What should a monthly SEO report show a tradesman? Thirteen lines, graded
The belief worth killing first is that a fat report means a busy month. It does not. A monthly SEO report is a marketing document written by the person being judged, and the two numbers that open almost every one of them are the two that climb fastest when the least is happening.
Here is the proof from my own books rather than somebody else's. Over ten weeks this site collected 8,694 impressions and 27 clicks. That is one click for every 322 times a British searcher was shown a link to it. Put on a chart, those impressions look like a business taking off. Put in a diary, they are twenty seven people.
So this is a teardown rather than an argument. Thirteen lines that turn up in real reports sent to UK trades, each graded signal, context or filler, with Google's own published definitions quoted against them. Every quote below was read on 5 September 2026.
A monthly report should show five things: enquiries by source, what was published or changed with links to it, the queries you won and lost, your Google Business Profile calls and direction requests, and next month's plan with dates. Everything else is context. A report for a UK trade that opens with impressions and never reaches enquiries is a document about itself.
The thirteen lines, graded
Three of the thirteen tell you whether you made money. Four are honest context. Six are filler, and four of those six can be produced without anybody touching your website.
Why the top two lines look best when least is happening
Impressions and average position are the two metrics that improve automatically as a site gets indexed. That is exactly why they lead the report, and exactly why they cannot be the evidence.
This is not a suspicion, it is measurable on my own property. Across the ninety two days to 12 August 2026 this site went from 61 impressions a day to 194, and average position moved from 64 to 43. Twenty one places. Any agency in the country would open a report with that. The clicks over the same period were 24.
Nothing in that pair of sentences is dishonest and nothing in it is worth money either. A report can be completely accurate and still answer a question you never asked.
The number that will never quite match
If you check a report against your own Search Console and the keyword table comes up short, that is usually the tool rather than the person. Google states that "anonymized (rare) results are omitted from the table, but are included in the chart totals", and that "the table can display a maximum of 1,000 rows, so some rare or long-tail rows might be omitted". For a trade business with a long tail of village and street level searches, that gap can be wide. Ask which view a figure came from and over which dates.
The five lines I would insist on
Five lines, none of which needs a tool subscription, and all five can be written in a plain email. If a provider will not produce them, that is your answer arriving early and cheaply.
Point five is the one that changes the relationship. A report is a description of the past and nobody can argue with it. A dated plan is a promise, and a month later it is either kept or it is not.
The one number almost no report contains
Enquiries by source is the only line that turns a retainer into a decision. It takes a notepad by the phone and about ten seconds a call, and it is worth more than every chart above it.
Here is a worked month on round numbers to show why. This is an illustration rather than a client's books, using a decorator paying for SEO on a site he already owns.
One month, one van, fourteen enquiries
| Word of mouth and repeat customers | 6 |
| Google Business Profile, call button | 4 |
| Website enquiry form | 3 |
| Facebook and local groups | 1 |
| Attributable to search this month | 7 |
| SEO at £300 every four weeks | £43 each |
Seven enquiries at £43 is a bargain if two become jobs and a waste if none do, and the report on page one cannot tell you which happened. The tally by the phone can.
Note what the tally also does. It stops you crediting search with the six that came from a neighbour, which is the most common way a UK trade over rates a retainer, and it stops you blaming search for a quiet month that was really the weather. It is the closest thing a one van business has to attribution, and it costs nothing. If you want the anatomy of the page those three form fills landed on, I have written up what a decorator's website has to do in full.
Where the enquiries you cannot see come from
Some arrive by routes no monthly report tracks at all. Lead platform listings now surface inside AI assistants, which is a different shop window with different rules, and I have looked at what happens when a platform lands inside ChatGPT. If a report claims credit for every enquiry in a month, it is claiming credit for things it cannot see.
What your Google Business Profile reports for free
The profile publishes calls, direction requests, website clicks, messages and the actual search terms people used, to you, at no cost. A report that omits the free honest numbers and leads with the bought ones has made a choice.
Google's own definitions are refreshingly plain. Calls are "the number of times a customer clicked on the call button on your Business Profile". Directions are "how many people asked for directions to your business". Website clicks are "the number of times people clicked on the website link". Searches are "the search terms that people used to find your business".
For a plumber or a joiner working an English or Welsh market town, those four lines are closer to real demand than anything in the search half of the report, because a person asking for directions to your yard is not browsing.
One timing quirk worth knowing before you accuse anybody of anything. Google says the searches metric "is updated at the start of each month" and "might take up to five days to show up". A report written on the second of the month can legitimately be missing it. That is a scheduling problem, not a dishonesty problem, and it is worth knowing which is which before you send the email.
The report I would be embarrassed to send
Any report whose best page is a chart of impressions. I know because that is the chart my own site would lead with, and I have published the number underneath it instead.
The third figure is the one that decides whether the first two matter. Thirty nine hundred pounds is a real number to a British sole trader. It is a van service, a fortnight of a labourer, or a decent chunk of a new set of tools. A report has to be judged against that, not against last month's version of itself.
Google is blunter about guarantees than most of the UK industry that quotes it: "No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google." If a report contains a promised position, the problem started before the reporting did.
What to do with this month's report
Read it back to front. Start at the last page, find the work log, and only then look at the charts. If there is no work log, the charts are the whole product.
For what it is worth about my own end of this, I charge £300 every four weeks for SEO on a site you already have, or £350 with the website built, hosted and looked after alongside it. Thirteen payments a year rather than twelve, so £3,900 rather than £3,600, which I would rather you read here than work out later. Whoever you use, insist on the five lines. They take a provider about twenty minutes a month and they make the whole arrangement checkable, which is the only property of a report that matters.