article · HOW TO READ A MONTHLY SEO REPORT

Read TheReport Properly.

Most monthly reports are built to be looked at rather than read. Here is what to look for, what to ignore, and what should be in there and usually is not.

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drop: monthly marketing report open on a desk with the numbers p…

01 · what should be in a monthly marketing report

What a monthly marketing report needs.

A report that can be checked has four parts, and only the fourth one is hard to fake.

What shipped

A dated list of changes, each naming the page or the account it touched. This is the part that says work happened.

What it produced

Calls, forms, bookings, sales. Real actions by real people, counted the same way every month so the numbers can be compared to each other.

What moved in search or in the ad account

Positions, impressions, clicks, cost per lead. These are inputs, not outcomes, and they belong here as context rather than as the headline.

What is next and why

The next three things, ordered by what they are costing you now. If this section is copied from last month, nobody is deciding anything.

02 · marketing metrics that do not mean anything

Marketing metrics that mean nothing.

None of these are lies. They are just easier to move than the numbers that pay you, which is why they lead so many reports. Read them last.

Impressions on their own. Being shown to people who never clicked is not an outcome.

Total site traffic with no split by source. A spike from one shared post reads the same as a month of earned search.

Average position across all keywords. Adding a hundred easy terms improves the average and changes nothing about your revenue.

Social followers, unless you can trace a follower to a booking.

Bounce rate quoted with no page attached. On a phone number page a fast exit is often the goal.

A score out of a hundred from any tool. Tools disagree with each other, and none of them are your customer.

03 · how to tell if a marketing report is honest

Three questions for any report.

Can I trace one number back to one thing that was done?

Pick any improvement in the report and ask which shipped change caused it. An honest report survives that question on at least one line. A dashboard cannot answer it.

Is this month comparable to last month?

Same date range length, same source split, same definition of a lead. When the shape of the report changes in a good month and back in a bad one, the reporting is the story.

Does anything in here look worse than last month?

Real work produces mixed months. A report where every line improves every month is being curated, and the parts left out are the parts you needed.

evidence

A published web audit, written the way a report should read

04 · why marketing reports are so hard to read

Why marketing reports are hard to read.

Most reports are generated by a tool, then a summary is written on top. Nobody decided what you needed to know. The tool decided, and the tool has no idea what your business does.

A fresh document every month has no memory. Last month's promises are not in it, so nothing is ever visibly unfinished. That is why a stack of twelve reports says less than one honest page.

The fix is not a better chart. It is one running record where an item stays open until it closes, and progress is a dated row you can open yourself.

05 · common questions about marketing reports

Marketing report questions.

How often should I get a report?

Monthly is right for search and organic work, because that is roughly the pace at which anything changes. Paid ads deserve a look every week, because a week of a bad setting is real money.

Should the report come with a call?

It should stand on its own first. If a report only makes sense while someone talks you through it, the talking is the product and the document is decoration. A call instead of a readable report is a warning.

What is a good cost per lead?

Only your own numbers answer that. Take what a closed customer is worth to you and what share of leads you close, and the cost you can afford falls out of those two.

Who should own the analytics account?

You should. Both the analytics property and the Search Console property should sit under your own login with your vendor added as a user, never the reverse. If the data lives in an account you cannot open, the reporting is the only truth you have.

What does your reporting look like?

A dated record instead of a monthly document. Every change is filed with the date it shipped and the page it touched, it stays open until it closes, and you can open it yourself. The audits I publish are the same shape.

+ · keep reading

What the audit turns up.

I crawl your whole site, score it 0 to 100, and send a ranked list of what is costing you customers. About a day. No call needed.