Monthly SEO report for clients: a Search Console template

A monthly SEO report for a client should open with one number, clicks from Google search for the month, compared with the previous month and the same month last year, followed by one sentence on why it moved and one on what happens next. From Search Console, add impressions, click-through rate and average position, the pages and queries that gained and lost the most, a one-line health check on indexing, sitemaps and Core Web Vitals, and a short list of opportunities. Date it to the last finalised day, not the day you send it.

Everything below that first paragraph is evidence. Clients read the number, the direction, the reason and the plan, and skim the rest, so the structure should follow the questions they ask in the order they ask them.

What to include from Search Console

Section	Where it comes from	What it tells the client
Headline clicks	Performance → Search results, with Compare	Whether search traffic grew
Impressions and CTR	Same report	Whether the site was shown more, and chosen more
Pages that gained and lost	Pages tab, sorted by clicks difference	Where the change happened
Top queries	Queries tab	What people searched to find them
Country or device split	Countries and Devices tabs	Worth a line when one market or device moved
Indexing health	Indexing → Pages	Whether the pages that matter are in Google
Sitemaps	Indexing → Sitemaps	Whether Google can read the site’s map
Core Web Vitals	Experience → Core Web Vitals	Whether real visitors find the pages fast
Manual actions and security	Security & Manual Actions	That nothing is wrong, in one line
Opportunities	Queries at positions 8 to 20	What next month’s work is aimed at

A health check line that says “no issues” is a good line. It tells the client someone looked.

How to explain the metrics to someone who is not an SEO

Many clients have never opened Search Console, and the words in it mean something slightly different from what they sound like. A short glossary on the last page, written once and reused every month, saves a phone call.

Metric	Say this	Avoid saying
Clicks	Times someone clicked through to the site from Google’s results	“Visitors” or “sessions”, which analytics counts differently
Impressions	Times the site appeared on a results page someone loaded	“Times people saw us”; the result may have been below the scroll
CTR	The share of those appearances that turned into a click	“Conversion rate”
Average position	The average of the highest spot the site held each time it appeared	“Our ranking”, as if it were one fixed place

Clicks will never match the client’s analytics, and someone will notice. Search Console vs GA4 has the reasons in a form you can paste into a footnote. Search Console metrics explained goes deeper on how the four numbers move each other.

28 days or a calendar month?

A 28-day window always contains exactly four of each weekday, which makes one period directly comparable with the next. For monitoring it is the sounder default, and QueryWatch’s overview opens on the last 28 days for that reason.

A calendar month matches how clients think, invoice and budget, but months differ in length and in their mix of weekdays. August 2026 had 31 days and 21 weekdays; September 2026 had 30 days and 22 weekdays. A business site that gets most of its searches on weekdays can look better in September than in August through the calendar alone.

The practical answer is to report the calendar month, because that is the conversation the client is having, and to make year-over-year the headline comparison. September 2026 against September 2025 compares two 30-day months with 22 weekdays each, and strips out seasonality as well. Use month-on-month as the secondary line, and when the months differ in length, quote clicks per day alongside the total.

Search Console keeps 16 months of performance data. That always covers the month just finished against the same month a year before, with about three months to spare, but a year-over-year view of last spring will already be out of reach by autumn. Anything older has to be exported while it is still there; how long Search Console keeps data covers the options.

Date it to the finalised day

Performance data is finalised two to three days after the day it describes, and Search Console counts days in California time. A report run on 1 October contains provisional days that will read differently when the client checks them. Send it on the 3rd or 4th, and print the range on the cover: “1 to 30 September 2026, data through 30 September”.

If you add an appendix table, remember that an export from Search Console is truncated to 1,000 rows while the totals shown are actual totals, so the rows in a large site’s appendix will not sum to the headline. Say so in the notes.

The narrative: three sentences before any chart

Write these first, and build the rest of the report to support them.

Clicks from Google in September were [number], [up or down] [percent] on September last year and [percent] on August. Most of the change came from [page or topic], because [reason]. In October we are [action], and the next report will show whether it worked.

If the month contained a drop, the drop goes in the first sentence, with the page that caused it and what you did about it. A client who finds a fall on page three of a report they had to read for themselves starts wondering what else is not on page one.

A template outline to copy

1. Summary. The three sentences above.
2. Headline numbers. Clicks, impressions, CTR and average position, each against the previous month and the same month last year.
3. What moved. The five pages that gained the most clicks and the five that lost the most, with the main query behind each.
4. Health check. One line each for indexing, sitemaps, Core Web Vitals, and manual actions or security issues.
5. Opportunities. Five queries at positions 8 to 20, each with the page that should rank and the change you propose.
6. Work done and next month’s plan. What shipped, what is next, and what you need from the client.
7. Notes on the data. Date range, the finalised day, California time, the 1,000-row export cap, and a line on why clicks differ from analytics.
8. Glossary. The four definitions above.

If the client asks about AI Overviews, Search Console has offered a Generative AI performance report to all websites since 31 August 2026, showing impressions in AI Overviews and AI Mode for sites that have enough of them. It is useful context rather than a headline; AI Overviews and AI Mode in Search Console explains what it can and cannot separate.

How QueryWatch helps with the monthly report

QueryWatch reads Search Console, so it covers the Search Console half of this template from a phone. On Pro, it generates a branded or white-label PDF with a property summary, the trend, the top queries and pages and the striking-distance list. The branded version carries the client’s name, your logo and your colour; the white-label option removes QueryWatch’s branding altogether. White-label reports from your phone shows what the client receives. Pro also has 16 months of history, custom ranges and period comparison, and a comparison CSV with previous-period columns and a delta on every row. The free tier has the CSV of the current view, the striking-distance list, and client tags and colours on every property.

What it does not do matters for planning. There is no scheduled sending, no GA4 data, and no client login; you generate the report and send it yourself. The agencies page has the full picture. QueryWatch is an independent app and is not affiliated with Google.