What a monthly SEO report should say
A monthly report has one job: let somebody who does not do this for a living decide whether to keep paying for it. Almost everything that goes wrong with reports comes from forgetting that.
The four things a client actually reads
- Did the numbers move, and by how much. In words, not only as an arrow. "Improved from 14.2 to 11.6" rather than a green triangle.
- What happened to the keywords we agreed to work on. Not all 250 keywords. The ones that were the point of the engagement.
- Why anything moved. This is the hard one.
- What you did, and what is next. In your words. No tool can write this honestly and every tool that tries produces the same paragraph for every client.
The sentence that is hardest to write
"Why did this keyword move" is the question asked in every client meeting, and the usual answer from a rank tracker is a coloured arrow. We write one sentence per mover, and it is built only from evidence in the database: a new site in the top ten, a SERP feature that appeared or disappeared, a page that changed between the two checks, or a Google update the movement overlapped. The word used for the last one is "during", never "because of".
When nothing matches, the sentence says that nothing in our data explains that one and the top 20 is otherwise unchanged. That sentence ships. It was tempting to write something more confident, and every time we imagined a client acting on a guess it got less tempting.
What does not belong
A domain authority score. A wall of keyword rows nobody reads before the summary. A percentage without its base. The word "significant". A page of green ticks for things that were already fine last month.
A note on the base
Never a percentage without the numbers underneath it. "Clicks fell 18%" is an alarm; "clicks fell 18%, from 1,240 to 1,017" is a fact somebody can think about. It is the same sentence with four extra words in it, and it is the difference between a report that gets read and one that gets forwarded unopened.
A shape that works
Page 1: the three numbers, in words. Average position, clicks, health score, each with its change stated as a sentence.
Page 2: the keywords you agreed to work on. Not the whole list. The ones that were the point.
Page 3: what you did and what is next. Your words, two paragraphs.
Page 4: the audit. The score, what closed this month, what is still open and why.
Appendices: everything else. The full keyword table, the full findings list, the raw Search Console figures. Nobody reads them and they have to be there, because the first time somebody asks for the detail and it is missing, the summary stops being trusted.
The month where nothing happened
It will happen, and it is the month that decides whether the report is evidence.
Say it was quiet. Say what you did anyway. Say what you expect from it and when. A report that claims progress every single month is a report that has stopped carrying information, and the client works that out faster than anybody expects.
Who the report is for
Somebody who does not do this for a living, deciding whether to keep paying for it. Write every line for that reader, and the rest of the decisions about a report make themselves.