What a Monthly SEO Report Should Show a Practice Owner

A monthly SEO report should let you check the work and see whether it's reaching the people you want to see. In practice that means five parts: every link placed, with its live URL, the page it points to and its anchor text; positions for the specialty and town phrases you agreed on; your Google Business Profile activity; inquiries by source, which come from your own records; and a short note on what was done and what's planned. A report you can't check line by line isn't much use to you, however polished it looks.

You don't need to learn SEO jargon to read one. If a report is built around those five parts, fifteen minutes a month is enough.

Every link placed, with proof

Links from other websites are a large part of what many SEO packages deliver, ours included, and they're the easiest part of a report to pad. A useful report lists each link with:

• The live URL of the page where the link sits, so you can open it
• The page on your site it points to
• The anchor text (the clickable words)
• The date it was placed

The target page column tells you whether the work supports your specialty pages or only your homepage. A practice that wants to be found for couples counseling and teen therapy should see links pointing to those pages, not everything aimed at the front door. The anchor text column should read naturally and vary: a specialty phrase like "couples counseling in Tulsa" a few times, your practice name, a plain web address, rather than the same exact phrase thirty times over. If a report gives you totals ("25 links built this month") without the URLs, ask for the list.

Every package on our pricing page includes a monthly report that lists every live URL, target page and anchor text, for exactly this reason.

Positions for the phrases you chose together

At the start, you and whoever does the work should agree on a list of phrases: your specialties and populations, paired with your town or state. For example, "anxiety therapist Tulsa", "teen counseling Broken Arrow", "online couples therapy Oklahoma". The report should show where your site sits for each phrase this month, and where it sat in the months before.

Two details make these numbers honest. First, local positions depend on where the searcher is, so the report should say where rankings are measured from, such as a ZIP code or the city center. Second, the map pack and the regular results are separate lists, and a good report shows them separately. A practice can sit third in the map and on page two below it for the same phrase, and both facts matter.

Read the trend across three months rather than reacting to one month's movement. Positions shift from day to day for reasons that have nothing to do with your site.

Google Business Profile activity

If your practice has a profile (it needs an office where clients come during stated hours), the report should show the profile's views, website clicks, calls and direction requests, along with what changed during the month: photos added, hours updated, categories adjusted, a description rewritten.

Reviews belong here as a count, with a note on which ones were answered. The wording of any replies matters for privacy reasons. HHS has settled cases with health practices that disclosed patient information in replies to online reviews, so no reply, from you or anyone helping you, should confirm that the reviewer is or was a client. That's a general caution rather than legal advice; your compliance advisor can say more about your situation.

Inquiries by source, from your side

This is the number that tells you whether SEO is paying, and no agency can see it for you. Only you can, through your own intake. Keep a simple log: the date of each inquiry, how the person found you (Google search, Google Maps, a directory, a referral, an insurer directory) and whether they booked a first session. Keep names out of anything you share, and keep clinical details out of the log entirely.

Share the monthly counts by source and nothing more. Set next to the ranking trend over a few months, those counts show whether better positions are turning into people reaching out, which is the whole point of the exercise.

What was done, and what's next

A few lines are enough: pages edited or written, technical fixes, content published, and what's planned for next month and why. If the plan changed (a new specialty page moved up the list, a phrase was dropped because nobody searches for it), the report should say so in plain words.

Numbers to read with care

Some figures look impressive in a report without telling you much about new clients. Each one below comes with a better question to ask.

• Total website traffic. A broad blog post can pull in readers from states you can't serve. Ask instead how many visits reached your specialty pages and contact page from your area.
• Domain Authority or Domain Rating. These are third-party scores, useful as a rough filter when choosing sites for links, but they aren't something Google uses to rank you. Ask whether each link sits on a real site a person would read, and whether that page is indexed.
• Total impressions. These rise with phrases that have nothing to do with your practice. Ask for impressions on the phrases you agreed on.
• "Keywords ranking" counts. These often include positions 50 to 100 for odd phrases nobody would search. Ask for positions on your agreed list.
• Number of links. A count says nothing about where the links are. Ask for the full list so you can open them.

How to check the links yourself

Once a month, set aside ten minutes.

1. Pick five links at random from the report and open each live URL.
2. Find your link on the page. Hover over it, or copy the link address, to confirm it points to the target page listed.
3. Read the paragraph around it. The link should make sense where it sits, on a site that publishes things a person might want to read.
4. Search Google for the exact page URL. If the page shows up, it's indexed. If it doesn't, ask about it.
5. Recheck two or three links from earlier months to make sure they're still live.

If several links fail these checks, raise it before the next month's work begins rather than after half a year of it. A provider doing honest work will welcome the question, because it's the same check they should be running themselves.

If you'd like a baseline before any of this starts, request a free visibility review. It records where your site stands today for your main specialty and town phrases, so every report that follows has a fixed starting point to be compared against.