SEO Report - The Process

Reporting is an important part of any job that takes more than a few hours. Since SEO is a long term, ongoing process, and the results may not appear for a while after the campaign is launched, a SEO report might be the only way for a client to learn whether the necessary work on his or her site is actually being performed and check the results.  There are so many factors that might influence these results that most clients require explanations of what’s happening to their web site at the moment and what is going to be done next. To help with that there are SEO reports of all kinds to help the clients evaluate the efforts of their SEO Company.  

What is a SEO Report likely to contain? 

To answer, here is what you should expect under the logo and header of your SEO services provider:

A List of things that have been done during the month, week or any other set period that the SEO report covers. You should keep in mind that many SEO specialists will be vague in their descriptions of the work process itself since too many specific details can reveal the details of their work. Anyway, it’s ok if some terms seem strange and some actions are completely incomprehensible as below them there will be graphs and numbers that are easy to understand. 

A List of measures your SEO specialist is going to implement plans for the upcoming future.  Don't expect them to be described any clearer than the ones from the above mentioned part of the  report.
Current positions of the given website in the Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs), and if it isn’t the initial report, written before launching the project, you should also expect this part to compare the current positions with those in the past.

Website traffic data; comparing the effectiveness of the period covered by the SEO report with the previous one should also be standard.

The items listed above should be required, but sometimes a SEO report will cover other topics and factors. It may be because the standard parts of the report don't contain the information necessary to understand the work which has been performed during the given time period. Sometimes changes in the traffic and positions don’t look as good as you expect , while some other measurable factors clearly show that a positive change in site positions and a much bigger flow of visitors won't take very long to appear.  Thus the SEO report might also contain data on link popularity, new incoming links, keyword density and many other things besides the amount of traffic and the positions.

You can read more about SEO Methodologies like this article on SEO Report at SEO Management.