What a good SEO report actually contains

Monthly reporting is where the relationship between a business and its SEO supplier usually goes wrong. Not through dishonesty, most of the time, but because the report measures the wrong things and everybody gradually stops reading it.

The three things a report should answer

Everything else is supporting detail.

• What changed on the site this month, and why that work? Not a task list — the reasoning. Which problem it was solving.
• What did it produce? Movement in visibility, and what that turned into in enquiries or revenue.
• What is not working, and what happens now?

A report that cannot answer the third question is a document written to reassure rather than inform.

Metrics that mislead

Total organic sessions

Rises for reasons that have nothing to do with the work — seasonality, a mention somewhere, brand searches after an offline campaign. It is worth tracking and worthless on its own.

Branded search

You already rank first for your own name. Traffic from people searching your company is not something the SEO earned, and leaving it in the headline number inflates every chart. It should be reported separately, always.

Average position

An average across hundreds of terms, most of which do not matter, moved by appearing at position ninety for something irrelevant. Report positions for the terms that produce business, individually.

"Keywords in the top 100"

Nobody looks at page ten. A rise here can mean progress and often means noise.

What is worth reporting instead

• Non-branded organic enquiries — the closest honest proxy for the thing you are buying.
• Visibility on the specific terms that matter, listed individually with movement since last month.
• Impressions by query group from Search Console, which moves earlier than positions and shows direction before rankings do.
• Landing page performance — which pages are earning, which are not, and what is planned for the ones that are not.
• What was shipped, briefly, tied to the problem it addressed.
• What is blocked, including where it is blocked on you. Most programmes stall on a developer ticket or an unanswered content question, and a report that hides that is protecting the wrong thing.

Attribution, honestly

Nobody can attribute perfectly. People search, leave, return via a bookmark and convert; phone enquiries vanish from analytics; consent banners mean a share of visitors are never measured at all.

A report claiming precise attribution of every enquiry is overstating what the tooling can do. A good one is clear about what is measured, what is estimated, and what is invisible — and asks you what enquiries actually came in, because your inbox knows things analytics does not. Setting this up properly is its own discipline; see analytics and measurement.

Frequency, and the meeting

Monthly is conventional and slightly too often for a channel that moves on a quarterly rhythm. It leads to reporting noise as though it were signal, and to changing course on a bad month that meant nothing.

A short monthly note and a proper quarterly review works better. The quarterly one is where strategy should actually be revisited, against the question of whether the last three months produced enough to justify the next three.

The test

Read last month's report and ask what decision it helped you make. If the answer is none — if it told you things were progressing and gave you nothing to act on — then it was written to justify an invoice.

The reports worth having are the ones that occasionally make uncomfortable reading, because those are the ones telling you something true. If you are choosing a supplier, our note on what to ask before signing covers the rest.