SEO reporting: what belongs in it and how to automate it

A good SEO report answers three questions: what was done, what did it deliver and what happens now. That fits on one page. Everything on top of that is decoration. Most reports business owners get from an agency are too long and say too little: twenty pages of charts in which you have to find the news yourself.

A report itself changes nothing about your visibility. It tells you whether last month’s work did anything. So you want to spend as little time on it as possible. Making it is arithmetic, and arithmetic can be automated.

The six numbers that matter

Number	Where you find it	What it says
Clicks from Google	Search Console, Performance	How many visitors Google sends you
Impressions	Search Console, Performance	How often Google shows you
Click-through rate	Search Console, Performance	Whether your title and description convince
Pages in Google	Search Console, Pages	Whether Google knows your whole site
Inquiries through the site	Google Analytics or your own count	Whether visitors become customers
Visibility in AI	A prompt tracker	Whether ChatGPT and Gemini name you

The first five have existed for years. The sixth is new. Search Console does not show whether ChatGPT names your business. You measure that separately. How is in measuring AI visibility.

What we deliberately leave out:

• A list of rankings for fifty keywords. Rankings vary per day and per person. Clicks are more reliable.
• An SEO score. A number from 0 to 100 that a tool made up. It says nothing about customers.
• Domain authority. A metric from a tool maker. Google does not use it.

Always compare with the same period

A single number says nothing. 840 clicks this month: is that good? You only know when you put it next to something.

Use two comparisons.

The 28 days before. Shows whether you are heading the right way.

The same period last year. Takes the season out. A bed and breakfast on Cape Cod always gets more search traffic in May than in February. Compare May with April and everything seems to work. Compare May with May and you see whether it is really getting better.

The most important part: what was done?

This is where most reports go wrong. You see charts, but not what changed on your site.

A report should have a list like this.

Date	Page	What changed	Effect after 4 weeks
October 6	/rooms	New title and description	Clicks from 41 to 67
October 6	/packages	Two internal links from the homepage	Position from 11 to 8
November 10	/area	Description added	Still measuring
November 10	/breakfast	Alt text on 6 photos	Still measuring

A list like that does three things. You see that work was done. You see what works for your site. And if something disappoints, you know what to put back.

Not getting a list like this from your agency? Ask for it. It is a reasonable question. More questions to ask a provider are in SEO subscription.

A one-page report

This is what a report looks like that you read in two minutes. The example is the bed and breakfast on Cape Cod.

November in short. Clicks from Google: 912, against 780 in October and 640 in November last year. Inquiries through the site: 23, against 17 in October.

What was done. Seventeen improvements: five titles, six descriptions, four internal links and alt text twice.

What worked. The new title of /rooms brought 26 extra clicks. The /packages page is on page 1 for the first time.

What did not work. The new title of /contact did nothing. We leave it, the page gets few impressions.

In AI assistants. For the question “bed and breakfast on Cape Cod near the beach”, ChatGPT names you in 9 of 28 tests. Last month in 4.

Next month. The bike rental page gets its own text. It is searched 310 times a month and you are at position 14.

That is all. No chart needed to understand how it is going.

Automating a report yourself

You can do it for free with Google’s tools.

Looker Studio. A free dashboard tool from Google. You connect Search Console and Google Analytics and build one page with your six numbers. The dashboard updates itself. Count on two to four hours for the first setup.

A monthly email. In Looker Studio you can have the dashboard emailed as a PDF every month.

The summary with AI. Export your numbers and let an AI assistant write in five sentences what stands out. Check the figures: a language model does not always calculate correctly.

What this setup misses is the most important part: the list of what was done. You keep that yourself in a spreadsheet. And the dashboard does not explain why a number changed.

What software does with a report

Software that works on your site itself knows what changed. It does not need to track that in a spreadsheet. The list of what was done and the effect afterwards then come from the same system.

That is how GreatCompany does it. Every improvement is recorded: the page, old and new. After four weeks GreatCompany measures what clicks the page got. That goes into your overview.

You get a report every 30 days. With Automatic you also get an email in every week where something was applied, saying what changed.

Want to know something in between? Ask in the chat. “What did you change on my site this month?” or “How many clicks do I get from Google?” The answer comes from your own numbers. See the AI SEO assistant.

The measurement in AI assistants is included. GreatCompany asks your customers’ questions to ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity every day. Your report shows for which questions you are named and for which your competitor is. More at the prompt tracker.

The report is then the final piece of a process that runs by itself. How that process works is in the article on automated SEO.

Reporting to a client or your leadership

Making a report for someone else? Keep three rules.

Start with the outcome. More or fewer clicks and inquiries than last month. Only then the explanation.

Use their words. A CEO thinks in customers and revenue, not impressions and click-through rate.

Be honest about what did not work. Nobody believes a report where everything goes up.

For agencies there is the Agency plan: $149 a month for 3 websites, with a report per client to share. See GreatCompany for agencies.

How long before you see something?

Do not expect miracles in your first report. Titles and descriptions work within a month. New pages take longer. What to expect per period is in how long SEO takes.

Start with a baseline

A report needs a starting point. Join the waitlist. When we open in the US, your free report is that baseline: which errors we find on your site, and for which customer questions ChatGPT names you or your competitor.