PeakLeadsSEO reporting
What should an SEO report include each month?
A monthly SEO report should show how many calls and enquiries came from Google, what work was done that month, what Google Search Console shows for your site and what your Google Business Profile recorded. It should keep searches for your business name apart from searches for your services, and end with next month's plan. Every figure should come from Google's own tools or your own call and form tracking, so you can check it yourself.
This is for the person who receives the report and pays for it. It goes through each part, explains Google's numbers in plain words and covers the signs of a report that is filling space.
It gives no benchmarks, because a good month for a roofer in Durbanville says nothing about an electrician in Polokwane. Compare your own months with each other.
What should an SEO report show first?
Calls and enquiries. They are what you pay SEO for, so they go at the top, not after six pages of graphs. Say you install aircons in Centurion. Your report should open with the calls from the website, the quote forms sent and the taps on Call in your Business Profile, each next to last month's figure.
Booked jobs matter more still, and only you know that number. Put it next to the enquiry count every month. Divide the SEO invoice by it and you have what each booked job cost, which is how SEO or Google Ads first? says to judge both.
The website figures need tracking. Search Console stops at the click and never learns whether the person phoned. Calls and forms from the site only get counted if it tracks every tap on the number or the WhatsApp button, and every quote form sent. If your report quotes an enquiry figure and nobody set that up, ask where it came from.
Early on, the enquiry numbers may hardly move, because SEO builds slowly. An honest report says so.
What work should the report list?
Everything done that month, specific enough that you could go and look at it. Whatever your monthly SEO work covers, "on-page optimisation" tells you nothing. "Rewrote the geyser replacement page and added the Benoni suburbs you cover" tells you which page to open. Look for:
- each page added or rewritten, with its link
- technical problems fixed, as opposed to found
- changes to your Business Profile, such as new photos, services or posts
- every directory listing or link built, with its address, so you can click it
The list should end with next month's plan. Next month's report should say whether that plan happened, and if it did not, why.
What do clicks, impressions, CTR and position mean?
They measure how often Google showed your site, how often people clicked through to it and how high it appeared. Google defines all four on its help page on impressions, position and clicks. In plain words:
| Number | What Google counts | What it cannot tell you |
|---|---|---|
| Impressions | Each time a link to your site was on the page of results someone had open, usually whether they scrolled to it or not | Whether anyone noticed it |
| Clicks | Each click from Google's results through to your site | Whether that person phoned |
| Click-through rate (CTR) | Clicks divided by impressions | Whether those clicks came from your area |
| Average position | Your highest spot in the results, averaged across the searches where you appeared, with 1 as the top | Where you sit for any single search |
Average position catches people out, because it is averaged across every search where your site was seen. Say you sit at the top whenever someone searches your business name, and this month Google also starts showing you near the bottom of the first page for "blocked drain Randburg". Those new appearances go into the average, the number gets bigger, and on paper your position drops, though you gained a search and lost nothing.
Google's own help calls position a complex metric that can mislead. A report should give it search by search, for the searches that bring you work.
Why separate searches for your name from searches for your service?
Because they come from different people. Someone who types your business name already knows you. They saw your bakkie, got your number from a neighbour or used you before. Someone who types "plumber Randburg" may never have heard of you, and reaching that person is what you pay an agency for.
Google said as much when it added a branded queries filter to Search Console: searches that include your brand usually rank higher and are more likely to be clicked, while the rest show how new people find you. Lump the two together and your own name flatters every figure in the report, with all of the extra coming from people who already knew you.
So the report should show them side by side. Google offers its branded filter only to sites with enough searches. On a smaller site, filtering out the queries that contain the business name gives a rougher version of the same split.
How many of your pages has Google indexed?
The report should say how many of your pages Google has indexed, and whether this month's new pages made it in. A page that is not indexed cannot appear in search at all. Search Console's Page indexing report gives the count, and the reason for every page Google found but left out.
Duplicates, removed pages and pages blocked on purpose are fine to leave out, Google's help says, but every page that earns money should be in: each service you sell and each area you work. The indexed count should rise gradually as the site grows. If it falls, or a new page stays out month after month, the report should say why and what is being done.
If your site is new and nothing shows yet, start with Will my new website show up on Google?
What should your Business Profile numbers show?
Calls, website clicks and direction requests made straight from your profile, because some customers phone from there and never open your website. Google defines each figure on its Business Profile performance help page.
Calls counts taps on the call button on your profile, answered or not. That is the closest the profile gets to an enquiry. Website clicks counts taps on the link to your site. Directions counts requests for directions to your business, which matter more to a showroom than to an electrician who goes to the customer.
One catch: Google says these figures include activity from Google Ads as well as ordinary search. If you also run Google Ads, not every call from the profile is the SEO's doing. And the figures only show on a verified profile, to an account that manages it, so if you have never seen yours, start there.
What are the red flags in an SEO report?
Most are ways of looking busy without showing results. Any one is worth a question, and several together are worth a harder conversation.
- Rankings for searches nobody types. Coming first for "affordable same day geyser plumber open on Sunday" is not hard when nobody else is chasing it. Nearly everyone who types a search you rank well for counts as an impression in Search Console, so a celebrated search that barely registers there is one very few people use.
- The headline number is an authority score from a third-party SEO tool. That is the tool company's estimate, not a Google figure, and nobody phones you because it went up.
- Traffic charts with nothing about enquiries. A blog post that ranks in another country can grow your visits without producing a single call, and Search Console shows which country each search came from.
- Every month's report reads the same: same commentary, same list of technical warnings, new numbers.
- "Number one on Google", with nothing on which search, where or on which device. Google says results depend on the time, place, device and recent history of the person searching, so a screenshot from the agency's office shows where the agency sees you.
- You have no owner access to your own Search Console. You should be an owner and the agency a user, for the reasons in Who owns your website? A PDF or a shared link to one view of the report is not the same thing.
Where does Peak Leads stand on reporting?
Our SEO clients get a plain-English report every month on rankings, traffic and calls, with the month's work listed against those numbers so you can see what the fee paid for. Technical problems get fixed rather than written up as findings. There is no lock-in contract, so every report has to justify the next month on its own.
Hold our reports to everything above. What the fee covers is on our SEO services page, and the work is scoped on a call rather than sold off a shelf.
How do you check your SEO report yourself?
Before you pay next month's invoice, hold the report up against your own accounts. That starts with being able to sign in to your own Search Console.
- Open the Performance report for Search results. It shows the last three months by default, so set the dates to the month your report covers.
- Filter to queries not containing your business name, or use the non-branded filter if your site has it. What is left are roughly the people who found you without searching for your name.
- Read down the searches. The ones your report celebrates should be there, with impressions. Google keeps searches made by very few people off the list, and off the totals too once you filter out queries with your name.
- If your work is seasonal, as leak repairs are in the Cape, compare with the same month last year too.
- Open the Page indexing report and check the count. For a new page, search Google for its address without the https:// part. If it comes up, it is on Google.
- Open your Business Profile, click Performance and choose the same month. Calls and website clicks should match the report.
If it all lines up, the numbers in your report are real. If something does not, ask in writing. And if you have no report at all, or no way into your own accounts, that is the first thing to fix.