SEO reporting in plain English

What a report is for

An SEO report should help you make decisions. After reading it, you should know whether things are moving in the right direction, what was done, and what's planned. If you finish a report confused, or only reassured by lots of green arrows, it isn't doing its job.

The numbers that matter

For most small businesses, a handful of figures tell the story.

From Google Search Console

Search Console's Performance report shows how your site appears in Google Search.

• Clicks. Visits from Google's organic results.
• Impressions. How often your pages appeared in results someone saw.
• Click-through rate. Clicks divided by impressions.
• Average position. Where your pages tend to appear, averaged across searches.

Look at them by page and by query, not just as totals.

From your analytics

Google Analytics 4 shows what visitors did once they arrived.

• Organic sessions, meaning visits from unpaid search.
• Key events, such as enquiry form submissions, calls from the website and bookings.

From your business

• Enquiries that mention finding you through Google.
• Jobs or sales that came from those enquiries.

That last one matters most and is the hardest to track. A simple "how did you find us?" question at the point of enquiry helps a lot.

How to read the figures

Compare like with like

Many businesses are seasonal. Compare this month with the same month last year, not just last month. A garden centre's traffic in December tells you nothing when set against June.

Look at trends, not single months

One month can be noisy. A Google update, a bank holiday or a local news story can move numbers. Three to six months shows direction.

Understand how the metrics interact

Impressions rising while click-through rate falls is often good news. It usually means you're appearing for more searches, including some where you rank lower. Average position can drop for the same reason. Read the numbers together.

What to be sceptical of

• Ranking reports for chosen phrases. Positions vary by location and device. A report showing top rankings for phrases nobody searches is meaningless.
• "Domain authority" scores. These are third-party estimates, not anything Google uses.
• Traffic without context. More visits only matter if they're the right visitors.
• Lists of tasks with no outcomes. "Optimised 40 meta tags" says what was done, not whether it helped.
• Hiding bad news. A good report explains drops, too.

What a good monthly report includes

Keep it short. One or two pages is plenty for most small businesses.

1. Summary. Two or three sentences on how the month went. 2. Key figures. Clicks, impressions and enquiries, compared with last month and the same month last year. 3. What was done. The changes made, in plain language. 4. What we noticed. Pages that improved, pages that dropped and likely reasons. 5. What's next. The priorities for the coming month. 6. Anything you need to do. Approvals, information or access.

An example summary

Here's the kind of opening that helps:

"Clicks from Google were up on the same month last year, mostly from the new boiler servicing page, which now appears on the first page for several local searches. The emergency plumbing page dipped after a competitor opened a new branch nearby. Next month we'll add more detail on response times and coverage to that page. We need you to confirm your bank holiday hours for the Business Profile."

You learn what happened, why and what's next in four sentences.

Questions to ask your provider

• Which of these numbers are linked to enquiries or sales?
• Why did this page go down?
• What did you change, and when, so we can connect actions to results?
• Do I own the Search Console and analytics accounts?

That last one is important. You should always own your accounts and give providers access, not the other way round.

Doing it yourself

If you manage SEO in-house, a simple monthly routine works:

1. Export Search Console's Performance data by page for the last 28 days and the same period last year. 2. Note your top ten pages by clicks and any big movers. 3. Count enquiries from organic search. 4. Write three sentences on what changed and what you'll do next.

Keep the notes in one document. Over a year, it becomes a record of what actually works for your business.

When the numbers go down

Every site has bad months. When figures drop, a good report works through the likely causes in order: a tracking problem, a seasonal dip, a technical issue such as pages dropping out of the index, a Google update, or a competitor improving. Each has a different fix. A report that simply says "rankings fluctuated" without checking these isn't telling you enough.

A note on dashboards

Live dashboards can be handy, but they don't replace a written summary. Numbers without interpretation leave you to work out what they mean. The most useful reporting combines a few clear figures with a short, honest explanation.