You pay for SEO for your Arkansas business every month, and once a month you want to see what the work did. A monthly SEO report should answer that in the first minute you hold it. It should also list what happens next, and the next month then starts from a plan you have already seen.
We send each Arkansas client one PDF report a month. It follows the same order every time, and every headline number in it has the change from last month. The sections below follow that order, from the first page to the action plan at the end.
When your monthly SEO report arrives
Reports go out by the 5th of each month. We pull the numbers on the 4th, after the first three days of the month have passed. Those three days give late conversions time to land in the accounts, and a report pulled on the 1st would miss them.
The date stays the same each month. You can plan the read the same way you plan any other monthly review in your business. By the 5th, you have the report for the month before.
The headline numbers and the change beside each one
The report opens with a short set of headline numbers. The set covers each channel you run with us.
Every number in that set has the change from last month. You cannot judge a bare number with no comparison. A count of organic sessions alone could belong to a strong month or a weak one, and you need the month before to know which. A note such as “up from 32 last month” turns the number into an answer.
This opening set is short on purpose. It has six to nine numbers across the channels you run. You can read it in a minute and know whether the month moved forward.
The check you can run on your last report
Pull up the last report you received from whoever runs your marketing today. Look at the first page, and find the headline numbers. Then look beside each one for last month’s figure or the change from last month.
If every number has its comparison, you have something to judge. If the numbers stand alone, you have a figure with nothing beside it. Either way, send us that report, and we will read it with you and list which numbers we would add a comparison to.
The summary and the traffic table
A short summary follows the headline numbers. It runs two or three sentences. It states the biggest win of the month and the biggest priority for the next one.
Then comes a website traffic table. It lists sessions and users by source, such as organic search, paid search, direct visits and referrals, with a total row at the bottom. A table has the numbers in a form you can compare month to month, and a paragraph of prose cannot do that.
The traffic table matters for SEO because it shows organic search beside every other source. When organic sessions rise and the other sources hold steady, the gain belongs to search. When every source rises together, search is only part of the gain.
What the SEO section of a monthly SEO report shows
The SEO section is the center of the report for an SEO client. It shows organic sessions against last month, and it shows clicks and impressions against last month too. Sessions count the visits that came from search. Clicks and impressions come from Google Search Console and count how often your pages appeared in search and how often someone clicked.
The section also has a note on searches for your business name against all other searches. A search for your name comes from someone who already knows you. A search for your service in your area comes from someone who may not, and that second group is where SEO finds new customers. Splitting the two shows you which group grew.
Last comes a table of the posts published that month. Each row lists the post title and the search it targets. The contract for an SEO client covers eight blog posts a month, and this table is where you see each one by name. Each post in that table went live only after a second reviewer who did not write it graded it against its brief. A post that fails review gets one revision, and a second failure stops it before it reaches your site.
The name note works the same way across months. When searches for your name rise, more people already know your business and look for it directly. When the other searches rise, search is putting you in front of people who did not know you before. Both are good months, and the note shows which kind you had.
The SEO section carries technical SEO items only when the month’s SEO audit ran. Every technical line in it then traces to a check that happened.
For a deeper look at which numbers matter most and how to read them, our post on how to read a marketing report goes line by line. Our post on how long SEO takes sets out what to expect from the numbers in the first months.
The ad sections, when you run ads
A client who runs ads with us gets a section for each platform. The report shows only the campaigns that actually ran that month. A campaign that was planned and never launched stays out of the tables.
The Google Ads numbers come from the same accounts we read every Friday, where we set the last seven days against the seven before. The Google Ads section shows a table by campaign. Each row lists the campaign type, spend, clicks, conversions, cost per conversion and click rate, with a total row at the bottom. Three short paragraphs follow the table: what we did that month, what improved, and the focus for next month.
The Meta section compares four numbers with last month: click rate, frequency, cost per click and reach. Frequency counts the average number of times each person saw an ad. A short narrative follows the table.
The action plan at the end
The report closes on an action plan table. Each row has a priority and an action, plus the channel the action belongs to. Recurring work appears as ongoing rows, and you can see the steady work beside the new work.
On an SEO account, the ongoing rows cover the Friday search review and the eight blog posts in the contract each month. A row for new work covers a single job for the month ahead. Each row lists its channel, and you can see how the work splits between search and any ads you run.
One to three items of focus for next month follow the table. They set the plan for the month ahead.
The table has no due dates. The work moves on the weekly rhythm we run, and the next report lists what got done. That keeps each report tied to the work that happened.
Why the report shows only what ran
Every table in the report has work that happened in the month it covers. A campaign that was planned stays out until it runs. A post that is in draft stays out of the posts table until it goes live.
That rule keeps the report honest across months. You never read a number for a campaign that did not run or a post that did not go live.
The same rule shapes the action plan. A row there describes work still to come, and recurring work stays on the table as an ongoing row.
How the report connects to the rest of the work
The report is at the end of a month of work. Every Friday we run a search review for each SEO client, and each month we run a full SEO audit. The report sets out the month’s numbers and the work we did in the accounts.
The Friday review reads Search Console for the last 28 days. It lists the pages that sit between position 8 and 20 with their top searches, along with the pages Google shows often that few people click. It also lists the pages that lost clicks against the 28 days before, and it checks whether Google has picked up each page published since the last review. We never claim a page is indexed or will be indexed by a date, because Google decides that.
You can see the full set of monthly work in our post on what you get each month from an Arkansas SEO company. The report is where that work becomes numbers you can check.
A monthly SEO report from the people doing the work
We manage eight client accounts, and each of them gets one PDF report a month. Ty Woods answers for the work himself. No account manager sits between you and the work.
The accounts behind the numbers stay in your business name. Your Search Console and Analytics belong to you, and so do your ad accounts. We pull the report from them. If you ever want to check a number yourself, you can open the same account and find it.
Send us your last report
Send us the last report you received, and we will read it with you. We will show you what our report would add to it, section by section. That first look is how our SEO work for Arkansas businesses starts.
Call us at 501.232.1017 or send us a note. The consultation costs nothing.