Reporting SEO work to someone who does not do SEO

An update landed with me once that opened on a chart of impressions climbing across six weeks. The work it was reporting had not started. Onboarding ate the fortnight. The chart was real, it meant nothing, and it led the document because it was the only line pointing upward.

That is the whole problem in one screenshot.

I sell link placements and I buy them, so I write these documents and I sit on the receiving end of them. I have been poor at it from both chairs.

Elsewhere on this site there is an itemised breakdown of $387 spent on three links, with the vetting numbers and the placement that never went live. That piece is about a result. This one is about the format and the relationship the format is holding up, which is a different job.

The only question anybody is asking

The person paying wants to know whether to keep paying. That is it.

Every other question is a proxy. Why did traffic dip, what about the competitor, how long until we rank. All of it walks back to the same place, and none of it gets answered by a document whose real subject is how busy you have been.

Worth being honest about where the standard template came from. These formats grew out of a need to justify an invoice, and anything built to demonstrate effort fills itself with whatever is cheapest to count. In SEO the cheapest things to count are almost never the things that matter.

You can diagnose one from its first page. Big number rising up top, actual work on page four.

Numbers that move without you

Total organic traffic. Impressions. Count of keywords ranking somewhere in the top hundred. Three metrics that open most reports, and all three drift for reasons unconnected to anything you did.

Impressions are the worst. A search feature appears on a query you were nowhere near, your listing gets rendered onto a page nobody scrolls to, and the line goes up. Nothing happened. You invoiced for a month in which nothing happened and the chart agreed with you.

It runs in reverse too, and that is where it costs you. A competitor goes down for a week, their clicks land on you, then they come back. Claim the rise in April and you own the explanation for the fall in May.

So the rule is unglamorous. If you cannot name the thing you did that moved a number, the number does not go at the top of the page.

Counting what left your desk

Links built. Pages optimised. Technical issues resolved. Audit delivered.

I am the worst offender here, because activity is what I sell. A count of links built is a count of invoices. It describes my month accurately and says nothing about whether any of it landed on your side.

I have watched somebody hit every activity target for twelve straight months while the thing the payer cared about sat still. Every figure in the deck was true. The site finished the year where it started.

Report activity anyway, because they are paying for it, and attach a claim to it. Four placements on pages covering this subject, here is the movement I expect, here is the date by which I will know. That last clause is where most people stop typing, and it is the only part carrying information.

Vocabulary as a way of ending the conversation

Crawl budget. Topical authority. Entity coverage. Index bloat.

These terms all mean something, several of them quite precisely. In a document written for somebody who does not do this job, they work as a polite way to close a topic. The reader nods. The reader does not ask, because asking means admitting they do not know, and they hired you so they would not have to know.

That exchange feels comfortable at the time. It is a loan against future trust and the repayment falls due all at once.

Six months in, with a flat graph on the table, the person paying rereads those documents with a different face on. Every term you never explained now looks like it was standing in front of something. They will not confront you. They go quiet and let the contract lapse at renewal.

The test for any sentence in a report: could the reader repeat it to their own boss without you in the room.

What I put in one instead

Four things, and they are not equally weighted.

The pages. Five to ten URLs that matter, named, with where each currently stands. Not three hundred tracked keywords. If the person paying cannot tell you which pages make them money, you have surfaced a bigger problem than reporting and should solve that one first. A list that short reads in a minute and is specific enough to argue with.

What moved, and my read on why. For each page, the change since last time and the cause as I understand it, flagged as a read rather than as fact. I think this one lifted because the title now carries the phrase people actually type. I think this one dropped because a far bigger site published on the same topic three weeks ago. Being wrong in writing is survivable. Being vague in writing is what loses the account, because vague reads as evasive the second results stall.

What I did and what I expect it to do, with a date on the expectation. Two placements bought on pages about this subject, movement expected in the six to twelve week window, and if there is nothing by then I will say the money did not work. Writing that sentence is uncomfortable, which is why it is missing from almost every report I have been sent.

What got worse. This is the section that buys you the rest of the document, and it belongs near the top rather than in an appendix.

Something is always worse. A page slipped. A bought link came down. A redirect went missing in a migration. A listing you paid for is still not live eight days after the invoice cleared, which is the most common failure in link buying.

The first time you volunteer a loss the reader could never have found alone, everything else in the document becomes credible in a way no confident phrasing would have managed. And if that section is empty this month, you did not look hard enough.

Saying I do not know yet

There is a sentence almost nobody writes into a paid report, and it only works early.

I do not know yet.

In month one or two it is a plain description of reality. In month seven with a flat graph behind it, the same words sound like a hedge invented under pressure.

Consider what fills the space when the sentence is missing. A chart of something irrelevant going up. The admission costs you one awkward paragraph. The chart costs you the relationship in month six.

I have sent those charts. Anybody who has done this for money has sent those charts.

The timescale conversation nobody has

Agree how long this takes before any money moves, and write down the first checkpoint.

Links do nothing measurable in three weeks. Content aimed at a query you do not rank for at all does nothing measurable in a month. Anyone telling you otherwise is either selling or has never watched a page climb from position forty across a quarter.

So put the number on the table. First real signal at ten to fourteen weeks, everything before that is inputs and observations, and if that does not work for you we should not start. It costs deals. Take the hit, because the deals it costs are the ones that turn sour in month four, when the client expected results in month two and never said so out loud.

Once a checkpoint exists in writing, a quiet month two is the plan running normally instead of a crisis.

Shape and delivery

Short. Shorter than feels professional.

Email body, not an attachment. A PDF gets opened on a phone, filed under read properly later, and never opened again. No dashboard login either. A dashboard is a place where somebody who does not do this job goes to feel stupid on their own time.

Write it so it invites an argument. Leave your read on the cause exposed. Put one direct question in it.

Where I got this wrong

Analytics on one of my own sites was wiped in an unrelated platform mess earlier this year and reporting has been broken since. I knew inside a day.

I kept publishing and kept buying placements for weeks anyway, because the work felt productive and repairing the measurement felt like admin. For that stretch I could not have written an honest report on my own site if somebody paid me for it. I would have guessed, and written the guesses in a confident register, because that is what people do when the alternative is admitting they are flying blind.

My outbound link ledger only starts in July of this year for the same reason. Everything before that is reconstructed from email searches, it is incomplete, and I know it is incomplete.

The test

A report nobody asks a question about is a report nobody read.

Not a clear report. An unread one. Silence is approval only in your own head, and a thumbs up is silence with a gesture attached.

So if what comes back is thanks, you did not get away with anything. You burned two hours and spent a little of the trust you will need in month six. Put something in there they can push back on: a number you are unsure about, a call they might disagree with, the thing that got worse.

The reporting format I use, and the questions I ask before agreeing a timescale with anybody, are here.