11 Stunning SEO Data Visualizations To Inspire Your Reporting

Data visualizations for SEO help you create more compelling tales that better fulfill the demands of your audience and get their approval. Here’s how to do it.

Data, we’ve all heard, tells a story. However, that tale might be tough to follow at times, especially if you aren’t a natural mathematician.

As SEO experts, we know that what we do has an impact on a business’s bottom line. So how do we convey that to our clients in ways that resonate?

Data visualizations are becoming increasingly popular and for good reason.

These visualizations show how SEO data can be used to tell compelling stories.

You’ll find all you need here, whether you’re just getting started with visual analytics or looking for ideas to improve your reporting.

The act of turning numbers into visual graphics is known as data visualization.

Those graphs you made in grade school? Visualizations.

What are gradient maps? Visualizations.

The way you portray your figures is also known as data visualization.

It all paints a picture.

Visualizations can considerably improve your reporting as an SEO expert.

Visuals not only make your data easier to understand for clients, but they also make it more interesting.

And that’s critical when you’re trying to get executive or client buy-in.

The good news is that you don’t have to begin at the start.

You may use a variety of data visualization tools and examples to help you tell the proper stories with your SEO data more quickly.

Here are 11 you can check out in your pursuit of visualizations to improve your SEO reports.

There are six rectangles in various hues of blue on the lefthand side of the datapine dashboard.

The lightest shade of blue at the top indicates the least qualified audience, while a dark blue rectangle at the bottom symbolizes the converted audience.

As SEO experts, we are often tasked with assisting people in solving a specific problem.

Whichever the problem, there are a variety of key performance indicators that can indicate if we are on the right route.

Starting at the end of the pipeline and working back is the best way to determine these key performance indicators.

If you want more readers to read all the way to the end of the blog post and click on the “related articles,” you’ll need to keep track of those clicks. But scrolls to the bottom of the blog post, 75% scrolls, 50% scrolls, 25% scrolls, page visits, and page impressions are all also indicators of whether or not we are headed in the right direction.

It’s also a terrific method to quickly see where drop-offs are likely to happen.

Personally, I’d have a workshop with the client to determine all of the KPIs we’ll be focused on for the left-hand side overview.

Then I’d work with the client to select graphics for each of those clients so they can connect a picture with the name and recall what that KPI means.

Finally, if you report monthly, you might provide a comparison number next to the metric’s name to let the customer know if you’ve improved month over month.

Every report has one part that a client’s eyes are drawn to first: the one that discusses money.

Far too often, we get swept up in the details of the job we’ve done and want to boast about it, even though we know that’s not what our clients worry about most.

Whether your ROI is going up or down, the fact is that clients will always go there first, so own it.

Make the numbers huge and show your power.

This example from Oneupweb organizes the numbers in a way that focuses your attention on the important data.

The retainer’s price is shown at the top.

The ROI % is right in the middle in huge type, while the formula that calculates the ROI in dollars is at the bottom.

This report is open and honest, and it caters to the needs of the clients.

The key search keyword tool produces a lot of data, but the table that organizes it by URL is quite useful.

In just a second, you can see which URLs have the best (and which have the worst, too).

While it’s not overly complicated or artistic, it simplifies the data in a stunning way.

While this table is intended to display metrics for specific URLs, it could easily be used by clients to track important keyword metrics.

For instance, you could track:

1. what position you currently rank,
2. whether there are any owned rich snippets,
3. how much traffic was sent to the site from that keyword,
4. buying intent, etc.

Smart Insights is constantly putting out beautiful reports, and this one is no exception.

They published this infographic to explain the types of bots hitting websites.

The color green represents good bots and red is bad, a concept we are very familiar with from a young age – that was their first win.

In the center of the infographic is a pie chart. Except for the fact that the bottom half of the pie chart is split down a little farther right a little further down the page, there’s nothing really unusual about it.

The same color scheme is used under the pie chart to further break down the information and provide context for how the “good” and “bad” bots are created.

This notion could be simply replicated in your SEO reporting for device reports.

For the device category, you might use a pie chart, then further down the page, you could divide it down by browser type or device model.

Making a website more user-friendly is a big part of our job as SEO professionals.

This might be difficult for our clients to grasp at times.

As a result, sharing click maps with customers is one of my favorite parts to do.

Here’s an example from Lucky Orange that shows them what pages on their site get the most clicks.

As you can see, a glance at this visual can give anyone an idea of where clients might get lost.

Forms are the perfect place to use heatmaps. You’d be surprised at how the click density drops as the form continues.

This may be especially useful for comparing how forms perform on mobile vs. desktop.

It’s no wonder that the following visualization received the World Data Visualization Prize.

The Gov | DNA site’s bubble graph is stunningly simple.

This bubble graph, unlike standard, scatter plots, is color-coded and has different-sized bubbles.

This is a great way to visualize a large number of metrics in one convenient place.

The bubble graph, on the other hand, is comparable to a scatter plot in that it makes it very easy to find outliers.

This, in my opinion, would be an excellent way to chart sessions vs. conversions for certain keywords.

I’d also use the color groups to represent other keyword groups, with the size of the bubble reflecting the term’s total monthly volume.

Measuring the performance of blog posts and categories of blog posts is comparable to tracking the performance of keywords.

However, after looking at this diagram, it appears that there may be an easy fix.

The diagram above depicts the various programming languages, the number of CRAN packages written in each language, and the various types of packages.

The languages are color-coded and found in the middle of the visual while the types of packages are attached to the respective languages in the outer circle.

The same setup could be used for blog posts.

The colors and large cells in the middles may be based on the categories and how much traffic they generate, and all of the large cells in the outer circle could be linked to individual blog entries in each category.

This type of setup could make it easy for anyone to see where the biggest wins are coming from as well as which categories may need more attention.

This is each image with a lot of moving parts.

I’m not sure I’d keep all of the pieces, but I believe the concept may be used to track audit progress.

A heart with all of the potential qualities may be found on the left side.

These characteristics suggest whether or not a requirement has indeed been met. If the requirement is met, it is put on the heart; if it is not, it is not.

So, this visual could be made to represent an “optimized page checklist.”

You could easily show the progress achieved on the site as a whole in an easy-to-digest method if you created characteristics for all of the things that need to be done for any given page.

You can look at this visual and see that most of the hearts at the bottom have a larger white ring, if that larger white ring represented content length, we could see that the other pages (hearts without rings) still need a bit more content.

There are several ways to teach geography, but none of them are really exciting.

At some point, you start to look past the visuals that you’ve seen many times before.

However, Justin Fung’s image of New York City is likely to catch your eye.

Each block of the city’s population is represented by 3D bars that go up and down on this map.

Color is also used as a secondary indicator of population.

This might be a great approach for local SEO marketers to mix up their reporting and offer their clients something new.

Imagine showing your clients where directions were requisitions from on their Google Business Profile.

Hoaxy is a tool for identifying misinformation spreaders on Twitter.

It may, however, be used just to identify information sharers and the circles they influence.

In this case, I looked up the name of a recent Search Engine Journal post to check who had shared it and urged others to do so.

What’s really cool about this is that it pulls in all of the Twitter accounts, which might be quite useful.

This would be a fun way to show your clients how well a particular blog article performed on Twitter and who liked it.

This is especially helpful if you’ve been working with PR people for link building.

Lastly, this could also be great information for identifying potential people for guest posting opportunities.

This is a great representation because it comes from a tool designed specifically for SEOs!

CognitiveSEO’s Visual Link Explorer can tell you (and your clients) a lot about how their pages are acquiring

Because of the element’s size, you can not only identify which pages have the most links at a glance, but you can also evaluate how authoritative those links are by looking at how far out those links reach.

The further the tether is from the center, the more reliable the link.

This tool is also interactive, allowing you to color-code the theatre based on the type of domain referring to the page and whether or not the link is active.

Honestly, this list could go on for days but hopefully, now you have a bit of inspiration!

I challenge you to look at the reports you’re presently delivering to clients and create at least one new graphic to either replace or supplement the data you’re now giving.

I have a good feeling it’ll end with more compelling reports and happier people on the receiving end.