How To Read SEO Ranking Reports
SEO Ranking Reports are part of our comprehensive monthly SEO packages. Unlike other digital marketing and SEO agencies, we provide you with an in-depth report of your website’s health, traffic, and keyword positions. On a monthly basis we generate the report and go over it with you that way you are not left in the dark. Below we will go over and break down what is in and how to read our SEO Report.
SEO Ranking Reports
Understanding the Data
As a part of our digital marketing service, our clients get a monthly SEO report. Any good Search Engine Optimization (SEO) service provider will send regular reports out. How else would their clients know the service they are paying for is working? Our reports contain the latest data on our client’s site. Most of the data is provided by Google’s algorithm. The algorithm is the rules that guide SEO strategies and makes the internet function in the most efficient way possible.
Unless you are someone who knows a lot about website marketing, the data provided on SEO reports may be confusing to understand. Slicks Digital is here to help! We will use an example on one of our reports and go discuss what each section is about. Then we will explain what the data in our SEO report means.
Website Designing & Optimizing
There is a few things to keep in mind when looking at an SEO Report.
Website marketing as a lot of factors that go into it, due to Google’s algorithm, and it can be easy to misunderstand the data without knowing these few things first…
- SEO is a "long game" - don't expect overnight changes during your campaign. All good things take time!
- Highs and lows happen - it doesn't always mean something is wrong with your site specifically. It is usually an outside event causing the changes.
- Consistent effort is the only way to move forward and up. Neglecting or stopping your SEO efforts will only hurt your website marketing campaign.
- You should never compare your numbers to another site's data. This is because each report will be unique to a site's individual circumstances and website marketing goals.
Backlinks & SEO
Search Engines look for a few factors when choosing which website to display in the Search Engine Results Page. One of the most important factors is relevant content to the search query, but also page authority. This is known in the industry as Authority Score, Domain Rank, or Domain Authority. The best way to increase your authority score is through acquiring backlinks. Below we will go over what backlinks are, they types of backlinks, and their importance.
Backlinks are when other websites link back to your site. While its handy to have other places that lead potential customers to your page, backlinks do much more!
Backlink are important to SEO because because it gives your site power and authority. Where these backlinks comes from are vital because it will effect how much power and authority your site will receive.
Receiving power & authority from backlinks is a part of how Google’s algorithm determines if your site is trustworthy and is a quality site. It helps determine if your site is worthy on being found quicker and easier during Google searches.
You can receive backlinks organically by have good content people want to share. Its also possible to ask or pay for links. Although organic ones are the most beneficial for your SEO.
Yellow Pages is an unrelated site to Shake Shack. The link they provided goes to Shake Shack’s site, this is what a backlink is.
Is how many websites link back to your site. So, as an example, if Slicks Graphics linked to your site that is 1 referring domain. If Slicks linked to your site twice it would still only be 1 referring domain but 2 backlinks. If Slicks Graphics and Yellow Pages both linked to your site once, then that would be 2 referring domains and 2 backlinks.
References the IP address of the sites giving you backlinks. IP addresses are the areas in which a site is based. Knowing your Referring IPs data would tell you about where your site is finding relevance. It can reference countries, counties, states or even towns
Follow links are the ones every website wants because these are the ones that Google’s algorithm counts. Follow links are what provides power and authority. Nofollow links, while still being a site leading to your site doesn’t count to the algorithm. Thus, no extra benefits are provided by a Nofollow link.
Our Website Marketing Plans Include Getting Backlinks for Your Site
So, lets talk about the actual data itself and what it means for this particular example. These numbers are going to tell us some very interesting things.
Click on the arrows to see the next section of the report explained!
These 1.1K links come from 162 different sites (referring domains). So this tells us that some of these sites provided multiple backlinks.
They also come from from 149 different IP addresses (referring IPs). That means there is some variety in where these backlinks are geographically coming from.
66% of the backlinks are follow links and thus are providing relevance, aka power and authority. Out of our 1.1K links we can see 750 of them are follow links.
34% of those links are Nofollow, and while still nice to have another way to lead people to the site don't beneficially effect the SEO report data. Out of the 1.1K links, 392 of them are nofollow.
Domain Score, which is the similar to the Google's PageRank, focuses on the amount and quality of the backlinks. Trust Score counts how many backlinks are from trusted and respected sources.
All that information above contributes to the Authority Score. This score how trustworthy and popular your site. Domain Score and Trust Score are apart of Authority Score calculations. A high Authority Score is good news for your SEO, but it takes a long time to build.
A high Authority Score is good news for your SEO, but it takes a long time to build. A part of Slicks Graphics' Website Marketing service is to hunt for backlinks that we can actively get for our client's sites. This, along with updated and quality on-page content will help earn backlinks and thus improve Authority Score.
Organic SEO
Organic SEO takes work to set up but, if done effectively, will bring visitors to your site naturally. This part of the report focuses primarily on keywords which are vital to getting your site found organically. What we mean by organically is that people can find the site by their own search and not because of Ads. A part of Slicks Graphics’ Digital Marketing service is researching which relevant keywords are being used and implementing them on our client’s websites. We do this to increase the potential amount of visitors to the site, and thus potential customers for the client.
Lets go over some important terms to know…
These search terms, which can also be phrases or questions, are what people frequently search to find products or services. For example, if we wanted Slicks Graphics to be found organically, we would want our site to be found by people who search for keywords such as: website marketing agency or vehicle wrap company, etc…
How do you get keywords to apply to your website? From its content! The literal text, images, videos and tags that make up your site is what contributes to the keywords the site might be found with.
Both of these refer to how many people are searching for or visiting certain sites. Traffic is the amount of people who have visited your site. Volume usually refers to the amount of people searching for certain keywords nationally. The goal of your SEO efforts is to get some of that volume to become traffic.
Is where your site’s keywords land on the first 100 pages of a Google Search. Ideally you want as many keywords as possible to land on the first couple pages of a search because that increases the potential that someone will visit your site.
Slicks Digital SEO Marketing Plans Strive to Get You Organic Site Traffic
So what can we learn from this part of the example SEO report? We can see how much traffic the site is getting, what keywords are doing well, if keywords have changed their rankings and how their keywords’ rankings are distributed on a Google search result.
Click on the arrows to see the next section of the report explained!
This example has 271 visitors for this month. Next to it we an see that it is a bit lower than the past month's traffic, down by 13%. This isn't necessarily a problem.
On the report we can see this example has 511 ranking keywords. That is an increase of 9% from last month! Even small growth is something to appreciate. Keywords usually have other keywords, phrases or questions that they naturally associate with and over time you can rank for those as well.
We can also see how much in Ad cost it would take to get the same organic results by looking at the "Traffic Cost" results in the report.
Sometimes seeing a drop in traffic or keywords can tell us we need to make adjustments to an SEO plan, but typically the dip in traffic is a completely normal and externally caused event. For example, the recent COVID-19 pandemic caused thousands of sites and industries to have a large dip in their traffic. This doesn't mean their SEO efforts are wrong, just that the pandemic changed what people were searching for during that time.
Another example would be any industry that has work heavily influenced by the seasons. No one will be looking for a company that plows snow when it is summer, so it shouldn't be concerning when traffic for that service drops during warmer seasons.
As seen before, the report reminds us that the example has 511 ranking keywords. The bar graph of the bottom shows how those keywords are distributed on the first 100 pages of Google.
6 keywords can be found on the first 3 pages of a search and that is great! That means there are 6 potential searches that are very likely to lead visitors to the site and thus potentially become paying customers. It will not be unusual, especially in the beginning of an SEO campaign to see the most of your keywords rank on lower pages. There is only one way and that is up! Just takes time and effort to get there.
Under "Top Keywords" we can see the keywords that no only are ranking well but also have some valuable volume amounts. This report also show an estimate of the amount of traffic that keyword brings to the site. Next to it is "Top Position Changes" and this section shows if any keywords have changed their rankings since the last report. Even seeing small changes are a good thing to see cause it means the SEO plan is working.
Position Tracking SEO Report Data
If you are one of our clients, this next section may or may not be in your monthly report. If you are still in the early stages of an SEO service then Google Analytics may not have enough data to go off of. Do not be concerned if this isn’t on your report at first because it will be added later.
Position Tracking gives even more data on traffic and keyword rankings. It will show positive and negative changes but you shouldn’t be alarmed if some negative changes occur. Rises and dips occur naturally all the time in the long-game of SEO – so long as its a steady, gradual rise upwards then a few small dips are nothing to worry about.
If you were to have a 100% on this score then that would mean you’d have every single keyword in the top ranking positions. Keep in mind that this is fairly rare, but it does say that the more visibility your site has, the better.
This number is calculated by the amount of keywords you have and their volume worth. In this case, just like the last one, the higher the number the better. This gives us insight on if the current ranking keywords are actually helping garner traffic or not.
Is what is sounds like, the average ranking of all the campaign’s keywords. The graph below that number will show a longer history of this data’s peaks and dips.
Our SEO reports are designed to inform our clients about their site's performance
Overall this example’s SEO report is showing improvement which is always a great sight too see.
We can see under “Top Keywords by Positive Impact” which keywords have increased their ranking position and how much that has improved the site’s visibility.
“Top Pages by Number of Keywords” is helpful in telling us which pages on the example’s site are getting increasing or decreasing visibility based on the keywords being focused on.
Site Health & SEO
Search engines like Google do consider how “healthy” a site is when deciding rankings. This take a lot of things into consideration such as links, hosting provider and more!
Our SEO reporting software crawls your page, just like Google does and warns us about potential problems on the site. A crawl refers to Google or other SEO systems scanning an entire site to determine all sorts of data about it. What is the site about? Does it have good content? What are it’s keywords? Does it’s internal/eternal links work? Do not be overly concerned if it seems like the crawl finds a lot of “warnings” or “notices” these are often minor and fickle elements. The internet is a large and complicated thing so have less than 100% site health isn’t a major problem.
A Site Audit regards a site’s health and informs us on what needs improvements. Health is determined by if the site is secure, if the site’s links function, loading speed and several other factors.
Internal links refer to links on a page that go to another page within the same site. For example, see the “hosting provider” that is underlined above? That is an internal link because it leads to another article from Slicks Graphics!
External links are any links that go to a different site altogether. Such as the YELP link referenced earlier in this article!
Are minor things that don’t greatly affect your site health score but are still useful to know about for general site improvement.
Warnings are more focused on possible broken external links, pages with low word count and other more content related issues the system recommends fixing for better SEO.
These usually refer to broken internal links or pages that are down. When we see these we do try to fix them as soon as possible!
Our Website Marketing Plans Cover Site Health Monitoring Services!
How can Slicks Digital Help Your Website Marketing Goals?
A good site will look good, be easy to use and have useful content for the visitor to access. A site can’t do this if there is a lack of information, broken links and a bad design. This is why its important to invest in a Website Marketing & SEO service for many businesses. You can guarantee your site will be done correctly the first time when you start your website marketing efforts with Slicks Graphics!
Click on the arrows to see the next section of the report explained!
So in this example we see a pretty good overall site health score right at the top. 84% isn't a bad score but also isn't a perfect score. At Slicks Graphics, if we saw this score we would definitely work on those 18 errors and put a dent into the 197 warnings.
These numbers may sound like a lot, but the bigger a site is the more likely there will be errors and warnings to attend to. Smaller sites might find it a lot easier to get a perfect health score but that usually means they also are low on content which helps with ranking.
From the history graphs we can see that overall their errors are low, which is a good thing. Warnings and notices have been consistent - this means that there is 1 kind of issue that might occur on a majority of pages that haven't been touched on yet.
It should be noted that having seemingly random spikes in site audit errors doesn't necessarily mean your site suddenly went haywire. If Google changes their crawling algorithms then you may find a rise in errors and warnings. Typically these are easy changes to implement and get back into good health. If you site was in the process of adding or reworking pages then a spike can occur then too. It can sometimes work itself out by the time the end of the process occurs.
Errors can effect visibility sometimes but in this example we can say that the 18 errors haven't really effected the visibility of the site. The two circle graphs focus on how the last crawl went.
So according to this example the crawl reached all 109 pages of the site. 34 of the 109 only took 1 click to reach. The less amount a clicks a visitor has to take to get to certain content is important. Search engines do care greatly about how easily your site is able to be used for visitors.
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A big thank you to all our current website marketing clients! We designed this page for them, that way they can be fully in-the-know about their SEO service and their monthly report. Please feel free to contact us at [email protected] if you have further questions about your current campaign or recent SEO report.
If you are not currently doing website marketing but are interested we would love to speak to you about how we can reach the goals you have set for your website. Need a site built? Just need help ranking your site on Google? Slicks Graphics is here to help! Please contact us today so we can discuss the best option for you, consultations are always free!
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