Essential SEO Reporting Tools (and Free Checklist)

Search engine optimization (SEO) is one of the most essential marketing skills that you can master.

If you know how to do SEO analysis and report on performance, you can show the value of your content marketing efforts to your manager or CEO and develop campaigns or strategies to boost your brand’s search engine rankings for relevant keywords or terms.

In this blog, we'll look at what SEO is, how it works, its benefits, and the best SEO analysis tools for beginners.

If you're looking for a handy version of these SEO Reporting Tools, just download our checklist. It will cover everything you need to know to conduct an effective SEO analysis. 

What are the benefits of SEO reporting?

Through SEO analysis, you can gain a deeper insight into your company’s current organic traffic sources and find out exactly how consumers are arriving to and interacting with your website.

By understanding the needs and behaviors of your prospects and customers, you can create and tailor content that’s relevant. This will put your time and money where it’s likely to see a good return on investment and provide SEO optimized content that’s valuable and useful (and indexable by Google). 

If you fail to analyze and report on your SEO efforts you’re likely to see your content and brand slip down the rankings. 

SEO reporting tools will be your eyes in the dark, serving up the insights, information, and data you need to continually evolve your SEO strategy across every channel or touchpoint (from blogs and landing pages to social networks and beyond).

In our hyper-connected tech-driven age, a mix of accessible SEO analysis tools exist that shed detailed light into where your on-page and off-page SEO methods work and the areas that might need improvement.

Let’s look at some great tools to help you track, analyze and tweak your SEO efforts. 

1. Google Analytics and Google Search Console

As the primary go-to tool for digital marketers, Google Analytics or GA4 is a trusted platform that offers a wealth of information concerning your customers demographics, preferences, engagement activities, and browsing behaviors (among other important insights).

The best thing about GA4 is that there are plenty of practical how-to guides on how to use as well as navigate the platform, starting with the Digital Marketing Institute library. Have a look at our GA4 Essentials (with Neil Patel Brands) or our guide to GA4.

For SEO analysis, Google Analytics and Google Search Console are tools that will help you measure a wealth of relevant metrics based on your specific search-based goals and benchmarks.

Here are the main GA4 and Search Console SEO metrics you should focus on to spot trends, identify any issues or weaknesses, and track your ongoing performance.

Google Search Console:

• Impressions
• Clicks
• Average positions
• Click-through rate

GA4: 

• Organic sessions
• Organic conversions
• Average session duration
• Bounce rate
• Engagement rate
• Sessions per user
• Engaged sessions
• Scrolled users

Other metrics are domain authority, SERP features, backlinks and referring domains are tracked in tools like SEMRush and Ahrefs. 

You can also use Looker Studio (formerly Google Data Studio) to convert data into customizable, informative reports and dashboards that can be shared company-wide.

Top tip: There are also some alternatives to Google Analytics you should know about as well as a handy tool called URL Profiler that compiles data from GA4 and Google Search Console into one accessible interface.

2. KWFinder

If you’re looking to conduct keyword SEO analysis and share your discoveries or suggestions with your manager or CEO, KWFinder’s interface is accessible, logical, and visually-digestible.

A crafty creation from Mangools, KWFinder offers the option to conduct domain-based keyword searches and see which terms your competitors are using.

By punching a keyword discovery search into the platform, you can gain instant access to an invaluable mix of easy-to-understand information that will help you curate lists of impactful keywords for specific SEO campaigns, content or activities. This insightful information includes:

• A chart-based keyword difficulty visualization that tells you how much overall traffic competition there is for a specific keyword or term
• A keyword popularity and trend chart that shows search volumes over a particular time frame
• A detailed list of relevant keywords with metrics on search volumes, difficulties, and pay-per-click (PPC) costs: a helpful metric for any paid marketing analysis or reporting activities
• A keyword questions tab that will show you the most popular or relevant questions people are asking based around a specific keyword. This is particularly effective if you’re analyzing existing content and you’re looking to update or optimize it to better match a searcher’s intent or gain rankings for rich snippets.

Armed with this information, you can conduct detailed analysis on fresh keywords for optimizing existing content as well as the terms you believe will prove most valuable for new or emerging search-based campaigns. 

Once you’ve gathered your information, you can export your prospect lists and discoveries into a CSV-based report.

If you're looking for agency support in the areas of SEO, content marketing and paid media, get in touch with Neil Patel Digital.   

3. Unbounce landing page analyzer

It’s hard to emphasize why user experience (UX) is key to digital marketing and its impact on search engine rankings. Part of this is the conducting of on-page SEO analysis based on navigability and usability.

While Unbounce comes complete with a host of advanced tools and functionality, the landing page analyzer lends itself to effective UX-based on-page SEO analysis for beginners.

By typing the desired URL into the platform and detailing your page’s target keywords, Unbounce’s algorithm will serve up a straightforward report that gives a total page score while digging deeper into the UX-centric elements that count.

As well as page performance speed, SEO performance, and trust & security scores, Unbounce’s on-page analyzer tool provides a metric on Message Match (a score based on the relevancy and value of your page content—or in other words, a rating on how much it delivers on its promises)—a big SEO ranking factor.

As Unbounce measures a mix of important UX and performance-centric elements, you will be able to analyze what’s working and what needs improvement. Unbounce’s on-page report also offers a color-coded priority list of the practical measures you will need to undertake to improve your pages’ UX offerings, content, design elements, and messaging for improved SEO performance.

4. PageSpeed Insights

In addition to the quality and shareability of your content, your domain authority, and your UX offerings, your page speed performance will have an impact on your company’s overall SEO performance.

PageSpeed Insights is a powerful free tool that is easy to pick up and it returns detailed Core Web Vitals assessments as well as a breakdown of your page’s speed and loading performance. The visuals are easy to understand and with one simple search, you will get a comprehensive list of recommendations that will help you improve your pages’ performance.

You can dig deeper into the platform’s recommendations (based on either mobile or desktop analysis) or cherry pick what you feel is most relevant or valuable and report these concrete findings to senior stakeholders within the business. This is a simple tool that will add an extra layer of intelligence to your ongoing SEO reporting efforts and strategy.

Other SEO reporting tools to consider

The six SEO reporting and analysis tools above will give you a well-rounded view of your brand’s search engine optimization-based activities and performance.

Using these essential tools will also give you guidance on what to do to improve your strategy while offering concrete metrics that will validate your initiatives or suggestions. Here are some other handy tools you might want to check out:

1. SEMRush

A powerful keyword suggestion and research tool with workflow optimization capabilities and a highly-interactive visual interface.

2. AnswerThePublic

This tool uses autosuggest (also known as autocomplete) data to power its searches. That means that you can get an array of phrases organized by search volume to see what people are searching for on a particular topic. This can help you create content that your audience are looking for. 

3. Screaming Frog’s SEO Spider tool

An excellent SEO tool for website or on-page optimization and evaluation, this neat platform is perfect for technical and UX-based activities or initiatives.

4. Ahrefs

A cohesive all-in-one SEO tool that allows you to perform site audits, keyword research, content comparisons, and rank tracking from the same interface.

5. Moz

Another versatile and industry-renowned SEO platform that is particularly good for rank tracking and backlink analysis.

6. SparkToro

An audience research tool, SparkToro crawls over 80 million social profiles and web pages to find what (and who) your audience reads, listens to, watches, follows, shares, and talks about online. You can then use this information to create targeted and personalized content. 

Use SEO to optimize campaigns and drive conversions

With such competition online for prospects and customers, companies need marketers with SEO skills to boost online visibility. Our certified Search Marketing Course developed with Neil Patel will introduce you to SEO and cover key areas such as SEO set up and content, SEO optimization, SEO strategy, analytics, demand generation and much more. Sign up today to get started!

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