There is no shortage of SEO reporting tools to choose from, but what are the main 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, often called GSC, is one of the most used tools for tracking important SEO metrics from Google Search.
Most common reporting use case
GSC has a lot of data to dive into, but the main performance indicator that SEOs look at first in GSC is Click on the main Overview control Panel.
Since the data comes from Google, SEOs consider it a good barometer for monitoring organic search performance. In addition to click data, you can also track what follows from Performance relationship:
- Total impressions
- Average CTR
- Average position
Tip
But for most SEO reports, GSC click data is exported to a spreadsheet and transformed into a graph to display year-over-year performance.
Favorite feature
One of my favorite reports in GSC is the Indexing relationship. It is useful for SEO reporting because you can share the ratio of indexed and non-indexed pages in your SEO report.
If your website contains many unindexed pages, it’s worth examining them to understand why they haven’t been indexed.
Price: Free
Google Looker Studio (GLS), formerly known as Google Data Studio (GDS), is a free tool that helps visualize data in shareable dashboards.
Most common reporting use case
Dashboards are an important part of SEO and GLS reporting allows you to get a total view of search performance from multiple sources through its integrations.
Out of the box, GLS allows you to connect to many different data sources.
For example:
- 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
- File – CSV file upload and Google Cloud Storage
Side note.
If you don’t have time to manually create your report, Ahrefs has three Google Looker Studio connectors that can help you create automated SEO reports for any website in just a few clicks
Here’s what a dashboard looks like in GLS:
With this type of dashboard, you share easy-to-understand reports with customers or other stakeholders.
Favorite feature
The ability to merge and filter data from different sources, such as GA and GSC, means you can get a personalized overview of your total search performance, tailored to your website.
Price: Free for 500 URLs
Screaming Frog is a website crawler that helps you check your website.
The free version of the Screaming Frog crawler is perfect if you want to do a quick check on a bunch of URLs. The free version is limited to 500 URLs, making it ideal for crawling smaller websites.
Most common reporting use case
When it comes to reporting, the Relationships The Screaming Frog SEO Spider menu is full of information that you can consult and which covers all the technical aspects of your website, such as analytics, redirects, canons, layout, hreflang, structured data and more.
Once your site is crawled, it’s just a matter of downloading the necessary reports and working out the key issues to summarize in your SEO report.
Favorite feature
Screaming Frog can extract data from other tools, including Ahrefs, using the API.
If you already had access to the APIs of some SEO tools, you could pull data from all of them directly into Screaming Frog. This is useful if you want to combine scan data with performance data or other third-party tools.
Even if you’ve never set up an API, connecting other tools to Screaming Frog is simple.
Price: Free
Ahrefs has a wide selection of 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 reports.
For example, you could use our:
Most common reporting use case
One of our most popular free SEO tools is Ahrefs Webmaster Tools (AWT), which you can use for your SEO reports.
With AWT you can:
- Monitor your SEO health over time by setting up scheduled SEO audits
- See your website performance
- Check all known backlinks for your website
Favorite feature
Of all the free Ahrefs tools, my favorite is AWT. At its core, site auditing is my favorite feature: once set 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, it’s a breeze to set up a free AWT account and schedule a technical crawl of your websites.
Price: Free
The Ahrefs SEO Toolbar is a free extension for Chrome and Firefox useful for diagnosing technical problems on pages and performing quick spot checks on the pages of your website.
Most common reporting use case
For SEO reporting, it’s helpful to run an on-page audit on your website main pages to ensure that there are no serious problems on the page.
With the free version, you get the following features:
- On-page SEO report
- Redirect tracer with HTTP headers
- Outbound link report with link highlighter and broken link check
- Positions in the SERP
- Change country for SERP
The SEO toolbar is excellent for spot-checking problems with your website pages. If you’re not sure about checking the code, it can also give you valuable tips on what elements you need to include on your pages to make them easy to search.
If there’s something wrong with the page, the toolbar highlights it, with red indicating a critical problem.
Favorite feature
The section I use most frequently in The SEO toolbar is the Indexability form. In this section you can see if the page can be crawled and indexed by Google.
While you can do this by manually checking 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, conversions, and much more on your website.
Most common reporting use case
GA gives you a total view of website traffic from different sources, such as direct, social, organic, paid traffic and more.
Favorite feature
You can create and track up to 300 events and 30 conversions with GA4. Previously, with universal analytics, you could only track 20 conversions. This makes it easier to track conversions and events within GA4.
Price: Free
Google Slides is Google’s version of Microsoft PowerPoint. If you don’t have a dashboard set up to report your SEO performance, the best thing to do is put together a presentation.
Many SEO agencies present their report through dashboard insights and PowerPoint presentations. However, if you don’t 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 ours SEO report template.
Favorite feature
One of my favorite features is the ability to share your presentation in a video chat directly from Google Slides. You can do this by clicking on the camera icon in the top right.
This is useful if you work with remote clients and makes sharing reports easier.
Price: Free
Google Trends lets you view the popularity of a keyword over time in any country. The data shown represents the relative popularity ratio scaled from 0 to 100, not the direct volume of search queries.
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 illustrate this visually in your SEO report.
Google Trends makes it easy to spot seasonal trends for product categories. For example, people want to buy barbecues when the weather is sunny.
Using Google Trends, we can see that the peak demand for barbecue usually occurs between June and July each year.
Using this data over the last five years, we could be pretty sure when the barbecue season will begin and end.
Favorite feature
Comparing two or more search terms to each other over time is one of my favorite uses of Google Trends, as it can be used to tell its own story.
Embellishing your report with trend data allows you to gain additional insights into market trends.
If necessary, you can also delve deeper into regional trends.
Final thoughts
These free tools will help you put together the foundation for a comprehensive SEO report.
The tools you use SEO reports don’t 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 other questions? ping me on X 🙂