What a good monthly SEO report should contain

A monthly SEO report should help you make decisions. Too many reports do the opposite: forty pages of charts, a long list of keyword positions and no clear answer to the question you actually care about, which is whether search is bringing in more business.

Whether you write the report yourself or receive it from an agency, here is what a useful one contains, in the order it should appear.

1. A short summary in plain language

The first page should be readable in two minutes. Three to five sentences on what happened this month, what caused it and what the plan is for next month. If something went down, the summary should say so and explain why. A report that only ever shows good news is not a report you can trust.

2. Business outcomes from organic search

Start with the numbers that connect to revenue: inquiries, calls, bookings, form submissions or sales that came from organic search. These come from your analytics tool, filtered to organic traffic, and they depend on conversions being tracked properly in the first place.

Show each figure against the previous month and the same month last year. Month-on-month comparisons are distorted by seasonality; year-on-year comparisons show the real trend.

3. Visibility in Google Search Console

Search Console is Google's own data about how your site appears in search. A good report pulls four figures from it: clicks, impressions, average click-through rate and average position. Then it goes one level deeper.

• Top pages by clicks, and which ones grew or fell.
• Top queries that brought clicks, grouped by theme rather than listed one by one.
• Queries with many impressions but few clicks, which often signal a title or description that needs work.

Rankings for a hand-picked list of keywords can be included, but they should support this picture, not replace it. A single ranking position says little about traffic or business value.

4. Technical health

This section should be short when things are fine and specific when they are not. It covers pages Google could not index and why, crawl errors, broken links, site speed and Core Web Vitals, and anything that changed on the site that could affect search, such as a redesign, new pages or a change in hosting.

Each issue should come with a severity and an owner. "Twelve pages return errors" is a finding. "Twelve product pages return errors after last week's update; the developer is fixing them by Friday" is useful.

5. Work completed this month

List what was actually done: pages written or improved, technical fixes shipped, links earned, local listings updated. Link to the pages so you can see the work. This is how you judge whether the effort matches the fee.

6. The plan for next month

End with three to five priorities, each tied to something in the report. If impressions are high but clicks are low on a service page, the plan should include rewriting its title and description. A plan that could have been written without reading the data is a template, not a plan.

What to leave out

Domain authority scores from third-party tools, raw lists of hundreds of keywords, total backlinks without any judgment of quality, and screenshots without explanation. None of these are wrong to track internally, but they do not belong in the report you use to make decisions.

If your current report does not answer "is search bringing in more business, and what are we doing about it?", ask for one that does.