SEO reporting: what to ask your consultant for

The thing that creates the most friction in SEO consulting is not the work itself but the report. The consultant sends a twelve-page PDF, the clinic or e-commerce manager stops reading on page two, and both sides walk into the meeting feeling that "there are no results". This article explains which report you should ask your consultant for, how often and from which source; which metrics drive decisions and which are merely decoration. Our aim is to describe a report that can be read on a single page.

We covered the questions for choosing the right consultant in the 12 questions article and the plan for the first three months in the first 90 days article; the report is the document that makes the commitments written in the contract visible.

The source principle: the report comes from your accounts

The first and most important request: the source of the report must be your Search Console and GA4 accounts, not the consultant's third-party tool. Search Console's performance report gives four metrics (clicks, impressions, click-through rate, average position) by query, page, country and device, and that data is your property. Third-party rank tracking tools are useful, but they produce estimates and they do not stay with you when the consultant leaves. Account ownership sitting with you, with the consultant as a user with access, is the precondition for the report's continuity.

Google's "Do you need an SEO?" page lists, among the questions to ask a consultant, "what kind of results do you expect, in what timeframe, and how do you measure success", and it warns against those who guarantee rankings. The report is the monthly answer to that question; reporting language that promises a guarantee is exactly what the same page warns about.

The five blocks of the one-page report

• Business outcome: the number of organic leads, bookings or sales, compared with last month and with the same month last year. If this block is missing the report is incomplete; traffic is not a business outcome.
• Visibility: clicks and impressions from Search Console, by target page group. Page groups rather than a total, because a total hides one group's decline behind another's growth.
• Query quality: queries that get impressions but no clicks, and queries with an average position between 4 and 10; the second list is next month's work list.
• Technical health: the error count in the page indexing report and the share of pages not in "good" status in Core Web Vitals, compared with last month.
• Work done and work to do: the list of what changed on the site this month (which page, what changed) and next month's three priorities.

These five blocks are deliberately short. You can ask for detail under each block, but detail goes on an appendix page, not the first page. The first page should contain more interpretation than numbers: the sentence "impressions on treatment pages rose this month, clicks did not; the titles will be rewritten" drives more decisions than a chart carrying the same information. Keep the chart in the dashboard and the sentence in the report.

The importance of the fifth block is often underrated. Google's same page recommends asking whether the consultant will share every change made to the site with a detailed explanation. A report without a change list makes it impossible to find the cause of a drop: if nobody knows what changed last month, this month's drop cannot be interpreted.

Which metrics are decoration

A keyword ranking table, on its own, is decoration. Average position varies by query with personalisation and device; Search Console's help page says you may not see your site when you search for a query that appears in your list. Ranking gains meaning together with clicks and business outcome. "Domain authority" and similar third-party scores are the same: they are the tool's own model, not Google's metric, and their month-to-month movement is mostly noise.

Another decoration is session count and bounce rate. In GA4, bounce rate is defined as the inverse of engagement rate and is not a quality measure on its own; if a patient reads a treatment page and moves to WhatsApp, that can appear as a "bounce". In the report, engagement metrics should sit next to the business outcome, with an explanation.

Frequency and format

A monthly report is enough; a weekly report means reporting noise on SEO's timescale. The exception is the period after a migration or a major technical change: asking for a short weekly note for two weeks then is reasonable. As a format, a single page with a shared Looker Studio or similar live dashboard underneath it; the PDF itself is the archive, the dashboard is where you query. On multilingual sites the dashboard needs to be built by locale; we described the setup in the GA4 locale-based reporting article.

The last thing to ask your consultant for is a written account of how the report is produced: from which source, with which filters, pulled on which date. This is not distrust; it is the reproducibility of the report. When the consultant changes or a figure is questioned, you must be able to run the same query and see the same number.

The report meeting: twenty minutes is enough

If the report is one page, the meeting is short too. The routine that works: the first five minutes on the business outcome block and the difference from last month; the next ten minutes on the change list and what those changes did in which page group; the last five minutes on next month's three priorities and what they need from you (content approval, developer time, budget). The output of the meeting is the list of decisions waiting for your approval, not the consultant's; most delays in SEO accumulate not on the consultant's side but in work waiting for approval.

Red flags

• No figure in the report names its source, and when you ask you get nothing beyond a tool name.
• The same pages appear as "improved" every month, but there is no record showing what changed on the page.
• In a month with a decline the report is late, or the decline is explained by nothing other than "an algorithm update".
• The report opens with a ranking table and the business outcome is either at the very end or absent.
• The consultant looks at Search Console from their own account, so you cannot see the same data.

Our own practice

In our SEO consulting engagements we deliver the report with these five blocks, from the client's own accounts, monthly; the report is not sent until the business outcome block has been matched with the CRM. The patterns we observe across the sector are published on our industry reports page after the method and sources have been verified; client data never appears there on its own.

Conclusion

A good SEO report is not long; it is one that drives decisions: it comes from your accounts, starts with the business outcome, continues with page groups and query quality, and includes technical health and the change list. The ranking table and third-party authority scores are not on this list, because none of them drives a decision on its own. Asking your consultant for this is asking for more accountability, not less.

Sources

• Do You Need an SEO? — Google Search Central
• Performance report (Search results) — Search Console Help
• Overview of Google Analytics reports — Analytics Help