Match Your Monthly Search Report to Calls and Booked Jobs

A monthly SEO report should let you check the work without taking anyone's word for it. That comes down to four things: every link placed, with its live URL, the page on your site it points to and the anchor text; how your target keywords moved; what leads the site produced; and a specific plan for next month. A report that can't show those four is describing activity, not work you can verify.

Here's what each part should look like, which numbers you can skip, and how to spot-check the links yourself in a few minutes.

Part 1: the work, with addresses

Link work should arrive as a list, one row per link, with three columns.

• Live URL. The address of the page where the link sits. You should be able to click it and read the article.
• Target page. The page on your site the link points to. This tells you whether the work supports the pages that bring in business, such as your service and city pages, or whether it all lands on the homepage.
• Anchor text. The clickable words. A healthy list varies: your business name, your web address, plain phrases like "this Olympia bookkeeping firm", and some that name a service. If every anchor reads "best roofer spokane", that's a pattern worth a question.

"15 backlinks built" with no list isn't reporting. Neither is a screenshot of a tool's graph.

The same standard applies to the rest of the month's work. New pages should be listed by URL. On-page changes should say which page and what changed, for example "rewrote the title tag on /drain-cleaning, added a section on Lacey". Business Profile work should name the specifics: photos added, services updated, posts published. Citation work should name the directories, so you can go and look.

Part 2: keyword movement, read over months

Rankings belong in the report, but they need context to mean anything.

First, where the rankings were checked from. Local results change with the searcher's location, so a plumber can rank well for a search made in Kirkland and poorly for the same search made in Renton. The report should say which location the checks use, and whether a position is in the regular results or the map results.

Second, the comparison should run against the starting point, not only last month. A move from 6 to 8 in one month is usually noise. A slide from 6 to 15 over three months is a conversation to have. A climb from 40 to 12 over a quarter is progress even before the phone rings, because pages usually pass through page two on their way to page one.

SEO results take months and depend on how strong your competitors are. A month-two report showing big wins on hard terms deserves the same scrutiny as one showing nothing.

Part 3: leads, as far as they can be counted

Traffic is a means. What matters is form submissions, calls, quote requests and bookings. A useful report separates visits to the pages that sell (services, locations, pricing) from visits to the blog, and shows how many leads came in through the site.

How precisely leads can be counted depends on your setup. Form submissions are easy. Calls are harder unless you use call tracking or ask every caller how they found you. If the report can't count calls, it should say so instead of presenting traffic as if it were the same thing.

Part 4: next month's plan, in specifics

"Continued optimization" is not a plan. "Two guest posts aimed at the Spokane Valley page, rewrite the gutter guard page, add job photos to the Business Profile" is. A specific plan gives you something to hold next month's report against.

Numbers you can mostly ignore

These show up in plenty of reports. None of them tells you whether the work is helping your business.

The guide Is SEO Worth It for a Small Business in Eastern Washington? can help you connect inquiries with the value of completed work.

• Total impressions on their own. They rise when you start appearing for loosely related searches that nobody clicks.
• "Now ranking for 1,400 keywords." Many of those are positions on page five for phrases almost nobody searches.
• Your own site's Domain Authority or Domain Rating. These are scores from SEO tool companies (Moz and Ahrefs), not from Google. We use DA to choose where links go, which is why our guest posts are placed on sites of DA 20 and up, but a higher score on your own site is not the goal. Leads are.
• Total backlinks counted by a tool. That count includes the junk links every site picks up on its own.
• Bounce rate by itself. A visitor who reads your hours and then calls you has, technically, bounced.
• Follower and share counts. They belong to a different channel.

A five-minute spot check

You don't need any tools to check a few links. Pick two or three rows from the report at random and work through them:

1. Open the live URL. The page should load and sit on a real site, with other articles, a working menu and a reason to exist beyond hosting links.
2. Search the page for your domain with Find on Page (Ctrl+F or Cmd+F). The link should be there, pointing to the target page listed in the report, with the anchor text listed in the report.
3. Read a few paragraphs. The article should make sense to a person and connect, at least loosely, to what you do.
4. Paste the live URL into Google. If the page comes up, it's indexed. If it doesn't, give it a few weeks and check again.
5. Open the same URLs next month. They should still be live.

If a link fails any of these, ask about it. A straight answer with specifics is what you're paying for.

How our report works

Every plan we sell comes with a monthly report that lists every live link URL, its target page and its anchor text. That list covers all three kinds of link work: guest posts placed through real outreach on other websites, Web 2.0 pages we publish on high-authority publishing platforms, and the amplification links that point at those pages (never at your site) to strengthen them and get them indexed. How many of each you get depends on the plan, and the SEO pricing page lists the counts for every tier, from 5 guest posts a month on Trailhead to 50 on High Cascades.

The guide From Service Pages to Reports: Checking Monthly Agency Work can help you compare reported tasks with the monthly scope.

How keyword movement and leads appear for your site depends on what your site can track. Ask about it before you start, and hold us to the answer.

If your current report leaves you guessing on any of the four parts, ask your agency for the missing piece this month. If you'd like an outside view of where your site stands before that conversation, request a free SEO assessment.