Home › The SEO guide for local businesses › What a monthly SEO report should show an owner
SEO Guide · Chapter 30 of 30
What a monthly SEO report should show an owner
For any owner who pays for SEO and gets a report they do not read. After reading it you will know which numbers belong on the first page, which ones mean nothing, and how to tell whether the work is doing anything.
In one paragraph
A monthly SEO report should show an owner what search sent the business last month in calls, forms and customers, with the same month a year earlier beside it, and then what changed on the site to cause it. Six numbers cover it: visits from Google search, calls, forms, pages Google has indexed, searches where the site shows on page one, and visits from AI assistants. Everything else in a typical report, from domain authority to keyword counts, is there to fill pages. This page builds an August report for a land and ranch broker in Burley and shows you how to check the report you get now.
What a monthly SEO report is
A monthly SEO report is the one document that says whether the money spent on search is coming back. It answers three questions in order. What did search send the business last month, in calls, forms and customers. How does that compare with the month before and the same month last year. What was done on the site, and what will be done next month, to move those numbers.
The numbers come from three places, and a report should say which. Calls and forms come from the lead tracking described under tracking the calls and forms that search sends. Clicks, impressions and the list of searches come from Search Console, which is Google’s own count. Visits and what people did on the site come from Google Analytics.
A report is also short. An owner reads it on a phone between two other things. The first screen holds the six numbers and one sentence on each, and the query tables and crawl results that some agencies attach belong in an appendix.
What a bad SEO report looks like for a land broker
A ranch and land brokerage in Burley gets a 14-page PDF on the fifth of each month. Page one is a traffic chart with a green arrow. Page two is a domain authority score, a number invented by a software company and not used by Google, that went from 18 to 19. Page three lists 40 tracked keywords with a position for each, and 12 are in the top 10, though three of those are the brokerage’s own name. Pages four through eleven are a crawl report of 200 technical items, most of them image sizes. Page twelve says 40 backlinks were built, without saying where. The last page says 10 pages were improved and names none of them.
Nowhere in the report is the number of people who called about a listing. The owner knows that a 640-acre irrigated parcel near the Raft River drew two serious buyers in August and does not know whether either came from the site. The report cannot say, because nothing in it was ever connected to a phone call.
The report is not lying. Everything in it is a real number. It is simply about the wrong things, and it is long because length looks like work.
A worked example: an August report for a land broker in Burley
Snake River Land and Ranch is a brokerage in Burley with 14 active listings, from a 40-acre pasture at $420,000 to a 1,900-acre ranch listed at $6.4 million. Here is the first page of its August report, with July and the same month last year beside it.
| What the report shows | July | August | August last year |
|---|---|---|---|
| Visits from Google search | 1,840 | 2,110 | 1,420 |
| Calls from the site and the Google profile | 24 | 31 | 17 |
| Listing inquiry forms | 6 | 9 | 4 |
| Pages Google has indexed | 62 | 64 | 58 |
| Searches where the site shows on page one | 38 | 44 | 21 |
| Visits from AI assistants | 14 | 22 | 0 |
Under the table, one sentence explains each row, and a short section says what changed on the site. The difference between that and the 14-page version is easiest to see in the summary paragraph.
Organic traffic increased 12 percent month over month. Domain authority rose from 18 to 19. Of 40 tracked keywords, 12 are now in the top 10 and 27 in the top 20. 40 new backlinks were acquired. 10 pages were improved for target keywords. Technical health score is 91 out of 100.
In August the site and the Google profile brought 31 calls and 9 listing inquiries from search, up from 24 and 6 in July and from 17 and 4 in August last year. Two of the nine inquiries were for the 640-acre Raft River parcel, both from the irrigated farmland page, which was rewritten in July and now shows on page one for “irrigated farm ground for sale Idaho”. Visits from ChatGPT and Perplexity reached 22, from none a year ago. September’s work is the recreational property page and the county pages for Cassia and Minidoka.
How to count the AI assistant visits in the last row is covered under measuring visits and mentions from AI assistants in the GEO guide.
How to check your own SEO report
- Open last month’s report and find the number of calls and forms that came from search. If it is not there, the report is not measuring the thing you pay for.
- Find the same month last year beside each number. Month over month alone hides the season.
- Look for the source of each number. Visits should say Google Analytics, clicks and impressions should say Search Console, and calls should say the tracking number or the Google profile. A number without a source is an estimate.
- Cross out every line that is a score invented by a tool: domain authority, technical health, visibility index. None of them is a number Google uses.
- Find the section that names which pages were changed last month and which will be changed next month. “10 pages improved” with no URLs is not a report of work.
- Open Search Console yourself, Performance, last 28 days, and compare total clicks against the visits figure in the report. They will not match exactly, since the two tools count differently, but they should tell the same story.
What we do about the monthly SEO report
The report you get from us is the table above, with your numbers in it, on the first page, followed by one sentence on each row and a plain list of the pages that changed and the pages that will change next month. Every figure names its source, every month sits beside the same month last year, and there is no score in it that Google does not use. It comes as a page you can open on your phone and forward to a partner, and it is the document every other page in this guide is working toward, because the six numbers on it are the reason for all of the rest.
Questions people ask about SEO: what a monthly SEO report should show an owner
What should be in a monthly SEO report?
The calls, forms and customers that came from search last month, with the month before and the same month last year beside them, followed by what was changed on the site and what will change next. Six numbers cover it: visits from Google search, calls, forms, indexed pages, searches on page one, and visits from AI assistants.
What KPIs matter most for local SEO?
Calls and forms from search matter most, because they are the only figures that connect to revenue. Behind them sit visits from Google search, the number of searches where the site appears on page one, and calls and direction requests from the Google Business Profile. Tool scores such as domain authority are not KPIs for a local business.
How long before SEO shows results in a report?
Changes to existing pages show in Search Console within four to eight weeks, and new pages take about as long to settle. Calls and forms follow the clicks by a few weeks more. A report should show movement in impressions and page-one searches by the second month, and in calls by the third.
Is domain authority a real Google metric?
No, domain authority is a score made by Moz, a software company, to estimate how a site might do in search, and Google has said repeatedly that it does not use it. Similar scores from other tools are estimates in the same way. A report built around one of them is reporting on a tool, not on Google.
How do I know if my SEO company is doing anything?
Ask for the list of URLs that changed last month and open two of them, then open Search Console yourself and compare its clicks against the report's visits. A company doing the work can name the pages, say what changed on each, and show the calls and forms that followed. A report with no page names and no calls is the sign.
This page is part of the The SEO guide for local businesses. The other guides: SEO, AEO, GEO.
Have us do this on your site
Send the address of your site. We fetch every page from outside, the way Google does, and send back the list: every page, every flag, and what we would fix first. Then we fix it, verify each change from outside, and report it in plain language every month.
