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There’s no shortage of SEO reporting tools to choose from, but what are the most important tools you need to put together an SEO report?
In this article, I’ll share eight of my favorite SEO reporting tools to help you create a comprehensive SEO report for free.
Price: Free
Google Search Console, also known as GSC, is one of the most commonly used tools to track important data SEO statistics from Google Search.
Most common use case for reporting
GSC has a lot of data to dig into, but the key performance indicator that SEOs in GSC look at first is that Click on the main one Overview dashboard.
Because the data comes from Google, SEOs consider it a good barometer for tracking organic search performance. In addition to click data, you can also track the following via the Performance report:
- Total number of impressions
- Average CTR
- Average position
Tip
But for most SEO reportingGSC click data is exported to a spreadsheet and converted into a graph to visualize year-over-year performance.
Favorite feature
One of my favorite reports in GSC is the Indexing report. It is useful for SEO reporting because you can share the ratio of indexed to non-indexed pages in your SEO report.
If the website has many unindexed pages, it is worth reviewing the pages to understand why they are not indexed.
Price: Free
Google Looker Studio (GLS), formerly known as Google Data Studio (GDS), is a free tool that helps you visualize data in shareable dashboards.
Most common use case for reporting
Dashboards are an important part of this SEO reportingand with GLS, you can get a big picture of search performance from multiple sources thanks to its integrations.
With GLS you can connect to many different data sources out of the box.
As:
- Marketing products – Google Ads, Google Analytics, Display & Video 360, Search Ads 360
- Consumer products – Google Sheets, YouTube and Google Search Console
- Databases – BigQuery, MySQL and PostgreSQL
- Social media platforms – Facebook, Reddit and Twitter
- Files – Uploading CSV files and Google Cloud Storage
Footnote.
If you don’t have time to manually create your own report, Ahrefs has three Google Looker Studio connectors that can help you create automated SEO reporting for any website in just a few clicks
This is what a dashboard in GLS looks like:
With this type of dashboard you share clear reports with customers or other stakeholders.
Favorite feature
The ability to combine and filter data from different sources, such as GA and GSC, means you get a customized overview of your overall search performance, tailored to your website.
Price: Free for 500 URLs
Screaming Frog is a website crawler that allows you to monitor your website.
Screaming Frog’s free version of its crawler is perfect if you want to do a quick audit of some URLs. The free version is limited to 500 URLs, making it ideal for crawling smaller websites.
Most common use case for reporting
When it comes to reporting, the Reports menu in Screaming Frog SEO Spider has a wealth of information for you to view that covers all technical aspects of your website such as analytics, redirects, canonical data, pagination, hreflang, structured dataand more.
Once you’ve crawled your site, all you need to do is download the reports you need and work out the key issues that you can summarize in your SEO report.
Favorite feature
Screaming Frog can retrieve data from other tools including Ahrefsusing APIs.
If you already had access to the APIs of some SEO tools, you could pull the data from all of these APIs directly into Screaming Frog. This is useful if you want to combine crawl data with performance data or other third-party tools.
Even if you’ve never configured an API before, it’s easy to connect other tools to Screaming Frog.
Price: Free
Ahrefs has a wide range free SEO tools to help you at every stage of your SEO campaign, and many of these can be used to provide insights for your SEO reporting.
For example, you can use our:
Most common use case for reporting
One of our most popular free SEO tools is Ahrefs Webmaster Tools (AWT), which you can use for your SEO reporting.
Of AWTyou can:
- Monitor your SEO status over time by setting a schedule SEO audits
- View the performance of your website
- Check all known backlinks for your website
Favorite feature
Of all the free tools from Ahrefs this is my favorite AWT. Within that, site audit is my favorite function. Once you’ve set it up, it’s a completely hands-free way to track your website’s technical performance and monitor its health.
If you already have access to Google Search Console, don’t worry establish a free AWT account and schedule a technical crawl of your website(s).
Price: Free
Ahrefs’ SEO toolbar is a free Chrome And Firefox extension that is useful for diagnosing technical issues on the page and running quick checks on the pages of your website.
Most common use case for reporting
For SEO reporting, it is useful to perform an on-page check on your website top pages to make sure there are no serious ones problems on the page.
With the free version you get the following features:
- On-page SEO report
- Redirect tracer with HTTP headers
- Outgoing links reporting with link highlighter and broken link checker
- SERP Rankings
- Country changer for SERP
The SEO toolbar is great for spot checking issues with pages on your website. If you’re not confident you can inspect the code, it can also give you valuable clues about what elements to include in your pages to make them search-friendly.
If there is something wrong with the page, it will be highlighted in the toolbar, with red indicating a critical problem.
Favorite feature
The section I use most in the SEO toolbar is the Indexability tab. This section lets you see if the page can be crawled and indexed by Google.
Although you can do this by manually inspecting the code, using the toolbar is much faster.
Price: Free
Like GSC, Google Analytics is another tool you can use to track your website performance, track sessions and conversions, and much more on your website.
Most common use case for reporting
GA gives you a complete overview of website traffic from different sources, such as direct, social, organic, paid traffic and more.
Favorite feature
GA4 allows you to create and track up to 300 events and 30 conversions. Previously, universal analytics only allowed you to track 20 conversions. This makes tracking conversions and events easier within GA4.
Price: Free
Google Slides is Google’s version of Microsoft PowerPoint. If you haven’t set up a dashboard to report on your data SEO performancethe best thing you can do is mount a slide deck.
A lot of SEO agencies present their report via dashboard insights and PowerPoint presentations. However, if you do not have access to PowerPoint, Google Slides is an excellent (free) alternative.
Most common reporting use cases
The most common use of Google Slides is to create a monthly SEO report. If you don’t know what to include in a monthly report, use our SEO report template.
Favorite feature
One of my favorite features is the ability to share your presentation directly from Google Slides via video chat. You do this by clicking on the camera icon at the top right.
This is useful when working with remote clients and makes sharing your reports easy.
Price: Free
Google Trends allows you to view the popularity of a keyword over time in any country. The data shown is the relative popularity ratio, scaled from 0-100, and not the direct volume of searches.
Most common reporting use cases
Google Trends is useful for showing how the popularity of certain searches may increase or decrease over time. If you work with a website that often features trending products, services, or news, it can be helpful to visually illustrate this in your SEO report.
Google Trends makes it easy to discover seasonal trends for product categories. For example, people want to buy barbecues when the weather is sunny.
Using Google Trends, we can see that peak demand for barbecues usually occurs in June-July every year.
Based on this data from the past five years, we could be fairly certain when barbecue season would start and end.
Favorite feature
Comparing two or more search terms over time is one of my favorite uses of Google Trends because it can be used to tell its own story.
Enhancing your report with trend data can help you gain greater insight into market trends.
If necessary, you can even investigate trends at a regional level.
Final thoughts
These free tools can help you lay the foundation for a well-rounded SEO report.
The tools you use for this SEO reporting do not always have to be expensive; even large companies use many of the free tools mentioned to create insights for their clients’ SEO reports.
Do you have more questions? Ping me on X 🙂
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