Monthly Reporting
Not a dashboard full of numbers with no work attached to it. A dated list of what was done, the numbers straight from Google's own reporting, what moved, what did not, and what happens next. Here is the format, in full, before you pay for anything.
Get StartedThe most common thing we hear from someone leaving another agency is not that the work was bad. It is that they could never tell whether there was any work. A report arrives, it has charts in it, the charts point up and to the right, and none of it answers the only question the owner actually has: what did you do this month, and did it help? Six months in, the invoices are the only part of the arrangement anyone can point to with confidence. That is not a pricing problem or a results problem. It is that nobody ever wrote down what was being bought.
How It Works
We record where you rank, what your profile is doing, and who currently holds the spots you want — and you get that in writing before any money changes hands. Without a baseline, every later report is unfalsifiable. This is also the point where we tell you if we think you do not need us yet.
Work gets written down on the day it is done, not reconstructed at the end of the month from memory. That is the only reason the dates in the report can be trusted, and it is why the report takes us almost no time to produce — it is a record, not a presentation.
Work log first, numbers second, next month third. No jargon, no charts that exist to fill a page. If a month was bad, the report says the month was bad and explains what we think caused it. You can read the whole thing in about five minutes.
A report and a deliverable are different things, and confusing them is the single most expensive mistake in this industry. A report is a photograph of the scoreboard — traffic, rankings, impressions. A deliverable is a thing that changed: a corrected category, a rewritten page, a fixed listing, a review that got answered. You can receive a beautiful report every month for a year while nothing whatsoever was delivered, and the report will not tell you that. So the first rule of ours is that the work comes first in the document and the charts come second.
The second problem is that scope is usually described in language that cannot be checked. "Content strategy and ongoing optimization" is not a scope, it is a mood. If a line item cannot be answered with a date and a specific thing — Tuesday the 8th, primary category changed from Contractor to Roofing Contractor — it is not a line item. Everything in our report has a date and a noun.
The third is vanity keywords. It is trivially easy to report a first-place ranking for a phrase nobody has ever typed, and plenty of reports are quietly padded with exactly that. We report on terms with real search volume, we show the volume next to the ranking, and when we track a term that is low volume on purpose — because it is high intent and worth owning — we say so in the line.
The fourth is ownership. Some agencies build your profile, your listings and your analytics inside accounts you do not control, so leaving means starting over. Everything we touch is yours. Your Google Business Profile, your domain, your analytics, your content. If you fire us on a Tuesday you still own all of it on Wednesday, and we will hand over anything you need to keep going without us.
The four things wrong with most SEO reports
Proof
We report this way because we run our own businesses on the same work, and the numbers we point to are ones we are accountable for daily: one profile at 130 five-star reviews, another at 215 reviews and 4.8 stars, and a single shop that pulled 13,216 Google views in one month on zero ad spend. Every one of those came from the unglamorous list — complete profile, active posting, reviews answered — which is exactly the list that shows up in a client's monthly work log.
FAQ
Three things, in this order: what was done, with dates; what changed in the numbers, with the source those numbers came from; and what happens next month. Anything that only contains the middle part is a scoreboard, not a report. You cannot hold anyone accountable to a scoreboard.
A report tells you what the numbers did. A deliverable is a thing that changed because someone worked on it — a corrected category, a rewritten page, a built citation, an answered review. You can get twelve months of reports with zero deliverables underneath them, which is exactly how people end up a year in with nothing to show. Ask for both, and ask for the deliverables first.
Because every line has a date and a specific object attached, and most of them are independently checkable. You can look at your own Google Business Profile and see the category, the photos and the posts. You can read the review replies. You can open the page that was rewritten. A report you cannot spot-check is a report you are taking on faith.
Yes, always, and this is worth checking with anyone you hire. We work inside accounts that are in your name. If we stop working together you keep the profile, the domain, the analytics history and the content, and we hand over whatever you need. An agency that owns your assets has made leaving expensive on purpose.
Rankings are tracked weekly, and the full report comes once a month. If something significant happens in between — a ranking drop, a bad review that needs a response, a Google change that affects you — you hear about it when it happens rather than four weeks later in a document.
Then it says nothing improved. SEO has flat months, particularly in the first quarter of organic work, and a report that never shows a bad month is a report being managed rather than written. What should be in it either way is the work log, so you can see that the effort continued while the numbers were flat, and our read on why.
Yes. Standalone monthly reporting is $49 a month. People usually buy it for one of two reasons: they are doing the work themselves and want an objective scoreboard, or they are paying someone else and want an independent read on whether it is working. We will tell you honestly either way, including when the other agency is doing a good job.
About five minutes of reading. Length is not a measure of effort — a forty-page automated PDF usually means nobody wrote anything. The work log is as long as the work was, and the rest is short on purpose.