What to put in a monthly SEO report (and what to leave out)
Most monthly SEO reports are built by addition. Each month someone asks "can we also show…?" and nobody ever takes anything out. Three years later the report is 22 pages, the client reads none of them, and the agency spends a day a month producing it.
Good reports are built by subtraction. Here's the test we apply to every section: would the client make a different decision, or feel differently about the retainer, if this number changed? If not, it goes.
What survives that test is surprisingly short.
The seven things worth including
1. The headline, in four numbers. Visits from Google search, how often you appeared, how often people clicked when they saw you, and enquiries — each with month-on-month and year-on-year comparison. The year-on-year matters more than agencies think: seasonal businesses are routinely misled by month-on-month alone. A heating engineer's November always beats their June; that's weather, not SEO.
2. The twelve-month picture. One chart of visits across the last year, with the same month last year marked. One. Not a dashboard.
3. Who found them: name-searches versus service-searches. Split the people who searched for the business by name from the people who searched for a service and found them. If service searches are growing faster than name searches, the SEO is working — that's the clearest single proof there is, and almost no standard report shows it.
4. What actually brought business. Visits and enquiries, page by page. The page with the most traffic and the page producing the most enquiries are rarely the same page, and that gap is usually the most valuable insight in the whole report.
5. What's nearly working. Searches where the site sits just off page one with real demand behind them, and listings that appear often but rarely earn the click. These are next month's work, justified by this month's numbers — quantified in visits, not percentages.
6. What's slipping. The slow six-month declines nobody notices until the client does. Reporting these yourself, before they're visible, is painful exactly once and trust-building forever.
7. What you'd do next. Three recommendations, in priority order, each tied to a number earlier in the report. This is the page that turns a report from a record into a plan — and it's the page that justifies the next invoice.
What to leave out
Bounce rate and engagement rate. No client decision changes because of them, and both invite long explanations of measurement quirks rather than conversations about the business.
Keyword tables with fifty rows. Ten searches, chosen because they matter to the client, beat fifty chosen because the export had them. If you track specific searches, track the ones the client would recognise — "boiler service leeds", not long query fragments.
Screenshots of tools. A screenshot of a dashboard says "this took no thought." Every number in a client report should have been chosen.
Anything you can't explain in one sentence. If a metric needs a paragraph of caveats, the caveats will be what the client remembers.
The caveat worth keeping
One technical footnote earns its place: Google deliberately leaves rare searches out of its per-query data while counting them in totals, so detail tables never quite sum to headlines. Say so, in one line, rather than letting a numerate client discover the "discrepancy" themselves. Precision about imprecision reads as rigour.
The shape of it
Our version of all this is seven pages, one question per page: the sample is open, no email gate, if you want to see it assembled. The structure is free to copy — it's the discipline of keeping it to seven pages, every month, automatically, that we charge for.
And if you're currently assembling reports by hand: the first week of the month is the most expensive week your agency has. Here's how to get it back.
YourReporting sends white-label monthly SEO reports your clients actually read — £39–£129 a month, never per client.