What a monthly report is for
A monthly SEO report exists to answer three questions: is it working, why, and what do we do next. Everything else on the page is decoration. If a report does not help you decide something, it is a document, not a report.
Store owners often receive the opposite: ten pages of charts that move up and to the right, a keyword list, and a summary that says "good progress". That kind of report is easy to produce and easy to defend, because it is built not to show a loss. It also tells you nothing about money.
This page describes the report you should expect from whoever does your search work, whether that is an in-house person, a freelancer, an agency or a service. It is also the report you can build for yourself in an hour a month. If you are still choosing someone, the page on how consultants structure the work that gets reported shows where reporting fits into an engagement, and our guide to working with an ecommerce SEO agency month to month covers how to judge one.
One rule before the contents. The numbers in a report should come from sources you can open yourself. If you cannot log into the place a number came from, you cannot check it.
The core numbers, split by page type
The most important choice in a store report is to split everything by page type. A store has product pages, collection pages, articles and a few others like the home page. They behave differently, and a single traffic total hides what is happening to each.
The source is Google Search Console, which is free. For each page type, the report should show four things, compared with the previous period and with the same period a year ago if the store is old enough.
Clicks. The number of visits from Google results. This is the number that counts. It cannot be faked by a seller, because it is Google's own count.
Impressions. How often your pages appeared. Rising impressions with flat clicks means you are being seen and not chosen, which points at titles and descriptions. The number counts appearances, not visits.
Click rate. Clicks divided by impressions. It shows whether the snippet earns the visit.
Average position. Useful as a direction, treacherous as a score. One page can rank for hundreds of searches at different positions, so the average blends them. Read it per page, not as a headline.
Then list the top pages in each type, by clicks, and the pages that gained or lost the most. Names, not summaries. "Your waterproof hiking boots collection gained clicks" is useful. "Collections performed well" is not.
Clicks and impressions from Search Console, split into product, collection and article pages, with the named pages that moved most.
Connecting pages to sales
Clicks are a step toward sales, not sales. A report for a store should connect the two as far as the data honestly allows.
The usual route is your analytics tool. Google's current analytics, GA4, can show landing pages for visits from organic search, and, if purchase tracking is set up, orders and revenue that followed. Your platform's own reports can add a second view.
What to ask the report to show:
Organic landing pages ranked by orders or revenue. This tells you which pages earn money, so you know which ones to protect and improve.
Pages with many visits and few orders. These are either the wrong audience or a page that fails the buyer. Both are worth fixing.
Pages with few visits and strong sales. These are your best candidates for more attention, because the page converts and only needs more people to see it.
Be honest about the limits. Attribution is imperfect. A buyer might find you through an article, leave, then return by typing your address and buy. Analytics often credits the last visit, not the first. A good report says so and avoids claiming a precise dollar figure for search. A mention of "revenue from organic search" should always name its source and its blind spots. For how to think about the return without made-up numbers, see what to expect from ecommerce SEO return.
What changed: the part most reports leave out
Numbers without a change log cannot be interpreted. If clicks on your collection pages rose 20 percent, was it because of work done, a seasonal peak, a promotion or a competitor stumbling? Nobody can say unless the report records what was done and when.
The change log should list, with dates, every meaningful action in the period:
Pages published. Titles and addresses, and which page type they belong to.
Pages edited. What was changed: title, body text, internal links, images, structured data.
Fixes made. Redirects, removed duplicates, speed improvements, indexing problems resolved.
Things that happened outside the work. A sale, a new product line, a theme update, a site migration, a stock-out of a bestseller. These explain movement that the seller did not cause.
With a log, you can read results honestly. Changes take weeks to show in search, so a good report looks at pages that were changed four to eight weeks ago and compares them with similar pages left alone. If the edited pages gained and the untouched pages did not, that is real evidence. If everything rose together, it may be the season.
This is also the section that protects you from a seller who takes credit for tides. A report that never mentions anything outside the work is claiming everything.
Site health and AI answers, kept short
Two more sections earn a place, and both should be brief.
Site health
A few lines, not a wall of warnings. How many pages Google has indexed compared with last month, any new indexing problems reported in Search Console, and whether page speed has moved on your main templates. A one-time ecommerce SEO audit is the right place for the long list. The monthly report should only flag what changed.
Visibility in AI assistants
Shoppers now ask ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Claude where to buy. Google's tools do not report on that. A report that covers it should state the questions tested, the date, which assistants were asked, and whether your store was named. It should present results as a sample, not a ranking, since answers vary from one asking to the next. For the background on why, see how AI assistants pick businesses.
If a seller reports AI visibility as a single score with no questions listed, you cannot check it.
What a good report leaves out, and what to ask for instead
Some content pads reports without helping. You can safely ask for less of these.
Proprietary scores. "SEO health 87 out of 100" is a number from a tool with its own rules. It shifts when the tool changes and rarely tracks sales.
Rankings for a long list of keywords. Rankings fluctuate daily and vary by person and place. A handful of important searches, tracked loosely, is enough.
Total traffic with no source split. It mixes search with email, ads and social, so it cannot show whether SEO is working.
Branded traffic mixed in. People who search for your store name by name are already yours. A report should separate those clicks from the ones where a stranger found you through a product or a question. Growth in the second group is the real sign.
Activity counts. "47 tasks completed" tells you about effort. You care about effect.
Ask instead for a one-page summary at the top: three sentences on what happened, three on why, and the next three actions. Everything below it is supporting detail you can open when you want to check.
A simple layout you can ask for or build yourself
Here is a layout that fits on one page and one page of detail. It works for a seller's report or for your own once-a-month review.
Top box. Clicks from Google this month versus last month and versus the same month last year, split into product, collection and article pages. Three plain sentences underneath.
Winners and losers. The five pages that gained the most clicks and the five that lost the most, with a one-line reason for each where known.
Money. Organic landing pages by orders or revenue, with the data source and the caveat stated.
Change log. Dated list of what was published, edited and fixed, plus outside events.
Health and AI. A few lines each.
Next month. Three actions, each tied to a page and a reason.
If your seller cannot produce something like this, ask why. If they produce it and it is honest about a bad month, that is a good sign. A report that never shows a dip is either lucky or edited.
How the report changes with store size and season
A report is not one shape for every store. Three things change what it should emphasize.
Store size
A store with a few dozen products does not need a page-by-page review of every item. Group the products, report on the collection pages, and list a handful of named product pages. A store with thousands of products should report by category and template, with the exceptions called out, since nobody can read thousands of rows.
Seasonality
Many stores have strong seasons. A gift store rises in the fall. A swimwear store peaks in spring. Comparing this month with last month punishes you for the calendar. Comparing it with the same month last year corrects for the season. For a store under a year old, say so in the report and focus on direction over several months.
Promotions and stock
A sale can move clicks, because people search for brand and offer words. A stock-out of a best seller removes clicks and sales together. Note these in the change log so nobody mistakes a promotion for the effect of the work. Our audit page covers how stock-out pages are handled technically.
Reporting cadence by stage
In the first month, expect the report to be mostly about what was done and a baseline, since search results have not moved yet. By the second and third months, you should see the first pages published beginning to appear in Search Console. By the fourth to sixth, a pattern of gain on pages that were changed. A seller who promises sales growth in the first report is describing a different business from the one Google runs.
Reading a report honestly when you are not an SEO
You do not need technical training to read a good report. You need five habits.
Start with clicks. If clicks to the pages that sell are not up, nothing else in the report matters yet.
Ask what you would see if it were not working. If a report format could never show a bad month, it cannot prove a good one.
Open one page. Pick a page listed as a winner and check it in Search Console yourself. If you cannot reproduce the number, ask where it came from.
Look for the dip. Honest reports show some pages that lost clicks and say why. A report with no losers has been filtered.
Judge by the trend, not the month. Search results rise and fall week to week. A three-month direction on named pages is what counts.
How RunOctopus handles this
A good report ties effort to results. That is easier when the work and the pages are visible on your own site.
RunOctopus is a done-for-you service. Its AI, Ollie, researches your business, then writes and publishes pages directly on your own website. A team plans, writes, reviews and publishes alongside Ollie. It works with Shopify, WordPress, WooCommerce and Wix.
There is nothing to install, nothing to approve, nothing to upload and nothing to schedule. You do not approve each page, because pages go live on their own. In the first week you get 8 long-form articles, 6 pages and a custom interactive tool built for your niche. After that it is 175+ pieces of content a month, written, published and linked. You also get reports on where ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude and Gemini name your business.
There is a 90-day promise: more visibility on Google and in AI answers within 90 days, measured against the 90 days before you joined, or every dollar back. For scale, an agency doing this work charges about $3,209 a month (2026 average, 439 providers) and publishes 4 to 12 pieces.
Paste your address into the free site read and Ollie reads the site and shows the plan. No account, no call.