SEO report: read it.

A monthly SEO report often looks like a twenty-sheet spreadsheet: hundreds of queries, charts, percentages, cryptic abbreviations. The business owner scrolls through it, sees green arrows and closes the file. Six months later it turns out the website isn't bringing in any more leads, even though "everything was growing" every month.

Let's look at which numbers in a report actually show results, which are only needed for the specialist's internal work, and which you can safely skip. That's enough to tell in ten minutes whether the project is moving.

What a proper report should contain

A good report answers three questions: what was done this month, what changed in search, and what it brought the business. If even one answer is missing, the document is incomplete, no matter how many pages it has.

Required sections

The minimum set looks like this:

• a list of completed work with the URLs of the pages that were edited;
• the site's search visibility trend by query group;
• organic traffic compared with the previous month and the same month a year ago;
• leads and calls from search;
• a plan for next month and what's needed from the client.

The last item is underrated. Half of all delays in SEO happen because the client hasn't approved the copy or hasn't granted access to the site. When this is written down in the report, you can see where the project is stuck and why.

Year-over-year comparison

Comparing only with the previous month isn't enough. Demand in almost any niche depends on the season: people search for air conditioners in summer, fur coats in winter, tax lawyers in spring. A drop in traffic in December may be normal, and growth in May may say nothing about the contractor's work. Comparing with the same period last year removes this noise.

Rankings: useful but misleading

A site's search rankings matter, but on their own they guarantee nothing. A site can rank first for a dozen queries nobody types and still not get a single customer.

Why average position means little

The average position across the whole query list is the handiest number for a nice-looking chart. Add a hundred low-volume phrases where the site is already in the top results, and the average improves. The reverse happens too: the specialist expands the list with new queries where the site is still far down, and the metric "drops," even though nothing bad has happened.

How to read rankings properly

It's more useful to look at the share of queries in the top 3 and top 10 for each group. This matters especially now: Alice's AI answers (Yandex's assistant) appear for roughly 42% of queries, and their sources are taken almost exclusively from the top ten. A site in 15th place gets into neither the AI answer nor the field of view of most users.

Query groups

Queries should be grouped by meaning: commercial, informational, by each service line or product category. Then you can see that, say, repair queries are doing fine while installation queries aren't moving. We wrote about how to build such groups in our article on keyword research.

Region and device

Search results differ between cities and on mobile. If your customers come from one region, rankings need to be checked there. Figures "for Russia as a whole" are almost useless for a local business.

Search traffic: what's behind it

Organic traffic shows how many people came from search engines, but what matters is its composition, not the total. Given that Yandex accounts for about 70% of search in Russia, the core data usually comes from Yandex Metrica.

Branded and non-branded traffic

Branded traffic is visits from queries that include the company name. These people already know about you; they're brought in by your reputation, not by SEO. If the report shows overall growth but it all comes from branded visits, the specialist's work has little to do with it. Ask for these two parts to be reported separately.

Visitor behavior

Bounce rate, pages per visit and time on site are supporting numbers. They're useful when you need to find a problem page: for example, the landing page for a key service loses visitors right after they arrive. They don't work as a final measure of performance, because they depend heavily on the page type and the niche itself.

Leads and money: the key numbers in the report

The most important lines in a report are the number of leads from search and their cost. Everything else explains why these numbers are what they are, but doesn't replace them.

How to connect search with sales

To do this, goals are set up in Metrica: form submission, a click on the phone number, a jump to a messenger, a completed order. Calls are tracked with call tracking. If the site is connected to a CRM, you can trace things all the way to deals and revenue. Without this link, an SEO report describes only traffic, not results. More on connecting data in our article on the role of analytics in marketing.

Cost per lead

Cost per lead is easy to calculate: divide the monthly SEO budget by the number of leads from search. This figure is handy for comparing with other channels, primarily paid search ads. In the first months it's usually higher than in advertising, and then it goes down, because you don't pay for clicks in organic search.

Technical metrics: when they matter

Technical issues matter when they hold back growth. If the site is healthy, a short line saying "no errors" is enough, not three pages of charts.

Page indexing

It's worth checking how many pages are in search and whether important sections have dropped out of the index. Yandex Webmaster now has a new "Diagnostics" tool, hourly query monitoring and extended query analytics for each URL. A sharp drop in the number of indexed pages is a reason to investigate right away, not wait for the next report.

Page speed

Google's speed benchmarks are: the main block of the page loads in no more than 2.5 seconds, the response to a user action takes up to 200 milliseconds, and layout shift during loading is barely noticeable. If the site fits within these limits, further speed-ups won't achieve much. If not, it's a task for the coming month.

Numbers you can skip

Some metrics end up in the report out of habit, even though they say nothing about results. You can look at them, but you shouldn't base decisions on them.

If a report consists entirely of numbers like these, that's a reason to ask your contractor some questions.

How to tell your contractor is doing the work

A sign of proper work is a clear link between what was done and what changed. Product cards were revised, and a few weeks later traffic to exactly those pages went up. The services section was rewritten, and leads started coming in for it.

Warning signs

You should be wary if you notice things like this in the reports:

1. For months the same phrase, "optimization work has been carried out," is repeated with no URLs or details.
2. The query list keeps changing, so months can't be compared with each other.
3. Leads aren't in the report at all, and when you ask about them, you're told that website SEO affects "brand awareness."
4. Growth is shown only for branded queries.
5. Every problem is blamed on search engine algorithms.

An experienced SEO specialist doesn't promise instant results, but can always explain what was done and why. A few more signs of an unreliable contractor are collected in our piece on how not to fall into the promise trap.

How long until the first changes

Website SEO usually produces noticeable shifts in three to six months, longer in competitive niches. So in the first months you look at the work completed and indexing, later at visibility and traffic, and by the end of six months at leads. Demanding sales in the first month makes as little sense as not asking about them for six months.

Questions to ask to make the report useful

For a report to be useful, agree on its format with the contractor in advance. Website SEO is a long process, and a consistent report structure lets you see the trend rather than a pile of scattered screenshots.

Ask which query groups visibility will be measured for, how branded traffic will be separated, which goals are set up in Metrica and where call data comes from. Find out how the results of SEO are assessed for each section of the site. If there are clear answers to these questions, the report will be a working tool.

Discuss money separately. The price of SEO and the price of website optimization mean little on their own if you don't know what a single lead costs. That's the number that shows whether SEO pays off and whether it's worth increasing the budget.

If you want clear reports

Before you hire a new contractor for SEO or website promotion, ask for a sample report from a similar project. It shows right away whether the team is used to counting leads or stops at rankings. This check is also useful for those already working with a contractor and doubting the results.

At epic name., the report is built around leads and their cost, with rankings and technical details as the explanation. We have been working in Moscow and across Russia since 2015. If you want to order SEO for your website, or SEO optimization for a specific section of the site, take a look at the page describing our SEO services: it shows what the work consists of and how we show its results.