Monthly SEO Report: The Metrics to Include (and the Ones to Skip)

A monthly SEO report isn’t just one more dashboard: it’s a decision document. Its job is to answer three simple questions — what changed this month, why, and what do we do next? Yet many reports are a pile of numbers with no interpretation, which nobody opens twice.

Here’s how to build a short report that works for a freelancer or an agency alike, and above all one a non-specialist client can actually read.

What is a monthly SEO report for?

SEO is long-term work: the effects of an action are measured in weeks, not days. A monthly review is therefore the right rhythm. It lets you:

spot trends rather than day-to-day variations, which are mostly noise;
link actions to results (an optimized page, a published article, a technical fix);
set priorities for the following month;
keep a record so you can compare month over month, or year over year.

The metrics to include

Clicks and impressions (Search Console): the foundation. Clicks measure the traffic that actually came from Google, impressions measure visibility. Always compare with the previous month and, if possible, with the same month last year to account for seasonality.
CTR: clicks divided by impressions. A drop while impressions rise can point to titles or descriptions that need work.
Average position, with care: it’s an average that shifts easily when new queries appear. Read it as a trend, not an exact score. Our article on average Google position covers its pitfalls.
Keywords that are rising and those that are falling: a short list (5 to 10 of each) says far more than an export of thousands of rows. Newly appearing keywords are a valuable signal too.
Top-performing pages and the ones slipping: it shows where to focus effort.
Technical health: non-indexed pages, errors found by an audit, Core Web Vitals. One paragraph is enough if nothing is wrong.
For a local business: the number and rating of Google reviews, and the trend in actions on the business profile.
Conversions, if you track them (forms, calls, quote requests): this is what ties SEO to real business.

The metrics to skip (or move to an appendix)

Vanity metrics with no link to a decision: a tool’s overall score shown on its own, a count of crawled pages, a total of impressions with no context.
Day-by-day positions for a long list of keywords: they fluctuate constantly and drown out the essentials.
Keywords with no commercial intent or unrelated to your business, even if they show lots of impressions.
Raw backlink counts: without the quality of the sites linking to you, the number means little.
Metrics nobody knows how to interpret: if the reader can’t say what a number implies, remove it or explain it.

Structuring the report so it gets read

A 3-to-5-line summary at the top: the month in plain language.
Key figures, with the change versus the previous month.
What was done this month (actions completed).
What worked and what didn’t, with a likely explanation.
The plan for next month: 2 to 4 concrete actions, not twenty.

A well-written one- or two-page report beats a twenty-page document nobody reads. And keep the same layout every month: comparison becomes instant.

Automate to save time

Gathering data from several sources by hand each month is the most tedious part, and the one where mistakes creep in. Hand it to a tool and spend your time on analysis and recommendations — where the real value is.

Want to go further?

In Digi-Pilot, the dashboard’s monthly reports automatically gather your keyword trends, your best improvements and the month’s trends, available whenever you need them. Start with a free SEO check of your website, then create an account to receive your first report.