The three questions every SEO report should answer
A chart can show what happened. Context helps you decide what to do about it.
What did we do?
Record completed work, affected pages and implementation dates together. Distinguish a recommendation from a change that has actually shipped.
What changed?
Read visibility, organic traffic and business outcomes together. Account for seasonality, period differences and measurement changes. Do not attribute every movement to a single task.
What comes next?
Connect each finding to a decision: continue, adjust, test or wait. Give the task an owner, a priority and a clear way to check completion.
Turn a finding into a decision record
This is an illustrative reporting format, not client data or a claimed result. Replace the examples with your own pages and measurements.
| Field | Example record |
|---|---|
| Finding | Category clicks increased, but product views did not change. |
| Check | Review comparable periods, event collection and the mobile filtering journey. |
| Decision | After validating measurement, test an improvement to category navigation. |
| Owner | Analytics reviews tracking; product and development own the navigation change. |
| Acceptance | Events are recorded correctly and the revised journey works on mobile. |
Two changes happening in the same period do not establish that one caused the other. Consider campaigns, stock, seasonality, consent choices and changes in search results. Search Console clicks and analytics sessions use different definitions; they should not be expected to match exactly.
Before sharing the report
- State the data source, date range and comparison period.
- Distinguish recommendations, implemented changes and observed results.
- Label explanations that have not been verified as hypotheses.
- Give the next action an owner and a review date.
Google’s Search Console performance report documentation provides the metric definitions to use when interpreting this data.
