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What makes a good SEO report? Have you ever thought about that? Most people rely on automated rank checking reports, which I feel provide some value (if you track the rankings as trend lines on a graph) but they don’t really get into the meat of what I would want reported to me, were I to farm out my SEO reporting to someone else.

There are a number of things that I look at when doing traditional SEO, particularly for my own sites where I am developing content and seeking new traffic that appeals to me. The SEO community is beginning to focus more on conversions than on rankings and referrals but informational conversions (what I usually seek for myself) are not always appealing.

For that matter, transactional conversions (sales) may not always be appealing, either. You may get a lot of customers who abuse your return policy, for example. Some companies have actually been targeted for what I would deem return policy abuse by a few blogs and Web sites.

Transformational conversions (signups or registrations) may also be unappealing if they are made for bogus reasons. In my science fiction and fantasy forums, for example, we constantly have to delete accounts that were created by spambots and low-life “link building” SEOs who create forum profiles in volume. I would prefer not to have to deal with those kinds of people.

So here are a few items I would want included on a good SEO report. Your mileage may vary.

Search Results Rankings – I do monitor some keywords, but what I would really like is a report that monitors query spaces. A query space consists of all the keywords and relevant content that would be served for those keywords that pertain to a particular topic. So I don’t just want to rank well for “itemized blue widget topicality”, I also want to rank well for “topicality relating to itemized blue widgets”, “blue widget topical itemization”, and “topic-specific itemized blue widgets”.

Furthermore, as I noted above I would want to see these rankings graphed into trend lines. Ideally I would want to see a 2-year rolling window. Since a query space could theoretically entail thousands of keywords and since many of those variations would produce virtually identical results, I would want to arbitrarily limit my query space analysis to about 5 keywords per query space.

So show me a graph by limited query space that includes up to 5 keywords with rankings for the past 2 years — by search engine (Ask, Bing, Google, and Yahoo! would be sufficient). I would also want to track a few meta search engines (including Ixquick, Dogpile, and 1 or 2 others). And then I would want to include a 3-month or 6-month window for new or smaller search engines.

A typical site with 100 pages of content should be tracking about 500 query spaces (approximately 2500 keywords across 10-15 search engines and meta search engines).

Furthermore, I would want to see aggregate rankings broken out by category: major search engines, meta search engines, and new search engines. Even though the query spaces are unrelated to each other, such aggregate rankings reports would give you a snapshot or birds’ eye view of your ranking depth.

Referral String Data – I would want to see which queries people are using to find my content. I would want to know month-by-month for about 2 years which strings are the most popular (the top 100 would be okay). However, I would want to see this data broken out by referer — don’t bother figuring out which one is a search engine, just tell me who the referers are that include a query string.

I would want to see queries flagged as seasonal if they occur in a cyclic pattern. I would want to see queries flagged as “never seen before”. I would want to see queries flagged as “stable”. And I would want to see queries flagged as “declining”.

You need trend graphs to do this kind of analysis and it can all be automated but no one does it to this level of detail.

Search Referral Demographics – So take that referral data report you just put together and find out what you can about who the referrers are — are they indeed search engines, or are they just sites with search boxes powered by search engines, or are they search engine partners? Are there any new names in the mix?

The sooner I identify new resources, the sooner I can get another advantage over my competitors. The same is true for query string analysis. If you’re suddenly getting traffic for a query you haven’t targeted, maybe you should optimize for that query space and see where that strategy takes you.

Competitors’ Analysis Report – Who my competitors are is not determined so much by who ranks for what keyword as how many query spaces the same sites appear in. You can divide competitors into “sites like mine that pursue all these query spaces” and “sites unlike mine that appear in these few query spaces”.

Some of your Class A competitors will be larger than you. Some will be newer than you.

Some of your Class B competitors will be so huge you are not even a blip on their radars. They don’t care about your query spaces — they just happen to show up here and there.

If your site sells shoes to American customers, your competitors will be other sites that sell shoes to American customers. The occasional CNN article about shoes will appear in your query spaces but CNN is not your competitor even if it outranks you.

Most competitive analysis reports lack sense and coherence. They look at nonsense like backlink profiles, comparative rankings, and on-page keywords. You’ll learn more about a competitor by comparing how many query spaces you both appear in without really looking at comparative rankings.

What makes a site a Class A competitor? You’ll know it when you see it. It’s the site that, if you were running it, you would try to push into all the query spaces you care about. Size and age really have nothing to do with it.

Backlink Profile Stability – I should think that if someone were doing SEO for me then they should know enough about link theory to be able to report to me which linking resources are performing well for my needs.

No, I’m not going to provide you with any criteria, but rest assured there are no link analysis tools out there that tell you want I would want to see in a report.

Every month I receive numerous offers from “SEO firms” wanting to help me with my rankings and link building. Friends, before I would give my money to you, I would want to know you could deliver the reporting by which I would hold you accountable. This ain’t your daddy’s ranking report — not by a mile.