If you pay for SEO, you probably get a report every month. The question is whether it tells you anything useful, or whether it is twenty pages of graphs designed to look busy.

A good SEO report should answer three simple questions: is more of the right traffic finding us, is that traffic turning into enquiries or sales, and what is being done next? Everything else is detail.

Here is what we think should be in every monthly SEO report, what the numbers actually mean, and the red flags that suggest it is time to ask some awkward questions.

1. A plain-English summary at the top

The first page should tell you what happened this month in a few sentences, written for a business owner rather than another SEO. Something like: “Organic enquiries are up 18% on last month. Three service pages moved onto page one. Next month we are focusing on the Portsmouth location page.”

If you have to dig through charts to work out whether things are going well, the report is not doing its job.

2. Organic traffic, compared properly

Traffic from Google is the headline number, but it only means something in context. Look for:

• This month against last month, so you can see the trend
• This month against the same month last year, which removes seasonal ups and downs
• Traffic to the pages that matter, such as your service and location pages, not just blog posts that bring in visitors who will never buy

A spike in traffic to an old blog post about something unrelated to your business is not a win. Traffic to the pages that sell is.

3. Conversions: the number that pays the bills

This is where most SEO reports fall short. Rankings and traffic are useful signs, but the real question is how many people got in touch, booked, bought or called because they found you on Google.

A good report pulls this from Google Analytics 4 (or your booking or e-commerce system) and shows enquiries, calls, form fills and sales from organic search. If your agency has never set up conversion tracking, that is the first job, because without it nobody can tell you whether SEO is paying for itself.

4. Keyword rankings that you actually care about

Rankings are worth tracking, but only for the searches your customers really use. A report that proudly shows you ranking first for your own business name, or for a phrase nobody searches, is padding.

The most useful ranking section shows:

• A short list of priority keywords tied to your services and locations
• Movement up or down since last month
• Which page is ranking for each keyword, so you know the right page is being shown
• New keywords you have started to appear for

5. Search Console data: impressions and clicks

Google Search Console shows how often your site appeared in search results (impressions), how often people clicked, and your average position. It is free, straight from Google, and harder to dress up than third-party tools.

Rising impressions usually mean Google is trusting your site for more searches, even before the clicks follow. It is a good early sign that the work is landing.

6. Local SEO, if you serve customers in an area

For most of the businesses we work with across Surrey, Hampshire and West Sussex, local search is where the enquiries come from. The report should include your Google Business Profile performance: calls, direction requests, website clicks and new reviews.

If you want a deeper look at this side of things, our local SEO audit guide walks through what to check.

7. Technical health

You do not need pages of technical detail, but you should see whether the site is healthy: page speed, mobile usability, crawl errors, broken links and any pages that have dropped out of Google’s index. The important part is what was fixed this month and what still needs doing.

8. What was actually done

This is the bit that tells you what you are paying for. A clear list of the work completed this month, for example:

• Two new blog posts written and published
• Service page for kitchen fitting rewritten and expanded
• Internal links added to five older posts
• Three backlinks secured from local business directories
• Broken links fixed and page titles improved on eight pages

Vague lines like “ongoing optimisation” or “technical improvements” with nothing behind them should make you curious.

9. Next month’s plan

A report should look forward as well as back. What is the focus next month, and why? The plan should connect to the numbers above: if a page is sitting on page two, the plan should say what will be done to push it onto page one.

The red flags

In our experience, these are the signs that a report is hiding more than it shows:

• No conversion data at all. If nobody is measuring enquiries, nobody can prove SEO is working.
• Rankings for phrases nobody searches. Being first for a ten-word phrase with no search volume is easy and worthless.
• Only good news, every month. SEO has ups and downs. A report that never mentions a dip is probably not showing you everything.
• Lots of jargon, no explanation. “Domain authority increased by two” means little unless someone tells you why it matters.
• The same report every month. If the only thing that changes is the date, the work may not be changing either.
• No list of completed work. You should always know what you paid for.
• Bought links or sudden link spikes. Hundreds of new backlinks in a month from sites you have never heard of can do real damage. Our guide to cleaning up toxic backlinks explains why.

How often should you get an SEO report?

Monthly is the right rhythm for most small and medium-sized businesses. SEO moves slowly, so weekly reports mostly show noise. Quarterly is too long to spot a problem. Monthly gives enough data to see trends and enough time to act on them.

Alongside the report, a quick call to talk it through is worth more than any graph. It is your chance to ask questions and make sure the work is pointed at what matters to your business right now.

What our SEO reports look like

At Delivered Social, every SEO client gets a monthly report that starts with a plain-English summary, shows enquiries as well as rankings, and lists exactly what we did and what we are doing next. No padding, no jargon, and if something has dipped, we will tell you why and what we are doing about it.

If you are not sure whether your current SEO is working, book a free Social Clinic. Bring your latest report and we will happily go through it with you.