SEO Report Sample PDF (and Explainer)

4 Feb 2026Ruben Rogersin SEO Concepts

An SEO report should outline the overall SEO performance of any given website. These reports are perfect new business drivers for marketing agencies as they can provide value up-front to a prospective client.

An SEO report can also be used on a recurring basis (monthly is the most common frequency) to showcase the improvement in SEO performance over time to clients or your boss.

Additionally, the report can highlight any SEO issues which need fixing in order to help improve organic search performance.

In this guide we've included a sample SEO Report PDF which you can download below and use to help build your own report.

What Should an SEO Report Contain?

We recommend your SEO report contain the following 8 sections:

• SEO Results Summary: This is the most important page of the report. If the recipient only reads one page of the report - this is it. Keep it to a single page and clearly highlight key insights and recommended actions. Showing how performance can improve will encourage the reader to continue through the report.
• Recommendations: This is where you outline clear, actionable steps to improve SEO performance based on the report’s findings.
• On-Page SEO Results: Covers key on-page factors such as meta tags, page structure, and keyword usage, along with internal and external links.
• Rankings: Shows traffic from search, including Google Organic, Paid Ads, and sometimes AI Overview citations. It also highlights top-performing keywords across organic and paid search, helping identify what’s driving visibility.
• Links: Focuses on your backlink profile, including top backlinks, Domain Strength, and Page Strength, helping assess authority and link-building opportunities.
• Usability: Evaluates device compatibility for mobile and tablet.
• Performance: Focuses on page speed and load times, along with technical factors that impact overall site performance and efficiency.
• Social: Shows which social media profiles are connected to the site and how they support overall SEO visibility and engagement.
• Local SEO: Assesses local visibility, including GBP listings, local schema markup, and reviews, to help improve performance in location-based searches.
• Technology: Lists the third-party technologies used on the site and checks key technical configurations like email authentication (DMARC/SPF) and site setup details.

SEO Results Summary

The purpose of the first page of the SEO report is to give the recipient a clear, topline overview of results in one place.

This can be challenging, as SEO involves many variables and moving parts.

However, stakeholders typically want concise, easy-to-digest insights, making it essential to summarize key findings, highlight performance, and point to the most important opportunities at a glance.

We recommend a traditional scorecard which grades a website on a scale from A+ to F-. This grading system is well-known around the world and anyone can quickly understand that A is really good and F is really bad.

You will need to individually grade the performance of each report section. Then apply an overall grading to the site.

The advantage of summarizing performance down to a single grade is the implied next action.

Tools like SEOptimer streamline this process by automatically generating detailed reports with clear grades for each section, saving time while ensuring consistency and accuracy.

Recommendations

Finally, you should use all the insights above to formulate recommendations on how to improve SEO performance.

Group your recommendations by each section of the report and indicate which recommendations are high, medium and low priority.

When discussing with your client or boss, focus on the high priority items first.

SEOptimer simplifies this process by scanning the entire site for issues and automatically generating prioritized recommendations, helping you focus on what matters most without all of the manual effort.

On-Page SEO Results

The On-Page SEO section evaluates how well a page is optimized for search engines, covering everything from content structure to technical signals.

A comprehensive on-page SEO audit typically includes:

• Meta Tags: Title tag and meta description length and optimization
• Headings Structure: Proper use of H1–H6 tags and content hierarchy
• Keyword Usage: Distribution and consistency of target keywords
• Content Quality: Word count and relevance of on-page text
• Image Optimization: Use of ALT attributes for images
• Indexing Signals: Canonical tags, noindex directives, and crawlability
• Technical Foundations: HTTPS usage, redirects, and page accessibility
• Site Infrastructure: Robots.txt, XML sitemaps, and analytics tracking
• Structured Data: Schema markup and entity signals
• Emerging Signals: LLM readability and AI-focused files like Llms.txt

A website can achieve a great score for on-page SEO if each of the components follow best practice.

Keyword Rankings

This section highlights how a website performs in search by combining traffic insights with keyword visibility.

Tracking keyword rankings over time is especially valuable, as it helps measure SEO progress, identify trends, and uncover new opportunities to improve visibility for high-impact search terms.

Links

This section of your SEO report should cover the Domain and Page Strength of the URL audited.

It should also include the Top Links, Top Pages by Links, Top Anchors by Backlinks, and check whether the site's URLs are friendly for humans and search engines.

Doing this manually is going to take a lot of work and time that could’ve been spent on building your business or growing your digital agency.

Usability

To check cross-device website usability, open the website on a mobile browser and tablet browser and take a screenshot.

Next, you need to check if unsupported technologies are being used like Flash or iFrames.

You’ll also need to check the site’s Core Web Vitals and PageSpeed Insights (for both Mobile and Desktop) and add these to your SEO reports.

Our tool runs vital checks on Core Web Vitals, PageSpeed Insights, and other usability elements, and then presents this in a clean SEO report.

Performance Results

Use a Website Speed Check tool such as Google PageSpeed Insights to ascertain the server response time, page content load time, page scripts load time and overall page size (in megabytes).

It is best to show context around the load times on a performance gauge with traffic light colors: green for good, orange for fair and red for bad.

Check that the website links to the main social channels such as Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, X (Twitter) and LinkedIn.

Local SEO

This section should cover the basic checks such as whether the site has a Google Business Profile listing and whether the main business details are filled out.

Technology Results

This section does not require grading but it can be handy to list all 3rd party technologies used on the site.

View the page source or use a technology lookup tool like BuiltWith to discover all technologies used.