For the person paying · not the person reporting
What should be in a monthly SEO report.
A monthly SEO report should show the work done: what changed, on which pages, on what dates, which issues were found and fixed, and what is planned next. Rankings and traffic charts belong at the end. If a report contains only numbers, it records the weather, not the work.
The usual
What most monthly SEO reports actually contain.
Open a typical report and you will find a traffic chart, a table of keyword positions, a domain score of some kind, and a page of screenshots exported from an analytics account. All of it is real. None of it is work.
Metrics describe the weather. They move for reasons that have nothing to do with anyone you are paying: a competitor ran a sale, a public holiday fell mid-month, a search engine shipped an update, someone mentioned your brand on the radio. A report built only from metrics cannot separate what a person did from what simply happened.
There is a second problem, and it is the more practical one. Numbers are the cheapest part of a report to produce. Connecting an analytics account and exporting a dashboard takes minutes, and can be scheduled once and forgotten. A record of the work takes someone writing down what they did, which is slower and considerably harder to fake.
So the test is not whether the numbers look good. It is whether you can finish the report and answer one question: what was done, to which pages, on which dates. If you cannot, the report has told you about the market rather than about the service you bought.
The checklist
The 5 sections that belong in a monthly SEO report.
In this order. The order is not decoration: it decides what the report is about.
- 1
Work completed, with dates and URLs.
The core of the report and the section most often written too vaguely to be checked. “Optimised meta titles” is not an entry. To take an invented example, “Rewrote the title and meta description on /services/roof-repairs, 14 Jul” is an entry, because you can open it. Every line should name what was done, the page it was done to, and when.
- 2
Issues found, and the status of each.
A crawl produces a list of problems. The useful version carries a status against every one: fixed, in progress, waiting on a decision from you, or deliberately left alone with a reason given. A long list of issues with no statuses is a report on the tool, not on the month.
- 3
What is planned for next month.
A short list of specific, named things. This is the section that lets you check next month whether what was promised was done, which is why it is the section most easily left vague. “Continue content work” cannot be checked against anything.
- 4
What changed away from your website.
Links earned, directory listings corrected, profiles updated, mentions placed. Off-site work is the part you cannot confirm by looking at your own site, so it needs writing down more carefully, not less. Each item should be checkable: a URL, a date, and which page of yours it points at.
- 5
The numbers, last.
Positions, traffic, impressions, enquiries. Placed at the end they are context for the work above. Placed at the front they become the report. A good numbers section also says what it does not explain: which movements are seasonal, and which are too small to mean anything yet.
The screenshot
How to read a rankings screenshot.
A screenshot of a keyword sitting near the top of page one is the most persuasive thing in most reports, and the least reliable.
Search results are not one fixed list. They vary by the location the search was made from, by the device, by whether the person was signed in, by what that person searched for earlier, and by the day. The same keyword can honestly sit high in one check and well down the page in another an hour later, with nothing having changed and nobody having lied.
That does not make rank tracking useless. It makes a single screenshot useless. What is worth reading is a tracked position over several months from a fixed location, shown as a line rather than as a moment. Check which way the axis runs before you read the shape: on a position chart, down is better, and a chart drawn the other way will look like a collapse.
Three things to ask about any rankings image. Where was the search made from. Was it a tracked series or a check run once, this morning, for the report. And how much of your actual traffic does that keyword bring, because a term nobody searches for can be won easily and will change nothing about your week.
The questions
What to ask when a section is missing.
A missing section is not proof of anything. Reports get built from templates, and a template written for a different client may simply have no field for it. The point of asking is to find out which it is.
| If this is missing | Ask this |
|---|---|
| Any list of work done | Can you send me the changes made last month, with the page each one was made to and the date |
| URLs next to the work | Which pages were edited. I would like to open them and look |
| Statuses on the issue list | Which of these were fixed last month, and which are waiting on me |
| A plan for next month | What specifically will you work on next month |
| Evidence for off-site work | Can I see the links and listings as URLs, with the dates they appeared |
| Anything except charts | Can the next report open with what was done, and put the charts after it |
None of these are hostile questions, and it is worth sending them in that spirit. A team doing the work will answer them in one email, often gladly, because a client who reads the report is a client who stays. A team that cannot answer them has told you something either way.
The fair part
What a good report from a good agency looks like.
Plenty of agencies do this properly, and it is worth saying so plainly rather than leaving it implied. The good ones are not hiding anything. They are usually the ones whose reports are shorter.
A good report opens with a paragraph in plain language: here is what we did, here is what it was for, here is what we expect it to do and roughly when. Then the work, with links you can open. Then the issues, with statuses. Then next month. Then the charts, clearly labelled, with the honest caveats attached.
A good report also admits things. It says when a month was quiet, when a change did not work and was reverted, when the numbers moved for a reason nobody controlled. Consistency of format matters more than the contents of any single month, because that is what makes two months comparable.
And a good agency does work that no report can really show you: the judgement about which market to go after, the decision not to chase a keyword, the conversation that stopped you spending money badly. That is real value and it is genuinely hard to put in a table. Which is the honest limit of everything on this page. A report is evidence that work happened. It is not proof that the work was the right work.
One more thing
If you would rather not have to ask.
We build a read-only product called Receipts. It watches your website and writes down what changed on it each month: which pages were edited, what a title said before and after, which pages appeared and which quietly disappeared. It is built for people who pay an agency and cannot see the work. It does not touch your site and it does not replace anyone.
Its limit is worth stating before you look at it rather than after. It can only see what leaves a trace on your website. Links earned elsewhere, listings corrected, and the thinking behind any of it are invisible to it. For those, you still have to ask the questions above.
Questions
Questions.
What is an SEO report?
A record of the search work done on a website over a period, usually one month, and what happened afterwards. The useful half is the record of work: which pages were changed, when, and why. The results half is context, and it moves for reasons nobody controls.
What should a monthly SEO report include?
Work completed with dates and URLs, issues found with a status against each one, what is planned for next month, what changed off your website, and the numbers last. If the numbers come first and the work never appears, you have been sent a dashboard rather than a report.
How often should I get an SEO report?
Monthly suits the pace of the work, because most search changes take weeks to show up. Weekly reporting mostly produces noise. What matters more than the interval is that the same sections appear every time, so you can hold one month against the last.
Is a rankings screenshot proof that work was done?
No. A screenshot shows a position at one moment, from one location, on one device. Positions vary by all three. It is evidence that a check was run, not that anything was changed. Ask which page was edited and on what date.
What if my agency will not show me the work?
Ask once, plainly, in writing: which pages were changed last month, and on what dates. Most teams answer the same day. If the answer is that the work cannot be described at that level, that is worth understanding before you renew, because on-site work almost always has a page and a date attached to it.
Can an automated SEO report replace a written one?
It can replace the mechanical half: what changed on the site, which pages appeared or disappeared, what the titles say now. It cannot replace the reasoning, the off-site work, or the decision about what to do next. Those still need a person to write them down.
Should the report include what did not work?
Yes. A report in which every month is a success is not describing a real project. Reverted changes, abandoned drafts and flat months are useful information, and their absence over a long run is itself a signal.
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