Most SEO reports look the same. A page of keyword positions, a graph of impressions and a line saying traffic is up. What they rarely answer is the question the person paying for them actually has: is this bringing in business?
This guide covers what to track, how to set it up so the data is still there in two years, and how to present it to someone who has five minutes and a budget to defend. It suits business owners who receive SEO reports and in-house marketers who have to write them.
Get your data sources in place and know their limits
You need three things. Google Search Console shows what people searched for and how many clicked. Google Analytics 4 (GA4) shows what those visitors did next. A rank or visibility tool such as Semrush, Ahrefs or Moz tracks positions and competitors.
Each one has a limit that catches people out:
- Search Console keeps 16 months of data. Anything older is gone. Export your figures every month, or set up its bulk data export to BigQuery, so you can compare against last year and the year before.
- GA4 keeps event-level data for two months by default. This restricts detailed explorations. In Admin, under data retention, change it to 14 months. Standard reports are not affected.
- The two tools will never match. GA4 only counts a visit when its tag fires, so visitors who decline cookies are missing. Search Console counts every click. Pick one source for each metric and stay with it.
Agree what counts as a win before choosing metrics
Rankings are a means to an end. Decide what a successful visit looks like: an enquiry form sent, a phone number tapped, a booking made, a basket completed. GA4 calls these key events (they were called conversions until 2024).
Sit down with whoever owns the sales figures and write the list. Every number in your report should trace back to it. If you cannot draw a line from a metric to a key event, it belongs at the bottom of the report or nowhere at all.
If the business also runs paid campaigns, feed the same key events into Google Ads so organic and paid are judged on the same terms. My Google Ads management work starts with this for that reason. For businesses serving a local area, add calls and direction requests from the Google Business Profile, which sit naturally alongside a local SEO campaign.
Split brand searches from non-brand searches
Brand searches include your company or product name. The person already knows you. Non-brand searches come from people looking for what you sell who have not chosen a supplier yet. That second group is where SEO work usually earns its fee.
Blend the two and the report misleads. A good review, a leaflet drop or a radio advert can lift brand searches and make SEO look stronger than it is. The reverse can hide a real decline.
In Search Console, open the Performance report, add a Query filter and choose custom (regex). For brand terms, list your name and its common misspellings:
acmeplumbing|acme plumbing|acme plumbin
Then divide non-brand searches by intent:
- Informational: questions and how-to searches. A regex such as ^(how|what|why|when|where|who|can|should)\s picks these out.
- Commercial: comparisons, prices, “best” and reviews.
- Transactional: “buy”, “quote”, “book” and “near me”.
Finally, group the results by section of the site: service pages, location pages, blog. A list of 4,000 keywords shows nothing. Five groups show exactly where visits and enquiries come from. An AI assistant can write regex for you, but test it against a handful of real queries before trusting it.
Turn enquiries into pounds
A report becomes persuasive the moment it contains a money figure. The simplest method is:
organic enquiries × close rate × average sale value
For example, 40 organic enquiries in a month, with a quarter turning into work at an average of £1,800, gives 10 sales and £18,000. The inputs will be rough, so say so, and use the same method every month so the trend can be trusted. For an online shop, GA4 reports revenue by channel directly.
To see which pages earn the money, filter GA4 to organic search and look at key events by landing page. Google does not pass search terms to Analytics, so you work at page level. Take the queries Search Console reports for a page and set them beside the enquiries GA4 credits to that same page.
Add a “How did you find us?” field to your forms and ask it on the phone. Answers like “I Googled a boiler engineer in Preston” are worth more than any dashboard.
Compare like with like
Week-on-week comparisons mislead in seasonal sectors. Boiler repairs climb in autumn. Wedding venues get a rush of searches in January. Retailers live or die by Black Friday.
Compare each month with the same month a year earlier, and add a rolling 12-month view to smooth out spikes. Keep the periods the same length and note bank holidays or trading days that differ. This is why keeping two years of data matters.
Track the smaller actions that lead to sales
Plenty of buyers do not convert on the first visit. Someone reads your guide, leaves, comes back a fortnight later by typing your company name, watches a demo, downloads a brochure and buys the following month. The sale will probably be credited to brand search or direct traffic, not the guide that started it.
Set up the smaller actions as secondary key events: brochure downloads, newsletter sign-ups, pricing page views, video plays, clicks to call or email. Report them separately from the main ones so they add context without inflating results. GA4’s conversion paths report shows which pages tend to appear early in a buyer’s journey.
They also show weak points. If plenty of people watch the demo and few enquire, the problem is the page, not the rankings.
Keep a change log
Traffic moves for reasons that have nothing to do with SEO. Keep a simple sheet with the date, the page and what changed. Record site launches, migrations, new service pages, price changes, promotions, press coverage and Google core updates. When a line on a graph jumps, you will know why, and nobody gets credit or blame they have not earned.
Add AI search to the picture
Two checks cover most of what is possible today. First, use the SERP feature filters in Semrush or Ahrefs to see which of your target searches trigger an AI Overview and whether your site is cited. Second, in GA4, look at referral traffic from AI assistants and note which landing pages they send people to. The volumes are small for most sites, but they are worth watching. I cover the wider picture in my AI search optimisation work.
When clicks fall but impressions hold steady, say so plainly, then show what you are doing about it. Reporting impressions next to clicks lets a reader see visibility that a click count alone would hide.
Look ahead and set alerts
Owners and directors want to know where the numbers are heading. Take 12 to 24 months of organic enquiries, extend the trend line in a spreadsheet and label it clearly as a projection. Machine learning tools need a lot of data to beat a straight line, and most small business sites do not have it.
GA4 custom insights can also email you when sessions or key events fall by more than a set amount, which catches problems weeks before the monthly report would.
Write for the person reading it
| Reader | What they want to know | What to show |
| Owner or managing director | Is SEO making money? | Enquiries, estimated revenue, cost per enquiry, forecast |
| Sales or operations manager | Are the enquiries any good? | Enquiries by page or service, close rate |
| Marketing manager | What is working and what next? | Non-brand growth, page groups, rankings, technical fixes, AI visibility |
Put a one-page summary first: five or six numbers, a sentence on what changed and the next action. Detail goes underneath for anyone who wants it. A faster site or a fixed redirect chain matters to the marketing team. It matters to the owner only when you can tie it to more enquiries.
Looker Studio is free and can pull Search Console and GA4 into one dashboard that refreshes itself. That leaves your time for the commentary, which is the part people actually read.
Start small and stay consistent
A good SEO report is short, consistent and honest about what the numbers can and cannot show. Begin with agreed goals and the brand and non-brand split. Add the rest month by month.
If you would rather have the tracking set up properly from the start, take a look at my reporting and analytics service or get in touch.
Graig Upton
Graig Upton is a UK SEO and Google Ads consultant with 23 years of hands-on digital marketing experience. Google certified in Ads, Analytics and Conversions, he has helped businesses ranging from local providers to national brands - including Nando's and Financial Times - dominate search and scale their leads. Based in Preston, working with clients across the UK.