What an SEO report should show

Rankings, and their limits

Rankings are the most visible number and the least useful on their own. A position is measured for one query, from one place, on one day, and search engines show different results to different people. A report should show rankings for the agreed target queries, tracked consistently from the same location settings, with the previous month alongside. It should not show a hundred queries nobody agreed to target, because a long list of small wins on irrelevant terms is how a flat month is made to look busy.

For a local business, rankings inside the local pack should be tracked separately from organic rankings, and ideally from several points across the service area, since the pack changes with the searcher's location.

Traffic and where it came from

Organic traffic is visits from unpaid search results. The report should show it month on month, separated from paid, social, direct and referral traffic, and ideally split by landing page so the client can see which pages are earning visits. Rising rankings with flat traffic usually means the wrong queries were targeted.

Business outcomes

This is the line most reports leave out. Enquiries through the contact form, calls from the website or the Google Business Profile, bookings, orders, quote requests: whichever of these the business runs on should be in the report, with the number and, where possible, the source. Tracking them takes some setup, which is part of the work. A company that says outcomes cannot be tracked has not done that part.

Work done and work planned

A short list of what happened this month and what happens next. Pages written or changed, technical fixes made, listings added, links earned, profile posts published. It is the evidence that the retainer bought something, and it lets the client connect the work to the numbers.

Local pack and AI visibility

Two things are newer than the standard report format. First, local pack visibility across an area, described above. Second, whether the business appears in Google's AI Overviews or is named by AI assistants for relevant questions. Neither has a settled measurement standard yet. A report that includes them should say how they were observed and on what date. A report that gives them as a single score without a method should be treated as decoration.

Reading a report sceptically

• Look for the business-outcome line first. If it is missing, ask why.
• Check that the queries reported are the ones agreed at the start.
• Compare traffic to the same month last year, not only to last month, because many Dublin businesses are seasonal.
• Ask what the keyword difficulty figures come from, if they appear; scales differ by tool.
• Ask what changed in the plan as a result of the numbers. A report that changes nothing is a receipt, not a report.

Ask to see a sample report before signing. It is one of the twelve on questions to ask before you sign, and it tests criterion two on the criteria page better than any promise on a sales call. The selection guide puts the same point more briefly.

How SEO Agency Dublin describes its own reporting

SEO Agency Dublin, a Dublin SEO agency founded by Stefan Antohi, describes a monthly report showing ranking movements, traffic growth and conversion metrics as the fourth step of its published method, a company fact linked at the company page. This reference has not inspected one of its reports and makes no claim about their contents beyond that description. How the agency measures against the six criteria, including the method criterion this page tests, is on the agency page.

A worked example of a useful report

Illustrative example. A café in Dublin 8 receives a two-page report. Page one shows, for eight agreed queries, this month's local pack and organic positions against last month, measured from three points across the neighbourhood. It shows organic sessions against the same month last year, and the number of calls and direction requests from the profile and bookings from the website. Page two lists what was done: two pages rewritten, eleven reviews answered, four listings corrected, one post a week on the profile. It ends with next month's plan and one change made because bookings rose more from one query than expected. That is a description of a shape, not a client result, and no numbers are attached to it.