Create your very own Auto Publish News/Blog Site and Earn Passive Income in Just 4 Easy Steps
At WPBeginner, we use SEO reports as health checklists for our websites. They show us at a glance how well our sites are performing and what we need to do to rank higher.
When you create an SEO report, you generate an actionable list of tasks you need to complete to improve your website's SEO. This allows you to optimize your website for SEO by checking items off a list, which can lead to more traffic to your website.
In this article, we will show you step by step how to create an SEO report. This will give you a clear path to optimize your website for search engines, step by step.
Why do you need an SEO report for your WordPress site?
Improving your WordPress SEO is important because it will help you get more website traffic.
Search engines are the largest source of traffic for most websites. SEO, or search engine optimization, is a process that improves your website's ranking so that your website appears higher on search engine results pages (SERPs).
The problem is that SEO is a complex process and beginners often don't know where to start. This is where an SEO report can help.
Conducting an SEO analysis will provide you with an assessment of your website's current SEO effectiveness and will also provide a report with actionable steps you can take to increase organic traffic to your website.
You can think of an SEO report as a to-do list that you can follow to optimize SEO, improve website traffic, and increase your sales and conversions.
Expert tip: Would you like an SEO expert to optimize your website for you? Our professional SEO services start at just $649 and include AIOSEO and Google Analytics setup, keyword research, on-page optimization, a domain overview report, and more.
Now let's look at how to create an SEO report for your WordPress site. We will cover two methods:
- Create an SEO report with All in One SEO (free)
- Create an SEO report with Website SEO Analyzer (free)
1. Create an SEO report with All in One SEO (free)
You may want to create an SEO report that you can easily view from your WordPress dashboard. The easiest way to do this is with All in One SEO (AIOSEO), the best SEO plugin for WordPress trusted by over 3 million businesses.
AIOSEO automatically creates an SEO report for your WordPress website to help you optimize it for search engines without hiring an expert. The plugin provides an SEO analysis tool that helps you identify the SEO tasks you have not completed yet.
We have written a full AIOSEO review where you can learn more about the plugin.
Note: For this tutorial, we will use the free version of AIOSEO as it includes the SEO analysis tool. There is also a premium version of AIOSEO that offers more features including sitemap tools, schema markup, a redirect manager, and more.
Installing and activating All in One SEO
To get started, you'll need to install and activate the AIOSEO plugin on your website. For more details, see our guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.
Once the plugin is activated, it will automatically launch a setup wizard. To proceed, you need to click the Get Started button.
For detailed instructions on how to configure the plugin, see our tutorial on setting up All in One SEO for WordPress.
When you are ready, just go to the All in One SEO » SEO Analysis page in your WordPress dashboard. You are looking at the SEO Audit Checklist tab.
TruSEO score
The first thing you'll notice is that All in One SEO has assigned your site a score for its overall SEO. This is the plugin's TruSEO score, with a good score being between 50 and 75 and the best SEO results coming with a score above 70.
You can improve your score by optimizing your website for SEO. An SEO report is helpful for this.
You'll find that All in One SEO creates an actionable, easy-to-understand SEO checklist. It shows you the exact steps you need to take to improve your TruSEO score.
These steps are displayed in four sections: Basic SEO, Advanced SEO, Performance, and Security.
If you have already made some SEO improvements with good results, they will be shown next to a green check mark. Important points that need to be worked on are marked with a red cross. Recommended improvements are marked in blue.
You can filter the list to see only the red, blue or green items by clicking the tabs above the list.
You can simply click on the arrow to the right of each checklist item to learn more details about it, why that item is important for SEO and how to fix the problem.
Basic SEO Report
The first section of your SEO report is “Basic SEO,” which focuses on the fundamental elements of on-page SEO. This is the best place to start.
Here are some optimization tasks included in the Basic SEO checklist:
- For optimal SEO results, make sure your site's SEO title and meta description are not too long or too short.
- Add relevant keywords to your H1 and H2 heading tags.
- Make sure you add alt tags to your images.
- Check that you are using the correct number of internal and external links.
Advanced SEO Report
Next, you’ll find the Advanced SEO Checklist, which goes deeper into technical SEO best practices.
This checklist covers more advanced SEO issues:
- You can check if your site uses a canonical link tag, which tells search engines the correct URL of your site.
- It ensures that you do not accidentally use noindex headers or meta tags that tell search engines not to index your pages.
- It checks the www and non-www versions of your website's URL redirect to the same site.
- The checklist warns you if you do not use a robots.txt file to make it easier for search engines to crawl and index your site.
- You can also see if you use schema markup to display additional information about your site in search results.
Performance report
The third section of the SEO report is “Performance,” which measures the speed and performance of your WordPress website. Slow websites are bad for both SEO and user experience.
The Performance Checklist includes the following items that can improve your site’s SEO:
- You should make sure that you use expired headers for your images.
- Also, make sure you minify JavaScript and CSS in WordPress.
- Use this checklist to determine if your HTML pages are larger or smaller than average.
- It measures the response time of your website, which can be improved by using a caching plugin.
Safety report
The last section in AIOSEO’s SEO report is “Security.” Website security is crucial for protecting user data and maintaining search engine trust.
Here are the “safety” items in All in One SEO’s checklist that can help you improve your SEO:
- This will ensure that directory listing is disabled on your site, as it will make it harder for hackers to access your website's files.
- This checks whether your website has been blacklisted by Google for malware, as Google removes suspicious websites from its index.
- It also ensures that your site uses the secure HTTPS protocol to protect the privacy of your users. We recommend that all websites enable HTTPS, otherwise Google will classify the site as unsafe, which will give a bad impression of your business.
Now that you have a detailed SEO report covering four key areas, you can start working on one problem or improvement at a time. As you make progress, you'll see your red items turn green and your TruSEO score increase. This will lead to more organic traffic from search engines.
2. Create an SEO report with Website SEO Analyzer (free)
This method requires no setup, but you won't be able to see the report in your WordPress dashboard. You'll also have to recreate the report every time you want to see it.
Just visit the WPBeginner Website SEO Analyzer page. There you need to enter your website URL and then click on the Analyze button.
Tip: You can also enter the URL to a competitor's website to perform competitive analysis.
After you click the Analyze button, an SEO report will be generated. It includes an overall SEO score as well as sections for basic SEO, advanced SEO, performance and security.
You will also find a button that allows you to download the SEO report as a PDF to your computer.
As you can see, the free SEO report contains most of the information from the SEO Analysis tab in All in One SEO. See the section above for more details.
Expert advice on SEO
We hope this tutorial helped you learn how to create an SEO report for your WordPress site. You may also want to check out some other guides on WordPress search engine optimization:
If you liked this article, please subscribe to our YouTube channel for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.
Create your very own Auto Publish News/Blog Site and Earn Passive Income in Just 4 Easy Steps
