How Does an SEO Agency Report on Results?
Reporting is where most client relationships are actually won or lost. It is also the easiest place for an agency to look busy while achieving nothing. This page is about telling the difference rather than about what the individual numbers mean.
Reporting Is Not Fixing
A beautifully presented decline is still a decline. An agency can report diligently, accurately and on time every month while nothing about your position improves. That is the single most useful thing to understand about agency reporting.
Why the confusion happens. Reporting feels like accountability.
A document arriving on schedule, full of charts, reads as a firm taking its responsibilities seriously. It demonstrates that somebody is watching, which is not the same as somebody acting.
What good reporting of bad news looks like. Not enough on its own.
An agency that tells you clearly that things declined has done half of its job. The other half is what it intends to do differently. A report describing a fall for the third consecutive month without any change of approach is a record of watching.
Why this matters more here than elsewhere. You cannot check the work.
In most trades you can see whether something was fixed. Here the report is frequently your only window, so a firm can substitute reporting for work far longer than would be possible anywhere else.
What to take from it. Judge action, not documents.
The question is never whether the reporting is good. It is whether anything changed because of what the reporting showed.
What A Report Should Answer
What changed, why, then what happens next. A document answering all three is a report. One answering only the first is a data export with a cover page.
What changed. The easy one.
Every report manages this, because it is the part software produces automatically. Presence of numbers is not evidence that anybody looked at them.
Why. The interpretation.
Whether a movement was caused by the work, by seasonality, by a competitor or by something outside anybody's control. This requires somebody to think, which is why it is frequently reduced to a sentence restating the number in words.
What happens next. The one that is missing.
What the agency intends to do differently as a result. This is the question that distinguishes a report from a summary. Its absence is the commonest fault in agency reporting by a considerable margin.
How to test for it quickly. Look at consecutive reports.
Put two months side by side. If the plan section is identical, else absent, nothing in the first month's findings reached the second month's work.
Where the numbers themselves are covered. Separately.
What each metric means and which are worth watching belongs in our measuring performance material rather than here.
What Should Be In It
Work done, results against a stated comparison, then the plan. All three, every time, in terms you can follow without help.
Work done. The section clients most need.
What was actually produced or changed this month, specifically enough to check. Pages written and where they are, fixes applied and what they were, listings updated. This is the only direct evidence that anything happened.
Why it gets omitted. It is the least flattering.
Results can be selected and presented well. A list of work done is a plain statement of how much time your fee bought, which is uncomfortable in a thin month. Its absence is therefore informative.
Results against a stated comparison. Against what matters.
A number without a comparison means nothing. Against last month, against the same month last year, else against the position when the work started, with the choice stated rather than left ambiguous.
The plan. Short and specific.
What happens next month and why that follows from what just happened. Two or three lines is enough, provided they are different from last month's.
The Metrics That Flatter
Three kinds of number that can grow while nothing useful happens. Recognising them is enough. What they actually mean is covered in our measuring performance material.
Cumulative totals. They only ever rise.
Any figure that adds each period to the last increases forever by construction, including through months where nothing was achieved. A chart of a cumulative total is a chart of time passing.
Impressions. Growth without benefit.
How often a site appeared can rise substantially without anybody visiting, because appearing far down a results page counts. Rising impressions with flat visits is a fact rather than an achievement.
Third-party authority scores. Not a Google measure.
Numbers produced by tool vendors as their own estimate. No search engine publishes such a figure, so an improving score is an improving vendor estimate rather than evidence of anything.
What makes these flattering rather than false. They are real numbers.
Nobody is fabricating anything. The numbers are accurate and they are selected because they move favourably, which is a presentational choice rather than a falsehood.
The question that cuts through. Enquiries.
Ask what happened to enquiries. That is the figure that resists flattery. An agency steering away from it is telling you where to look.
Ask For The Bad Month
A report where everything always improved is not credible. Every real campaign has poor months, so their complete absence indicates selection rather than success.
Why every campaign has them. Too many variables.
Seasonality, competitors doing something, algorithm changes and ordinary variation all produce months where things go backwards. A year of uninterrupted improvement across every measure does not occur naturally.
What consistent good news actually means. Choosing what to show.
Somebody is picking the measures that moved favourably. That is not fabrication and it does mean the report is a selection rather than a picture, which makes it useless for deciding anything.
What to ask for. One question.
Ask what did not work this month, else what they would do differently. An agency willing to answer has told you something valuable about how it operates.
What a good answer sounds like. Specific and unbothered.
A named thing that underperformed, why they think so and what follows. Somebody comfortable with their work discusses failure easily, because they have an explanation and a next step.
What a poor answer sounds like. Reassurance.
Being told everything is on track, that these things take time, else that it is all going well. That is an answer to a different question and the deflection is the finding.
Automated Reports Are Not Reports
A scheduled export with no commentary attached is the practice that gave agency reporting its reputation. The commentary is the entire product. Without it you have received a file.
What is actually being sent. Something you could generate.
Data pulled from accounts you own, arranged by software, sent on a schedule nobody attends to. You could produce the same document yourself in a few minutes, which is worth remembering when it is presented as part of the service.
Why it persists. It costs nothing to send.
Once configured, it arrives every month without anybody touching it. That produces the appearance of a reporting habit at zero ongoing effort, which is precisely the problem.
What is missing. Everything that required a person.
Why the numbers moved, whether it matters, what was done and what happens next. All four require somebody to have looked. None of them can be automated.
How to recognise it. Two signs.
It arrives on exactly the same date every month. It contains no sentence that could only have been written about your business this month.
What to do about it. Ask for the covering note.
Request a short written summary alongside it. A firm doing the work produces that easily. A firm that was only sending the export finds it difficult.
How Often
Monthly reporting is the norm and it is frequently too frequent to be meaningful. Contact is a separate matter. Confusing the two produces either silence or noise.
Why monthly can be too often. The period is short.
A month is a small window for work that moves slowly, so month to month comparison captures ordinary variation as much as progress. Quarterly comparison is frequently more informative, even where a monthly report is produced.
Why monthly persists anyway. It matches the invoice.
Reporting cadence follows billing cadence rather than anything about the work. That is understandable and it means the reporting period was chosen for administrative reasons.
Why contact should be more frequent. Different purpose.
Reports look backwards. Contact is where questions get asked, decisions get made and things that changed in your business reach the agency. A client who only hears from an agency at reporting time is being reported to rather than worked with.
What we do. Stated as an example of a defined cadence.
We commit to an update every three weeks, which is deliberately not the same rhythm as a monthly report. The point is that a client should always know when they will next hear from somebody rather than the specific interval.
What to agree at the start. Both, separately.
How often you will receive a report, then how often you will actually speak to somebody. How to manage your SEO agency covers the client side of that.
What To Do If You Cannot Understand It
An unintelligible report is the agency's failure rather than yours. You are not supposed to be a specialist. A document you cannot act on has not done its job whatever it contains.
Why the blame sits there. Communication is part of the service.
You are paying for work and for being told about it. A report requiring specialist knowledge to interpret has delivered half of what was bought. The missing half is the half you can use.
What to ask for. Plainly.
Ask them to tell you in a sentence whether things are better or worse, then what they are doing about it. That request is entirely reasonable and most people feel awkward making it.
What a good response looks like. Immediate and unpatronising.
A straight answer in ordinary language, followed by an offer to change the format. Somebody who understands their own work can always explain it simply.
What a poor response looks like. Two versions.
Refusing, else explaining in the same terms more slowly. Both indicate either that they cannot simplify it or that they would rather you did not follow it closely.
Where this leads if it continues. A different question.
Persistent inability to explain the work is a signal about the arrangement rather than the reporting, which is covered in how to measure whether your SEO agency is delivering. The full series is on the hiring an SEO agency guide.
Ask us what
did not work
last month.
Somebody comfortable with their work discusses a poor month easily, because they have an explanation and a next step. Our reporting states what was done, what changed against a stated comparison and what happens next. You can question any of it.
What we commit to in writing:
Our prices are published rather than quoted on request, so you can compare us against anybody else before speaking to us.
Every guide.
One practice.
What an agency is, whether to buy at all, which model suits you, how to vet one, what things cost, what should be in a contract and how to work with them afterwards.
