The monthly report lands in your inbox on the fifth. It is twenty-three pages long. You open it, see a lot of green arrows and a chart going up and to the right, feel vaguely reassured, and close it. Next month, the same.
If that sounds familiar, the report is not doing its job. So what should an SEO report include? Less than most of them do, and more of what matters. A good one answers three questions in plain language: what changed, what it cost, and what happens next.
The three questions every report should answer
What changed? Both the work done and the results that moved, up or down.
What did it cost? The fee, and any tools or extras billed that month.
What happens next? The plan for the coming month, and why.
If you can answer those three after reading the first page, the report works. If you cannot answer them after reading all of it, it does not, however many charts it has.
What belongs in it
A short summary at the top. Three to five sentences, written by a person, saying how the month went.
The work done, listed: pages changed, posts published, fixes made, profile updates. Specific enough that you could check each one.
Search performance from Google Search Console. Clicks, impressions and average position, compared against last month and, once there is enough history, the same month last year.
Your Google Business Profile, for a business with a location or service area: calls, direction requests and website clicks from the profile.
Enquiries, where they can be tracked. Form submissions, calls, bookings. This is the line your business actually runs on.
What did not work, and what is being done about it. A report with no bad news in it is not being honest.
Next month's plan.
What it cost.
Reading the numbers without being misled
A few definitions are worth knowing, because reports lean on them. In Search Console, an impression means someone saw, or potentially saw, a link to your site in Google Search, and a click means they followed it to your site (sourced from Search Console Help).
Average position is the one most often misread. It is the topmost position your site held in results, averaged across all the searches it appeared for. So when your site starts showing up for more searches, including ones where it sits on page two, the average can fall even while things are improving. An average position going down is not automatically bad news, and one going up is not automatically good news. Ask what is behind it.
On the profile side, Google counts calls as taps on the call button on your Business Profile, direction requests as people asking for directions to your business, and website clicks as clicks on the website link on the profile (sourced from Google Business Profile Help). Those are closer to real customers than any ranking table.
What is usually filler
Third-party "authority" scores presented as the goal. They are a tool company's own estimate, and they are not something Search Console reports.
Long ranking tables for phrases nobody searches.
Impressions on their own, with no clicks or enquiries beside them.
Screenshots with no commentary. If nobody explains a chart, it is decoration.
Twenty pages when two would do. Length is not effort.
How often, and how long
Monthly is right for most small and medium-sized businesses. Weekly numbers jump around too much to mean anything, and quarterly is too long to wait to find out something is wrong. One to three pages is plenty, with a short call to go through it, because the conversation is where the questions get answered.
Hold any provider to this, including me
This is the standard I would hold any report to, and that includes mine. A monthly performance report covering rankings, visibility and traffic trends is part of what is included in my Foundations plan, and you should expect it to answer the same three questions.
If you are doing SEO yourself, the same structure works as a one-page note to yourself each month, and the 15-minute monthly SEO routine is a good habit to pair it with. And if you are still deciding whether SEO is worth paying for at all, is SEO worth it for a small business in Canada is the place to start.
One more thing a good report never does: promise next month's rankings. It sets targets and says what they depend on.
So, could you answer the three questions from the last report you received?