I have read a lot of SEO reports written by other agencies, usually because a business has asked me to explain one. The pattern almost never changes. Twelve pages, a lot of green arrows, and no way to answer the only question that matters: did this month make money.
That is not an accident. Impressions, average position and visibility scores move whether or not the work was any good. Build a report from those three and you have a document that is very difficult to be angry at. You have also built something useless.
The three numbers that go first
Everything on page one of a report should be a number the client could, in principle, go and check themselves.
- Ranking position for named commercial terms. Not an average across 400 keywords. The specific terms that people type when they are ready to buy, listed individually, tracked weekly, shown as a line going back to the month the work started.
- Organic traffic to the pages that take enquiries. Separated from blog traffic and separated from brand traffic. If someone searched your company name and landed on your homepage, that is not SEO working, that is someone who already knew you.
- Leads, tied to the page that produced them. Form fills and calls, attributed back to a landing page. This is the number that turns SEO from a cost into an investment, and it is the one most agencies leave out.
Three numbers. If the report opens with anything else, ask why. This is the format I use on every organic SEO engagement, and it is the same one page whether the month was good or bad.
The five metrics to cut
These are not useless. They are diagnostic, and I look at all of them while working. They just have no business being the headline.
- Impressions. Google showed your page to someone. That is it. Impressions can double because a page started ranking at position 47 for a term nobody searches with intent.
- Average position. An average across every term you rank for, including the ones you never wanted. Add fifty new pages ranking at 30 and your average gets worse while the business gets better.
- Visibility score. A number invented by a tool vendor, weighted by that vendor's keyword list. It does not exist inside Google.
- Keywords in the top 100. Position 100 is page ten. Nobody has ever been to page ten.
- Domain authority. A third party estimate of a thing Google does not publish. Useful for comparing link prospects, worthless as a performance metric.
A good test: for every metric on the first page of your report, ask what a business decision based on it would look like. If you cannot name one, the metric is decoration.
One page, and why
My reports fit on one page. Not because short is clever, but because the length is a forcing function. If the three numbers and the work done do not fit, something on the page is padding.
The layout, top to bottom:
- The three numbers, with last month beside them so the direction is obvious
- What was actually done, as a list of specific changes with dates. Not "optimised on page elements", but "rewrote the boiler replacement page around the term people actually search, 14 August"
- What is next, in priority order
- Anything that went wrong, including algorithm updates and tests that did not work
That last line is the one clients remember. A report that only ever contains good news is not a report, and everyone reading one knows it.
What to do when the numbers are flat
Some months nothing moves. Technical work often lands weeks before rankings react, competitive terms take three to six months, and core updates can flatten a good month for reasons nobody outside Google fully understands.
A flat month is still worth reporting honestly. What changes is what goes in the next section: whether the plan holds, or whether the evidence says the plan was wrong. If an agency cannot tell you which of those two it is, they are not reading their own data.
The reason I run reporting this way is not integrity for its own sake. It is that a client who can see the three numbers can tell whether to spend more or spend less, and that is a far better conversation than defending a green arrow.
Where this leads
If this is the bit you want handled rather than explained:
- Organic SEO. The work the report is measuring, run as one engagement.
- SEO audits. If you want the diagnosis before you commit to anything monthly.
- Results. A real account, with the numbers you are allowed to ask to see.
