What a useful SEO report contains, and what padding looks like

We are an agency that sends monthly reports, writing about how to judge monthly reports. Read it with that in mind. Everything below is something we would be happy to be asked about our own.

The genre this competes with is the red flags listicle, which teaches suspicion. Suspicion is not useful. A test is.

The four things it must contain

1. What was done, in a list, with dates

Not activities in the abstract. The specific things: this page written and published on the 8th, this category changed, these four listings corrected, this link earned from this site.

If you cannot tell from the report what somebody actually did with the hours you paid for, that is the finding. Everything else on this page is secondary to it.

2. Enquiries, counted, by source

Calls, forms and messages, with where each came from. This is the only number in the report that is about money, and it is the one most commonly missing because it is the hardest to make look good.

3. Rankings measured across a geography

Not one position for one keyword, checked from one place. A grid across the area you serve, because distance is one of the three factors Google names and a single number is a sample of one point. A report showing one position, with no indication of where it was measured from, is not a measurement.

4. What happens next month, and why

One paragraph. What the numbers suggested, what will be done about it, and what is expected to change. A report that is entirely backward-looking is a receipt rather than a plan.

The four that are padding

• Domain authority or any similar score. Invented by tool vendors, not used by Google, and included because it moves.
• Total keywords ranking. A number that only goes up, counts positions nobody sees, and means nothing.
• Impressions with no click or enquiry data alongside. Appearing is not the objective.
• Traffic as a headline. It includes everyone who was never going to call you and rises reliably when you publish content nobody buys from.

Three questions to ask about any report

1. 01Which of these numbers would go down if the work stopped, and how soon? A number that would keep rising on its own is not measuring the work.
2. 02What decision does this report help me make? If the honest answer is none, it is a receipt.
3. 03Can I see this myself? You should have direct access to Search Console, your analytics and your Business Profile, in your own accounts. Data that only exists inside an agency's dashboard is data you lose when you leave.

That third one is the most revealing and the least confrontational. A good agency has already set it up that way.

The honest complication

Something the red flag listicles never admit, because it makes agencies harder to condemn: a genuinely good month can produce a boring report. How long local SEO takes is the context that makes a quiet month readable rather than alarming.

Month two of a competitive account often consists of writing four service pages and fixing thirty listings. None of that moves a number that month. The pages need time before they hold a position, and the listings prevent damage rather than creating gains.

So a flat report is not automatically a bad month, and the way to tell the difference is the first item on this page. Real work with flat numbers is normal at month two. Flat numbers with nothing in the what-was-done list is the problem, and it is a different problem.

Judge month two on the work list and month six on the enquiries.

The one thing that ends the conversation

A guaranteed ranking, in any form. Google states plainly that nobody can guarantee a number one position and warns about anyone claiming a special relationship with it.

A guarantee means one of two things: the target will be a search nobody makes, or the tactics carry a risk you have not been told about. Neither is a report problem, and both are visible in the first proposal if you read for it.

The five numbers worth reporting at all are set out in what to measure. The numbers that look impressive while meaning nothing are the ones with no denominator: impressions with no clicks beside them, keyword counts with no positions, traffic with no enquiries. If a figure cannot be traced to a call or a booking, it is decoration.