The world of SEO can be complicated to those who have just immersed themselves within the internet world, and just as complicated for those who are long-time followers. Despite the name, there is no universal metric or form of understanding that will ensure all of your bases are covered with respect to SERP rankings, content creation, keyword analysis and more. As such, a variety of reports are necessary in order to paint a more comprehensive picture that can be understood by webmasters. In the following article, we will discuss four must-have SEO reports that you’ll need to generate in order to rise above the competition and excel.

Keyword Research

A keyword research report is a fundamental element of proper SEO behaviour and will shed light on how your keyword targeting strategies are working and how they can be properly calibrated. These reports will contain valuable insight that helps determine what your SEO budget should be, as well as the keywords that your brand will wish to target. Other minutiae include stats on what it will take to break into the first page of search results, how much traffic can be expected from such efforts, and whether it is better to pursue a paid or organic approach to gaining exposure for each set of keywords.

Competition Analysis

When pinging servers for sets of data to consider, you obviously don’t want to forget about your competitors. Competition analysis reports will shed light on the activities of your competitors and give you an insight into their strategies. These reports – when done properly – will tell you which keywords they are targeting through paid and organic efforts, and whether it is worth your time to target select keywords that are currently targeted by them but not by you. You’ll also use this as a way to determine where your competitors are citing their traffic (such as which sites are linking back to them). All of this provides leads in a number of categories that makes it easier for you to close the gap.

Website Audits

Your website’s SEO friendliness and optimization plays a huge role in every single piece of content’s success. Even with proper keyword considerations, your organic effort can fall flat on its face if you do not have page titles, meta tags and other elements properly configured. A website audit report will check your website’s on-page optimization against industry standards and point out any areas that need to be corrected. Keyword density, broken or bad links, formatting tag usage, validation errors and title/tag usage are just a few of the things that a complete website audit will analyse. You’ll also be able to inspect page statistics such as PageRank, the number of indexed pages, word counts and more.

Conclusion

The three most important elements in terms of SEO reports that any webmaster must consider are competitive analysis reports, keyword research reports and website audit reports. With these tools in hand after pinging servers for the data, you’ll be able to better understand the competition, the nature of SEO and your own website.