Most people running SEO ranking reports to check their keyphrase positions on a monthly basis – some people even check them on a weekly basis to see the trend over the course a month. Today I want to talk about additional reports that you can run to give you a deeper insight into your search rankings and opportunities for improvement.

1. Competitor Rankings

Why not track your key competitors for the same keyphrases? This report will give you great insight into search activity that your competitors are running. Link this monthly report with the one below and you will be able to track in detail the search campaigns that are working for your competitors.

2. Page Indexing

The number of pages that are indexed by the search engines is important when trying to expand the reach of your pages across long tail keyphrases. For Freestyle’s clients I use a tool to track the number of pages indexed on a monthly basis by Google and compare to previous months.

This report serves two purposes:

  • I can track spikes and dips in page indexation (and link that to client and competitor rankings)
  • I can track Index Ratio. This is a measurement to illustrator the difference between the numbers of pages in Google’s primary index to the number of pages in Google’s secondary index.

3. Error reporting

Monthly reporting of technical errors like 404/302/301’s is vital, but they can be very difficult to track and I, for one, can’t always remember to sign in to Webmaster Tools to check these errors. So what we’ve done for some clients is build an app that logged the errors and auto sends them via email at the beginning of the month. You can then work through the errors methodically and measure the impact through the course of the month.

4. Content traction reporting

This is something that I force myself to access Webmaster Tools for. Webmaster Tools give a lot of data of the quality of the content in the important ‘on-page’ areas of your website. Through Webmaster Tools you can find duplicate content issues, missing content issues and even non-descriptive content issues.

The reason why I force myself to use Webmaster Tools is because with that system you can edit as you go. When I’m editing content for a client I have Webmaster Tools open to check for errors with that page and then I can fix everything in one go.

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