What makes a local report different
A general SEO report focuses on rankings and website traffic. A local SEO report also covers the Google Business Profile and the map pack, because for most local businesses those produce a large share of calls. It also deals with location: a business can be strong in one part of the Valley and invisible in another, and the report needs to show that.
The structure of our monthly report
1. The summary
Three to five sentences at the top: what improved, what declined, what it means for the business and the single most important next step. If you read nothing else, the summary tells you where you stand.
2. Map visibility
Geo-grids for your main searches, compared with last month and the baseline, with the share of your service area where you appear in the top three. Data comes from our Google Maps rank tracking.
3. Google Business Profile actions
Calls, direction requests and website clicks from the profile, plus profile views, compared month over month and, once enough history exists, year over year to account for seasonality.
4. Website results
Organic visits, the pages receiving them, and conversions such as form submissions and click-to-call taps, from Google Analytics 4. Search Console data shows the searches driving visits and any new search terms appearing.
5. Leads
Tracked calls and forms by source: organic search, the Google profile, and other channels for context. Where possible, notes on lead quality, such as how many were genuine service enquiries versus sales calls or spam.
6. Reviews
New reviews, average rating, reply rate and how you compare with the businesses in your local pack.
7. Work completed
A plain list of what was done: pages published or improved, profile updates, citations fixed, links earned, technical fixes.
8. Next month
The priorities for the coming month, and why they were chosen based on the data above.
An example summary
Here is the kind of summary that opens a typical report:
August summary: Map visibility for "AC repair" grew from 38% to 46% of your service area, mainly in Glendale and north Peoria after the Peoria page update. Profile calls were 212, up 9% on August last year. Tracked leads from organic search were 64, with 51 genuine service enquiries. Priority for September: the "AC installation" grid is still weak near your base, so we will expand the installation page and add the service to your profile.
Everything below the summary supports these points with data.
Example metrics table
| Measure | This month | Last month | Same month last year |
|---|---|---|---|
| Top-three share, main search | 46% | 38% | 29% |
| Profile calls | 212 | 238 | 194 |
| Profile direction requests | 18 | 21 | 15 |
| Profile website clicks | 97 | 104 | 81 |
| Organic leads (qualified) | 51 | 55 | 39 |
| New reviews | 23 | 19 | 11 |
| Average rating, last 90 days | 4.8 | 4.7 | 4.6 |
The month-over-month dip with year-over-year growth in this example reflects normal late-summer seasonality, which the report would explain.
Reporting for service-area businesses and storefronts
The emphasis changes with the business model. Storefronts, such as clinics, restaurants and shops, watch direction requests closely, because they show people planning to visit. Service-area businesses, such as plumbers and pool companies, do not receive direction requests in a meaningful way; calls and form leads are their key actions, and visibility needs to be measured across the whole area they travel to. We shape each report around the actions that matter for your model.
Explaining changes honestly
Numbers go down as well as up. When they do, the report says so and explains the likely cause:
- Seasonality: many Phoenix services have strong seasonal patterns, such as cooling demand in summer or landscaping demand in fall.
- Competitor activity: a new competitor or a competitor's review surge.
- Google changes: algorithm updates or changes to how results are displayed.
- Profile or site issues: an accepted public edit, a technical error or a lost page.
Each explanation comes with what we are doing about it. A report that only shows good news is not a report anyone should trust.
Reports for multi-location businesses
For businesses with several branches, each location gets its own visibility, profile and lead section, followed by a comparison across locations. That makes it easy to spot a branch that needs attention. Our multi-location SEO service relies on this reporting.
Tying reports to revenue
The most useful reports show not just leads but outcomes. When your CRM records which leads became customers and what they were worth, the report can show revenue from search. Our SEO lead attribution service sets up that connection. Even without a CRM, simple call notes or a monthly count of booked jobs from search can add this layer.
Seasonal comparisons
Comparing this July to last July is often more meaningful than comparing July to June, especially for Phoenix businesses with strong seasons. Once a year of data exists, we show year-over-year comparisons for profile actions and leads alongside month-over-month changes.
Reading the visibility section
The visibility section shows geo-grids as colored maps. Green points mean the business appears in the top three for a search made from that spot; yellow means it appears lower; red means it does not appear in the results checked. The report explains what changed between grids and why, such as a new location page widening coverage to the west, or a competitor's review surge narrowing it to the north. Over time, a growing green area is the clearest visual sign that local SEO is working.
Leads by service and area
Where tracking allows, we break leads down by service and area. A plumber might learn that most water heater leads come from Glendale and Peoria, while drain cleaning leads come mostly from central Phoenix. That breakdown guides where to focus pages, reviews and profile updates next month.
What we leave out
We deliberately leave out vanity metrics that do not help decisions:
- Rankings for searches with no business value.
- Long tables of keywords nobody reads.
- Domain authority scores from third-party tools presented as goals.
- Traffic from irrelevant countries or bots.
If a number appears in the report, it is there because it helps answer a business question.
Alerts between reports
Some problems cannot wait for the monthly report. We set up alerts for sudden changes, such as a large drop in profile calls, a profile suspension, a negative review, a site outage or a spike in errors in Search Console. When an alert fires, we investigate and contact you with the cause and the fix, then summarize it in the next report.
Delivery and review
Reports arrive at the same time each month, as a short document you can read on a phone. A brief call to go through the report is available every month, and we flag urgent issues as soon as they appear rather than waiting for the next report.
Data ownership
All the data behind your reports comes from accounts your business owns: Google Analytics, Search Console, your Google Business Profile and your call tracking. If you ever change providers, the history stays with you.
Setting up reporting
- Check tracking: confirm that GA4, Search Console, the Google profile and call tracking are working and connected.
- Agree on key numbers: usually three to six measures that matter most to your business.
- Set the baseline: the starting point for every future comparison.
- Choose search terms and grids for visibility tracking.
- Deliver the first report and adjust the format to what you find most useful.