Web ranking reports provide information about the rankings of a website for various search terms in the leading search engines. At present, the list of important search engines includes Google, Yahoo, MSN Search, AltaVista, Search, AllTheWeb, Lycos, HotBot, Overture, DMOZ, and AskJeeves. From small business owners to webmasters of Fortune-500 enterprises, people who are serious about their websites rely on web reports to check and track their web ranking.

Web reports are comprehensive documents that include a keywords list, search engines list and the position a web site has obtained for selected keywords. These reports provide graphs and charts to present a graphical view of the results track the increase or decrease in search rankings each week. The results can be saved for future analysis, converted into HTML reports, exported into Excel or printed out.

Web ranking reports assist in a company's online marketing strategies, placement tactics and rework on search engine optimization. They help a webmaster in monitoring the website's search engine positions and provide alerts when a site's ranking drops. Each time a search engine database is updated, the rankings tend to shift. New web sites come up and old web sites are closed down affecting the rankings. Web ranking reports equip a webmaster with the necessary tools to correct existing problems, make improvements, and check the competitor's website positions, thereby increasing the traffic to his or her website.

Generating web ranking reports consumes a large amount of computing resources and time, especially when the web sites to be tracked are large, with thousands of keywords. Specialized companies that provide comprehensive web ranking reports exist and it's usually preferable to outsource the task to them.

A webmaster can also obtain competition research reports from these service providers. A competition research report provides details about competing websites and their strategies. For smaller websites, a webmaster can visit the search engines directly to see specific results for chosen keywords.