO report will usually include these keywords and their rankings.
Organic traffic
When a website starts getting high-ranking keywords, it usually brings in more organic traffic. “Organic” here simply means that you haven’t paid for this traffic or brought it through another marketing channel — it’s all coming from search engines.
Backlinks
A backlink is a link leading to a page on your company’s website from some other website. These backlinks can be acquired naturally (because your website has high-performing keywords) or through a direct partnership (usually by exchanging backlinks with another website). An SEO report will usually communicate the total number of backlinks your website is getting as well as the number of backlinks for individual webpages.
CTR
CTR (or click-through rate) is a metric that shows the percentage of people who click on a link leading to your website after seeing it pop up in search results. Determining what’s a “good” CTR will depend a lot on your industry but you’ll usually want to shoot for at least 3-5%. Include this in your SEO reports to identify which webpages aren’t just ranking high in search results, but actually bringing visitors to your website.
5 SEO report templates from the experts
Because SEO is such a widespread practice, there are tons of people out there trying to do the exact same thing you’re doing, and many of them have shared the templates they use for the SEO reports. All these templates can be used with widely-available tools like Google Sheets and Microsoft Word, meaning you don’t need any special platforms to make them work.
SEO report template from Ahrefs
Since they’re behind one of the top SEO tools on the market, it shouldn’t be surprising that the team at Ahrefs has one of the best SEO report templates out there. This template for Google Slides will walk you through everything you should have in your report — and works best when you export data from Ahrefs.
Backlinko SEO report template
You can get this template for Google Docs, Word, or as a PDF, and it lets you plug in data from Google Analytics — which you should already have access to as part of your domain. It’ll even walk you through how to get that data and how you can explain it to different stakeholders.
SEO report template for Google Sheets
If you’d rather use a spreadsheet to report on your site’s SEO performance, this is the template for you. You can plug in data from Google Search Console and get numbers for traffic, impressions, and clicks for every page.
Local SEO report template
For some businesses, knowing their website’s SEO performance for their immediate area is more important than tracking any other kind of data — think of brick-and-mortar businesses and service-based industries. If you’re working in these fields, then this is the SEO report template for you.
SEO content audit template
If reporting on your site’s SEO performance is part of your role, being able to give clients or stakeholders actionable next steps is essential. With this template, you can help them go from a report to a content audit that’ll help them squeeze more value out of their SEO efforts.
Reporting in
Whether you’re building an SEO report for a CEO, a department head, or your colleagues, make sure it communicates performance and gives actionable next steps. Usually, that means mentioning traffic, keyword rankings, and other important KPIs. Start with the right template and your report will take you minutes instead of hours.
Need to report on a broader project?
If your SEO report is part of a broader project, here's our guide to other common reports for project management