If your monthly SEO report is longer than four pages and you can’t tell from the first one whether things are better or worse, the report is working for your provider, not for you.
We see a lot of these when businesses come to us wanting a second opinion. Twenty pages of auto generated charts, a “domain authority” score, a list of 300 keywords, and nowhere does it say how many enquiries came from Google this month. The charts aren’t wrong. They’re just answering questions nobody asked.
A useful report answers three things, in this order: did more customers find us, did more of them get in touch, and what did you do about it?
The numbers that matter
1. Enquiries from organic search
This is the headline. Form submissions, phone taps and bookings that came from people who found you through Google (not ads, not Facebook). It should be on page one, compared with last month and the same month last year.
If your report doesn’t include this, it’s usually because tracking isn’t set up. Form submissions are easy to count. Phone calls need a little setup, which we cover in tracking phone calls from your website. Either way, a report without lead numbers is a report about traffic, and traffic doesn’t pay invoices.
2. Clicks from Google, from Search Console
Google Search Console shows how many times people clicked through to your site from Google results. It’s Google’s own data, so it’s more trustworthy than third party estimates. Look at clicks over time, and which pages they land on.
Watch the year on year comparison, not just month on month. A landscaper’s traffic in January will look nothing like September, and that’s seasons, not SEO.
3. Impressions, with context
Impressions are how often your site appeared in results. They’re useful for spotting early movement before clicks follow. On their own, they can be inflated by appearing on page 6 for something irrelevant. A report that celebrates impressions while clicks are flat needs a follow-up question.
There’s a newer report worth asking about. Search Console now has a Generative AI performance report that shows impressions from AI Overviews and AI Mode, and Google says it’s been available for all sites since 31 August 2026. It won’t show anything for sites with too few AI impressions, but if yours has data, it belongs in the report.
4. A small set of target searches
Not 300 keywords. Ten to twenty searches that a real customer would type and that you’d want to win: “physio Lennox Head”, “emergency plumber Ballina”, “hearing test Lismore”. Their positions, tracked from your local area. Rankings change by location, so a ranking checked from Sydney tells you little about Ballina.
5. Map results
For a local business, the map pack often matters more than the blue links. Your Google Business Profile performance (calls, direction requests, website clicks) should be in the report, even if it’s just a few lines. If those numbers are flat, that is a local SEO and Business Profile problem more than a website one.
6. Work done, and what’s next
What changed on the site this month, and what’s planned. Pages written, fixes made, links earned. This is the part that tells you whether you’re paying for work or paying for a dashboard.
What’s usually filler
These aren’t useless, but they shouldn’t take up the space they do:
- Domain authority or domain rating. These are scores invented by SEO tool companies. Google doesn’t use them. Fine as a rough trend, meaningless as a goal.
- Total keywords ranked. Ranking 80th for 500 things is worth nothing. This number can go up while your business gets no more calls.
- Bounce rate and time on site, without context. A contact page with a high bounce rate might mean people found the number and rang it.
- Pages of site audit warnings. A list of 400 “issues” from a crawler, most of them trivial, makes a report look busy. Ask which three matter.
Questions to ask your provider
Print these out for your next catch up.
- How many enquiries came from organic search this month, and how does that compare to last year?
- Which pages are bringing in those enquiries?
- Which of our target searches moved, and why do you think they moved?
- What did you change on the site or off it this month?
- What’s the one thing you’d do next if the budget were fixed?
- Is anything in this report estimated by a third party tool rather than measured by Google?
- Do we own the Search Console, Analytics and Business Profile accounts, or do you?
That last one matters more than it sounds. Your business should own those accounts, with your provider added as a user. If you leave, the history stays with you.
A provider who answers these clearly is probably doing good work, even if the numbers are moving slowly. SEO takes months, and honest reports say so. A provider who answers with more charts, or with promises about page one, deserves a closer look. Our guide on how to spot a dodgy SEO offer covers the warning signs.
What a good one page report looks like
If you want a template to hand your provider, ask for this:
This month: 14 enquiries from organic search (11 forms, 3 phone taps), up from 9 last year. Clicks from Google up 12% on the same month last year. Main entry pages: the hearing aids page and the tinnitus page.
Searches we’re tracking: 6 of 15 on page one locally, up from 4.
Work done: rewrote the tinnitus page, fixed two broken redirects, replied to three new Business Profile reviews.
Next month: write the service page for kids’ hearing tests, chase a listing on the local health directory.
The figures there are made up to show the format. What matters is that a busy owner can read it in 60 seconds and know whether to keep paying.
If your monthly report is all charts and you still can’t tell whether it’s working, our SEO team can rework last month’s into the format above. Pass it on through our contact page.