A good SEO report template has eight sections: a title card, an executive summary, traffic and KPIs, keyword movement, backlink growth, content performance, technical health, and AI visibility. Every one of them can be built from Google Search Console, GA4 and Looker Studio, with no paid subscription to anything.
That last section is the one most templates still leave out, and it is the one clients now ask about first. I build these reports every month for clients, in Looker Studio for the recurring numbers and in slides for the commentary, and this is the structure I have settled on.
Last updated 7 September 2026. There is an interactive version of this exact template on the site, so you can fill in your numbers and get the report rather than rebuilding it from scratch: SEO report template builder.
The eight sections, and what to say in each
The hard part of monthly SEO reporting is not assembling the charts. It is writing the sentence under each chart that tells the client what changed and what you are doing about it. A number with no interpretation gets skimmed. Every section below has both.
1. Title card
Client name, the period covered, who prepared it and for whom. It takes thirty seconds and it stops the version confusion that happens the moment three months of reports are sitting in someone’s inbox. Name the file with the period in it too, not “SEO report final v2”.
2. Executive summary
Three or four sentences, written last, read first. Assume the person reading it will read nothing else. Lead with the number that matters to their business rather than the number that flatters the work, name the one thing that moved most, and say what next month’s priority is.
If the month was bad, say so here rather than burying it on slide nine. Clients forgive a flat month. They do not forgive finding out about it themselves.
3. Traffic and KPIs
Pull it from: Search Console Performance for clicks, impressions, CTR and average position. GA4 for sessions and conversions. In Looker Studio, both connect natively, so this section builds itself once and then updates on its own every month.
Show this period against the previous one, and filter Search Console to non-branded queries wherever you can. Branded search mostly tracks whatever marketing did elsewhere, so leaving it in makes SEO look better or worse than it was.
What to say: the relationship between the numbers, not the numbers themselves. Impressions up sharply with clicks flat is a title and snippet problem, not a ranking problem. Clicks up while conversions fall means the new traffic is landing earlier in the buying cycle, or the pages are not doing their job. Those two sentences are worth more than the whole chart above them.
4. Keyword movement
Pull it from: Search Console Queries, comparing date ranges. Export both periods to Sheets, match on query, and calculate the position delta. No rank tracker needed, and Search Console has the advantage of showing real average position rather than a sampled check from one location.
Show ten winners and five losers, not two hundred rows. What to say: weight the movement by where it landed. A query going from 18 to 6 changes the traffic. A query going from 40 to 25 changes nothing yet, and saying so builds more trust than presenting both as wins. Always show the losers. A report with no losses in it reads as a report nobody checked.
5. Backlink growth
Pull it from: Search Console, then Links, then Top linking sites. This is the section people assume needs a paid tool. It does not, as long as you are honest about the limits: Search Console reports links on a lag, gives you no authority metric, and undercounts.
What to say: name the two or three links actually worth naming, with what they are and why they matter. Then state the caveat in the report itself, so a flat month reads as unconfirmed rather than as nothing happening. Clients are fine with lag when you tell them about it in advance.
6. Content performance
Pull it from: Search Console Pages, compared period on period, plus GA4 engagement rate for the same URLs.
What to say: pick the single page that moved most and explain why it moved, whether that was a rewrite, an internal link change, or something a competitor did. This is also where a page that is quietly dying gets caught, months before anyone notices in the traffic total. Internal linking is usually the cheapest fix available here, and I have written separately about how many internal links per page a site actually needs.
7. Technical health
Pull it from: Search Console Pages for indexed versus not indexed, and Core Web Vitals for the good URL percentage. Both are free and both are what Google actually sees, which a third-party crawler is only approximating.
What to say: the raw not-indexed count means very little on its own, since plenty of pages are excluded deliberately. The number worth reporting is whether any page you want ranking is sitting in that bucket. Keep it to issues found, issues fixed, and issues still open with a date against them. Nobody needs a screenshot of a crawl.
8. AI visibility
This is the section that separates a 2026 report from a 2022 one. Buyers increasingly get an answer from ChatGPT, an AI Overview or Google’s AI Mode without ever clicking, and none of that shows up as a ranking. If you only report positions, you are reporting a shrinking share of how people find your client.
Pull it from: two free sources. First, a fixed prompt panel: write down fifteen to twenty-five questions a real buyer would ask, run the identical list in ChatGPT, Google AI Mode, Gemini and Perplexity on the same day each month, and log whether the brand was named and which pages were cited. It takes about forty minutes and it is the only way to measure this consistently right now. Second, GA4 under Acquisition and then Referrals, where chatgpt.com, perplexity.ai and gemini.google.com show up as referral sources once assistants start sending clicks.
What to say: report mentions and cited pages separately, because they mean different things. A citation without a mention means your page fed the answer but the brand did not survive into it, which is usually a positioning problem in the content itself. Publish your method next to the score, since there is no industry standard yet and a client will ask how it was calculated.
On a legal services client with a low-authority domain I have tracked this monthly since the start, and the AI visibility numbers moved before the rankings did. The month-by-month figures for that project, including mentions and cited pages by assistant, are in my case studies.
How long a monthly SEO report should take
The first one takes three to four hours, almost all of it setting up Looker Studio: connecting Search Console and GA4, building the comparison date ranges, and getting the non-branded filter right. That work is done once per client.
After that, a monthly report takes me forty to sixty minutes. Roughly ten minutes checking the dashboard has not broken, forty on the prompt panel and the writing, and ten on the next-steps list. If yours takes four hours every month, the problem is that you are rebuilding charts by hand rather than that you are being thorough.
Send it monthly for retainer work. Weekly reporting on SEO is noise, since the data moves slower than the reporting cycle, and it trains clients to react to fluctuations that mean nothing.
Use the interactive version
Rather than leave you to rebuild this from a screenshot, I put the whole thing on the site as a working tool. Enter your Search Console and GA4 figures section by section and the SEO report template builder assembles the formatted report, drafts the commentary from your own numbers, and lets you print it to PDF or copy it as text. Nothing is uploaded or stored anywhere.
There is a “load an example” button on it if you want to see a filled-in SEO report sample before entering anything of your own.
Frequently asked questions
What should an SEO report template include?
Eight sections: title card, executive summary, traffic and KPIs, keyword movement, backlink growth, content performance, technical health, and AI visibility. Each one needs a source you can defend and a sentence explaining what the data means. A template that is only charts will get skimmed and then quietly ignored.
Can I build an SEO report without paid tools?
Yes, entirely. Search Console covers queries, pages, indexing, Core Web Vitals and links. GA4 covers sessions, conversions and AI referral traffic. Looker Studio connects to both for free and refreshes automatically. Paid tools mainly buy you better backlink data and faster competitor research, neither of which is required to report on your own site honestly.
How often should I send a monthly SEO report?
Monthly, on a fixed date, ideally the same working day each month so the comparison periods stay clean. Quarterly is too slow to catch a problem and weekly is faster than the data actually moves. The exception is a migration or a recovery, where a short weekly check-in is worth it while the situation is live.
How do I report AI visibility to a client?
Run a fixed list of buyer questions through the major assistants on the same day each month and log mentions and cited pages per assistant, then pair that with AI referral sessions from GA4. Report the method alongside the number. Consistency matters more than precision here, because the value is in the trend across months rather than in any single month’s score.
About the author. Kapil Lodhi is an SEO and AI SEO specialist in Indore, India, with over four years of hands-on experience across technical SEO, on-page and content strategy, link building, local SEO and e-commerce SEO for clients in India, the United States and Canada. He builds these reports monthly, and the reporting is part of how he works with clients.