SEO reports turn hard-to-grasp data into clear tips that help you make smart choices and show the value of your work.

Good reports tell the story of how well your site works through easy-to-read charts and key stats.

This guide gives you two free tools to make your work quicker:

1. SEO Audit Checklist Tool: Make full, custom check lists in just a click
2. SEO Report Builder Chart Generator: Build pro-grade charts for your reports in no time

Good SEO reports need you to check your site's tech health, content quality, backlink profiles, and keyword ranks so you can spot both flaws and growth areas.

The best part? You don't need to pay for high-cost tools - you can do all this for free when you know the right way.

Learn how to build professional SEO reports from scratch, or discover how to get most of the work done for free with the right tools:

• What does an SEO report look like?
• How to do SEO analysis of a website?
• How to create a SEO audit report?
• Is there a free tool available for SEO analysis?

What does an SEO report look like?

SEO reports give a quick view of key search stats that show how well searchers can find your site online.

These files show key facts like where your terms rank, how many people find you on their own, how good your links are, how well your site works, how visitors use your site, and if they buy from you.

Good reports use plain charts to show trends at a glance with no fuss, tying search stats to cash gains through clear, quick tips you can use right now.

SEO reports come in a few main types, each for a set task:

• Month-to-month reports track growth through time, putting new stats next to old ones to show if things get better.
• Tech audit reports spot site health flaws with how you rank to show which to fix first.
• Competition Research reports put your stats next to those who compete for the same terms, to show where you win and where you might grow.

The best reports keep the same form all through, so busy folks can skim them fast to get what they need.

How SEO reports look has changed a lot, from tons of text to clean dash views with quick-grasp charts and red/green marks.

New-style reports use color cues to show at once if stats go up or down, with green for good trends and red for spots that need work.

This way of showing stats helps turn hard facts into clear views that all can grasp, no tech know-how needed.

How to do SEO analysis of a website?

1. Make Sure Your Site Is Indexed
2. Check for Duplicate Versions of Your Site
3. Ensure Your Site Is Mobile-Friendly
4. Evaluate Your Site Speed
5. Crawl Your Site for Technical Errors
6. Check Core Web Vitals
7. Review Content Quality
8. Check Your Site's On-Page SEO
9. SEO Crawler (technical analysis)
10. Analyze Your Backlink Profile
11. Backlink Research
12. Backlink Monitoring
13. Analyze Your Organic Traffic
14. Keyword Tracking
15. Keyword Research
16. Benchmark Against Competitors
17. Find Keywords You're Missing Out On
18. Find Missing Backlink Opportunities
19. Check Your Presence in SERP Features

Make Sure Your Site Is Indexed

Check if Google and other search tools can find and read your site by looking at the index stats in Google Search Console.

If your pages aren't in the index, they won't show up when people search - no matter how well you've set them up.

This first big step tends to show surprising gaps where key pages stay out of sight due to blocks in your robots file, no-index tags, or paths that bots can't crawl.

You can check any search engine by typing in your domain name, but some engines have user accounts that tell you which URLs they know about after you prove ownership of your website.

Check for Duplicate Versions of Your Site

Search tools get mixed up when they see more than one form of your site (www vs non-www, http vs https).

Google will tell you exactly what they know about any specific URL on your website when you log in to GSC and use the URL Inspection Tool

To fix these issues with proper redirects and canonical tags is tedious work but essential - or else you end up competing against yourself in search rankings.

Ensure Your Site Is Mobile-Friendly

Since Google now checks the mobile view of sites first, your site must work right on all small screens.

Google's Mobile Test tool was retired at the end of 2023, so Lighthouse is the best way to find mobile errors.

Lighthouse is also available in modern browsers as part of the Developer Toolkit.

These fixes may need help from coders and can be hard to solve, most of all on old sites made when mobile views were not seen as key.

Evaluate Your Site Speed

How fast your page loads affects both where you rank (to a small extent) and if folks stay.

Tools like PageSpeed and GTmetrix help find what slows you down, but their tech tips can be hard to grasp.

To make things fast means you may need to shrink pics, clean up code, and tweak how your site runs - tasks that need skilled solutions. Many times, a simple plugin can help.

Crawl Your Site for Technical Errors

Use crawling tools to identify broken links, redirect chains, missing meta tags, and other technical issues that hamper search performance.

This process can be time-consuming for larger sites, generating overwhelming reports with hundreds or thousands of issues that must be manually prioritized and addressed.

Often times, the best way to see this is from the viewpoint of a web crawler and most SEO tools offer some kind of crawl test. Some actually crawl, while some just test for 'crawlability', meaning it 'could' be crawled, maybe...

Check Core Web Vitals

Google's Core Web Vitals check how fast your page loads, how quick it lets folks click, and if stuff jumps around on screen.

Search Console shows these scores, but to fix bad ones takes deep tech skills and good coders.

Small firms tend to have a hard time with these since they don't have pros who know both how to make sites fast and how it ties to SEO ranks.

Fortunately, the actual scores and rank are not directly tied to rank, but seriously bad scores may hurt you and annoy your users.

It is important to pay attention to this, but do not confuse its power.. a "good enough" score is "good enough", and high scores do not help rank, in most cases. Follow what is working in the SERP for your keyword.

Review Content Quality

Look at your text to see if it's full, true, and fits what folks search for.

This means you must read and judge each key page - which eats up time if you have lots of text.

Watch for weak text, old facts, and spots where your competitors give more help to those who visit.

There is quality and there is quality... a "good" article may not show the signs Google is picking up. A "bad" article could get good objective quality scores.

Usually using this to gauge a SERP helps to illustrate a larger strategy taking place, rather than each of the parts on their own being of much influence on rank.

Check Your Site's On-Page SEO

Look at page titles, small blurbs, headings, and where the key terms show up on your pages.

This slow check of each page takes way more time as you add more pages to your site, but serve as an intro to your page as many unrequested links will use these as their link text.

Hunt for parts you missed, same titles on more than one page, and ways to make your page parts match what folks are seeking.

SEO Crawler (technical analysis)

Use smart SEO tools that act like search bots to see your site, and find tech flaws you can't see with just your eyes.

These tools are strong but make big, complex charts that need deep SEO know-how to grasp.

The flood of facts can stop you cold if you don't have a clear plan for which flaws hurt your ranks the most.

Analyze Your Backlink Profile

Look at how many good sites link to yours with tools like Ahrefs or Semrush.

This work takes a sharp eye to tell good links from bad, but most links are only ever a good thing.

Without paid tools, you can't do this job well, since free tools show just a small part of all your links.

This kind of data is not cheap to gather and keep up to date, so any reliable source has some serious costs involved.

Backlink Research

Find what sites link to competitors but not to you, to spot where you might get new links.

This means you must check and mix lots of data and this takes huge chunks of time if you don't have top tools.

Then reach out and track who you've asked for links adds more work to a task that's hard from the start.

Backlink Monitoring

Keep tabs on new and lost links to guard your site from bad acts and see what link strategies work best.

To set this up right takes tech smarts and eyes on it all the time, but it pays to recover lost links and understand that the internet does decay over time.

With no way to make this run on its own, most firms let it slide as they deal with what seems more important at the time.

Analyze Your Organic Traffic

Study your website's performance in search using Google Analytics or similar tools to identify traffic patterns, user behavior, and conversion rates.

Connecting this data to specific SEO efforts requires careful analysis across multiple platforms.

Many businesses struggle to move beyond basic metrics to the insights that actually drive strategic decisions.

Keyword Tracking

Monitor your keyword rankings over time to measure SEO progress and spot potential issues early.

Setting up proper tracking across different locations and devices (mobile, desktop) requires good tools and weekly checks.

Without regular tracking, you'll miss the historical data needed to show SEO value or explain why rankings dropped.

Google Analytics is powerful and free to use with many SEO tools integrating with it for more advanced data and analysis.

Keyword Research

Find the words and terms folks use when they look for what you sell with tools like Ahrefs and Semrush.

Many other SEO tools incorporate data from these leaders in data, including SEOLinkMap.

Most firms make the big mistake of going for terms that are too hard to win or miss the long tail terms that could bring in good sales.

It is critical to know how competitive your site is when planning which keywords to target. The biggest search volume is not always the best choice.

Benchmark Against Competitors

See how your site stacks up next to your competitors to find where you shine, lag, or could grow.

This work means you need to pull stats from lots of tools and meld them well, os specific tools built for Competitor Research on specfic keyword SERPs.

If you don't have a clear plan, you'll get lost in too much data and fail to find the gems that tell you what to do next.

Find Keywords You're Missing Out On

Spot the key terms where your competitors rank for but you don't show up at all.

This hunt needs good tools and a keen eye to tell real gold from terms that won't help your firm.

The best terms to chase are hard to find, as they hide in long lists with tons of words that would take days to check by hand, but they exist!

If you are researching your competitors, start with the words they rank for (in common) and you could likely cover new topics, covering your niche more completely, better defining your relevance.

Find Missing Backlink Opportunities

Look for sites that link to those you compete with but not to you - these are the best spots to chase new links as they are likely on topic and certainly willing to link to sites like yours.

To find these, you must check huge sets of link data from more than one place at once. The 'rules' are simple, but the review process gets real boring real quick.

To turn this work into real links takes well-crafted notes to each site that take lots of time and require skills to write in an influential way.

This is often why website owners turn to professional link builders for results.

Check Your Presence in SERP Features

See how often your site appears in featured snippets, knowledge panels, image results, and other special positions in search results.

These top spots steal clicks from the plain old blue links more each day, and you do not need to be in the organic top 10 to show up on the first page in some of these SERP features.

Get on the first page without a top ten organic listing!

To win these prime spots, you must know what each feature type needs from your page and backlink profile and make small tweaks to both tech and text that boost your shot at them.

Google is very selective, so chance plays a part, but solid, helpful, clear page design with a healthy dose of being able to see "what works" and "what doesn't" can help you understand the search intent Google is preferring for specific keywords.

How to create a SEO audit report?

1. Define Your SEO Report Goals and Audience
2. Choose the Right Data Sources for Your SEO Report
3. Select Essential SEO Metrics to Track
4. Collect and Extract Your SEO Data
5. Clean and Organize Your Data
6. Create Effective Data Visualizations
7. Analyze Trends and Identify Key Insights
8. Develop Actionable Recommendations
9. Design a Professional Report Layout
10. Automate and Schedule Regular Reports
11. Present Your SEO Report Effectively

A good SEO report shows what's wrong with a site and gives a path to fix each issue, ranked by what will help the most.

An amazing report is built from measurements, not generalized assertions.

Follow these steps to build reports that turn complex SEO data into plain facts that drive real change.

Define Your SEO Report Goals and Audience

Start by clear goals for what your chart needs to do and who will read it. Each group - the top brass, sales teams, or coders - need their own type of stats and look.

This first step gets rushed too much, which leads to charts that don't help those who need them or give tips they can't use.

Time spent here saves you from the waste of big, full charts that stakeholders won't read through or grasp.

Choose the Right Data Sources for Your SEO Report

Pick good tools that give you the right stats for your task.

From GA and Search tools to the big SEO sites, each has its own strengths and flaws.

When you use more than one source, you'll need to fix the gaps by hand, since stats don't tend to match well from site to site.

This dull task gets much worse when you try to see how things have changed through past months.

Select Essential SEO Metrics to Track

Pick the stats that match what you need, and don't fall for the trap of trying to track it all.

Stick to facts that help you make calls, not just those that look cool but don't lead to real steps.

If you lack this tight scope, your charts will get stuffed with facts that hide what's key and make it hard for teams to see what counts.

Collect and Extract Your SEO Data

Pull stats from your key sites, which may need more than one data grab and at times an API hook to get the full scope of data.

This step that seems quick can turn hard when you face caps on what you can pull, rate limits, and stats that don't match up from place to place.

Gathering data could have you jumping between sites, but the goal is to let it all settle in front of you before digging into it any further. Once you know what you are working with, it is easier to put it together.

Clean and Organize Your Data

Sift through raw facts to cut fluff, fix odd forms, and build a clean set of data for your work.

This step could have you 'normalizing' large sets of data and performing some other math so that different scales of data can work together better in future steps.

If you skip this clean-up phase, charts may have bad facts that hurt trust and lead to wrong tips based on bad or same-twice data spots.

Create Effective Data Visualizations

Turn hard facts into charts and graphs that show how well things work at a glance.

Good charts need both an eye for design and the experience to know which type works best for each kind of data.

Most folks have a hard time with the mix of plain and full views, which leads to charts that are too hard to grasp or too thin on facts to tell the whole tale.

I always feel a special sense of accomplishment when a chart or graph starts showing multiple related datasets together, packing info into all sensory levels.

Analyze Trends and Identify Key Insights

Look at your data to find real growth paths, links, and ways to make things work that tell the full tale of how your site is doing.

This task needs real skill to tell true trends from just luck or odd blips in the data.

This phase works best after the initial data is gathered, allowing stats to be combined to reveal higher meanings.

As an example: readability stats, content length, and heading count can tell us about the level of detail and complexity used in a webpage helping us understand the audience that to ppages appeal to.

Not a guarantee of ranking, but a clear set of boundaries around what Google thinks their searchers want to see, built from objective measurements.

Develop Actionable Recommendations

Turn your facts into clear, ranked tips that teams can use to make things work well.

Changing tech facts to real steps takes both SEO smarts and grasp of what the site needs.

Most reports mess up at this key point, with broad hints like "make your words better" that don't give clear steps non-tech staff can take.

Solid, actionable advice helps keep everything and everyone on track.

Design a Professional Report Layout

Lay out your findings in a clear format that's quick to read, with neat parts and the same look all through.

Making slick reports can be a task that takes too much time, as you try to make it look good while not cramming too much on the page.

But you took th advice from earlier and had the data already gathered! You really saved a lot of sloppy effort if you have your data ready by this phase in the plan.

If you don't put thought into how it looks, your best points may be missed or seen wrong when placed in messy sheets that don't flow well.

Automate and Schedule Regular Reports

Put a plan in place to make your SEO reports run with less work from you each time.

This takes some work up front but saves loads of time down the road.

Most teams get stuck making new reports from scratch each month, which wastes time and leads to mixed facts and stats.

A good set-up means you can click once and get fresh data right when you need it.

Present Your SEO Report Effectively

Share what you learn in a way that makes sense and gets folks to make real changes.

This step can make or break all your hard work - get it wrong and your tips may sit and do nothing.

It's hard to talk tech to teams who don't know SEO terms, so keep it plain and clear.

When you don't, you'll find that your best tips don't get used, no matter how good they are.

Is there a free tool available for SEO analysis?

The SEOLinkMap SEO Report Builder is a free tool that scans your entire website and integrates with GSC and GA4.

This turns hours of work into a quick task, with clear action steps that help you rank higher in search results, and giving you neat reports you can share with clients right away.

Compare the normal way of making reports that takes 4-6 hours of work against the SEOLinkMap Report Builder's quick 15-minute process with its simple drag and drop tools that give better results with neat, good-looking outputs.

Instead of piecing together screenshots and data tables, you get client-ready reports with easy drag and drop parts that always stay updated and show the freshest stats that matter the most for what you need.

Of course, we made it easy for SEO report sharing with your clients by providing expiring, revocable, read-only links that you control. Or you could generate pdf seo reports that you can share with your clients.