White-label Search Console reports from your phone

The report is the artefact a client judges you on, and for most freelancers it is built the same way every month: on a laptop, on Thursday night, by pasting Search Console exports into a spreadsheet template and hoping the chart updates. This post is about what should be in it, what QueryWatch generates from the phone, and when a PDF is the wrong format.

What clients actually read

Less than you think, and in a fixed order. They read one number, usually clicks this month against last. They read the direction. They read the sentence that says why. And they read what you are going to do next. Everything after that is evidence, and evidence is skimmed, not read.

That has a consequence for the report. The forty-row query table is not the report; it is the appendix that proves you did the work. The top of the first page should be the number, the trend, and the explanation, and the sections should follow the questions a client asks in the order they ask them: how did we do, what changed, why, what now.

The “what now” is where a striking-distance list earns its place. A page of queries sitting at positions 8 to 20, ranked by what moving them would be worth, is a plan a client can see, and it is the part of the report that justifies next quarter’s retainer. Striking-distance keywords explains how the list is built.

What the QueryWatch PDF contains

The report is generated on the phone, with the same components the app draws its own screens with, and goes out through the normal share sheet to Mail, Slack, Files or wherever the client lives. It carries a property summary, the trend, the top queries and pages, and the striking-distance list, dated to the last complete day of data.

A branded report carries the client’s name, your logo and your colour. The white-label option removes QueryWatch’s branding altogether, so what arrives in the inbox is your report with nothing on it that is not yours. Both are Pro features; the free tier has the CSV described below.

The colour is the client tag’s colour from your portfolio, so a report for the client you have tagged in orange arrives in orange without any setup, which is a small thing that makes the report look like it came from somewhere organised.

When to send CSV instead

Some clients live in spreadsheets, and for them a PDF is a picture of data they would rather have as data. Send the CSV.

A CSV of whatever table you are looking at is on the free tier, and it carries a context header row naming the property, the date range and the dimension, so a file that has been sitting in a Slack thread for a month still says what it is. The comparison CSV, with previous-period columns and a per-row delta, is Pro; it is the one to send when the client’s own analyst wants to see the movement rather than the snapshot.

Date it to the finalised day

Search Console performance data is finalised two to three days after the fact. A report run on the 31st includes two or three provisional days that will show different numbers when the client looks them up in Search Console, which is exactly the kind of discrepancy that erodes trust for no reason. Run the report to the last complete day and say so on it: “through 28 October”. Why the data is days behind has the detail, but the rule is one line.

The sentence on top

The PDF is evidence. The message is the email you attach it to, and it is one paragraph: the number, the direction, the cause, the next step, and when they will hear from you. If the month had a drop in it, the sentence about the drop goes first, with the page that caused it and what you did, because a client who finds the drop on page three of a report they had to read themselves is a client who wonders what else you are not mentioning.

If you have the alerts on, you will usually have already sent that sentence the day the drop happened, and the monthly report confirms it rather than revealing it. That is the difference between explaining a drop and being asked about one, and it is most of what an agency is paid for.

What the report does not do

There is no scheduled sending; you generate the report when you want it and send it yourself. There is no client portal or read-only login; sharing a live dashboard is on the roadmap, not in the app yet. And there is no GA4 or revenue data in it, because QueryWatch reads Search Console and nothing else.

If your client wants a report that arrives on the first of the month without you touching it, a scheduled Looker Studio delivery is the right tool, and it is a good one. The PDF from the phone is for the other case: the call is in an hour, the number moved, and you want something with their name on it in their inbox before you dial in.