What a monthly SEO report should show

Google Search Console records four figures for every search and every page, and a report should show all four.

• Clicks: visits that came from a Google search result.
• Impressions: the times a result from your site was seen.
• Click-through rate: clicks divided by impressions, which shows how persuasive your title and description are.
• Average position: where your best result was placed, averaged across every time you appeared.

Each figure belongs beside two comparisons: the previous month, and the same month a year earlier. Many businesses are seasonal, and a fall from December to January may be the calendar and nothing else.

Totals hide the story. A useful report names the searches that gained and lost the most clicks, the pages that rose and fell, and any page that appeared in search for the first time or dropped out of it.

A total that is flat can conceal one page collapsing while another climbs, and those two need opposite responses.

Positions are relative. A page can fall without getting worse, because a competitor published something better or rebuilt their site. A report that watches named competitors can say which it was, and that decides whether the answer is to fix your page or to outdo theirs.

Every report should carry a dated list of the work completed that month: pages published, titles rewritten, faults fixed. Without it, a change in the figures cannot be tied to a change on the site, and nobody learns what worked.

The last section is the plan: the next month’s priorities, in order, each with the reason it was chosen. The reasons should follow from the figures earlier in the same report.

Five signs separate a report that fills pages from one that informs.

• Figures with no comparison period.
• Rankings for searches nobody makes, such as your own business name.
• Visitor totals with no mention of enquiries or sales.
• No list of work done.
• The same recommendations every month.

The figures in a report can be checked against their source. Open Search Console, choose Performance, and set the date range to compare the same two months the report compares. A report whose numbers cannot be matched there should say where they came from. If your agency has access and you do not, our guide to sharing Search Console and Analytics access safely explains who should own the account.