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What should I be asking my SEO agency and what should they actually include in a monthly report
Posted by on December 28, 2025 at 6:48 pmHey everyone,
I’m working with an SEO agency and just want to make sure I’m asking the right stuff and actually getting useful info back, not just nice-looking reports.
Right now they mostly send rankings and traffic numbers, but it feels like there’s more happening that I don’t really see.
What are the must-ask questions you usually ask your SEO team?
And what should always be in a monthly SEO report?I’m also wondering if there’s a standard SEO report template that’s actually trackable and reportable long term.
Not something crazy detailed, but detailed enough that nothing important is skipped or “not reported”.Main things I’m curious about:
- why rankings go up or down
- how to tell if SEO is driving real leads or sales, not just traffic
- how technical SEO and content work are tracked
- how local SEO is measured (if applicable)
If you’ve worked with agencies or done SEO in-house, what do you wish you asked sooner?
Appreciate any real-world advice.
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1 Reply
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A/B report, if there is a drop, you should ask them why
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You and the agency need have a shared KPI, key performance indicator. It sounds like you don’t have one now. Good KPIs for SEO can be ecommerce sales or sales leads received. These are measurable numbers that align the agency with your actual expected outcomes. You probably don’t want more SEO, you want the results that you expect from it. That should be your KPI.
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I got below report from friend of mine
What is your advice?
The following questions must be answered clearly and with supporting data as part of the monthly SEO report. Vague or generic answers are not acceptable. All responses should reference specific URLs, metrics, or actions where applicable.
1. This month, which exact pages drove the increase or decrease in organic traffic, and why? (Please reference specific URLs and metrics.)
2. How many new pieces of content (blogs or pages) were published this month, and how much organic traffic did each one generate?
3. Out of our total target keywords, how many are currently indexed and ranking in Google?
4. Which keywords are currently ranking between positions 4–15, and what is the specific plan to push them into the top 3 results?
5. How many backlinks were acquired this month, and how many of them were paid versus organic (earned) links?
6. What specific technical SEO issues were fixed this month, and which technical issues are still pending or unresolved?
7. What was the biggest SEO risk, limitation, or challenge this month, and how did you mitigate it?
8. How much total time was spent on SEO this month, broken down by task (content, technical SEO, link building, analysis, reporting)?
9. If we stopped SEO efforts today, which gains would we likely lose first, and why?
10. What did NOT work this month, and what are you changing next month as a result?
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From a billing perspective, you should have work shown and tracked. For example, x hours on content, x hours on technical tweaks and what those tweaks were, and so on. Bonus points if you can log in anywhere and check that the work was done (e.g. WordPress to see page history.)
Everyone else will tell you what other metrics the reports should contain, but as the client this is also what you want to see.
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Any agency worth their salt will agree and go through all of this with you – if you need to ask Reddit then you’re working with the wrong agency.
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Rankings are important but you need to look at it as a %z. Analysis of going up and down is pointless and time consuming. What should be happening is that over time everything on average goes up
SERPs are timely snapshots – they could be down just at that moment. Paralysis of analysis is a pointless distraction – look at it over 60-90 days
What’s important is that you have a strategy that you are a stakeholder in
The. Those pages need to show revenue or leads or the strategy needs pivoting.
You may be lucky tha some keywords result in immediate leads – like “buy now” but research journeys may never be attributable
What you need to know is that if your client needs to read X, Y or Z how’s your SEO team building a bridge to match search phrases and then after that are searches for brand + generic going up – that is a strong sign of SEO influence
If you can have a conversation with your SEO agency – consider shopping around maybe?
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Agencies can provide a LOT of data. Some useful, some not. And they certainly can provide pretty looking and detailed reports. Especially if they’re using AI as a helper tool to do it.
Rather than letting the agency or even Reddit decide which reports they should be including, look at it from the other way:
What reports or data do YOU need, as a business owner, to run your business (and scale it or make it more profitable)?
Some of the info that comes to mind is info about leads or sales and where they’re coming from, for example. Which products or services are most profitable for you as a business, and what is the agency doing to drive sales to those specifically? Isolate those products or services, watch rankings and visits to those pages. What’s the competition doing for those products or services specifically, how are they ranking? Ask the agency how they can drive more visits?
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