A client called me 4 months in and asked a question I have not been able to forget. He said, "I open the Looker report every Monday. I scroll. I close it. Can you just tell me what happened?"
He was paying us 6,000 dollars a month. He had 14 tabs of dashboards in his inbox. And he had no idea what we were doing or why it was working.
That call killed dashboards at The 66th. Not the data, the dashboards. We still pull every metric. We just stopped pretending the spreadsheet was the deliverable.
The Test That Exposes Every Bad SEO Report
Here is the question I now ask of every report we send. Could the founder, after reading this in under 4 minutes, walk into a partner meeting and explain what moved last month and why?
If the answer is no, the report is decoration. It exists to look like work, not to communicate work.
Most agency reports fail this test on purpose. A 14-tab dashboard hides 2 things: a thin month of output, and a strategist who cannot explain their own judgement calls. Tabs are camouflage. The more tabs, the less the agency wants you reading any single one.
What Most Agencies Send (And Why You Tune Out)
I have audited reports from probably 30 agencies over the last 2 years, sent to me by prospects who were burned and switching. The pattern is almost identical.
Page 1 is a screenshot of Google Search Console. Total clicks, total impressions, average position. A green up-arrow next to a number that may or may not be tied to anything you sell. Page 2 is a keyword table sorted by impression volume, which means the top of the list is whatever generic informational query happened to surge that week. Pages 3 through 11 are screenshots from Ahrefs and SEMrush. Page 12 is a list of backlinks acquired. Page 13 is a list of blog posts published. Page 14 is a recap of what they plan to do next month, written in the same language as last month's recap.
Nothing in that report tells you whether the work moved the business. It tells you the work happened.
What I Send Instead
The replacement is a written update. One page. Plain English. Tagged by segment the founder actually cares about.
For a personal injury law firm, that means I am not writing "organic clicks up 23%." I am writing: "12 new enquiries on personal injury, 6 on family law, 3 on estate planning. The personal injury number is up because the 4 city pages we shipped in March are now in positions 4 to 7 and starting to take real traffic. Family law is flat. We have a structural problem on that hub I want to talk about on Friday."
Same data, completely different document. The first version lets the founder nod and move on. The second forces a conversation.
The Three Things Every Report Should Answer
I made this list after the client call I opened with. Every monthly update we send has to answer 3 questions, in this order.
| Question | What it forces the strategist to do | What the founder gets |
|---|---|---|
| What moved last month? | Pick the 2 or 3 things that actually changed, not list 40 metrics. | A clear picture of the trend, not a wall of numbers. |
| Why did it move? | Explain the cause. Tie it to specific pages, specific work, specific decisions. | Confidence the agency understands its own results. |
| What are we doing about it next month? | Make a real recommendation. Not "continue optimisation." | A reason to keep paying. A plan they can challenge. |
If a section of the report does not answer one of those 3 questions, I cut it. The cut version is shorter than the version that came before. That is the whole point.
Why Dashboards Survive Anyway
Most agencies keep the dashboard because it protects them. A dashboard pushes the burden of interpretation onto the client. If the numbers look bad, the client did not understand the context. If the numbers look good, the agency takes credit. Either way the agency never has to make a claim it can be held to.
A written update flips that. When I write "we expected the family law hub to start moving by now and it has not, here is what I think is wrong," I am on the hook. If I am wrong about the diagnosis, the founder will remember next month. That is the right pressure to put on a strategist. The dashboard removes it.
This is also why short-term clients almost never get a great report. The agency does not trust the relationship enough to write something they can be held to. So they default to data dumps. The client churns. The cycle continues.
What This Looks Like When It Works
The clients we have run this format with for 6+ months stop asking for dashboard access. They stop forwarding the report to their CFO with a question mark in the subject line. They reply with one of 2 things: "Got it, see you Friday," or a real question about a real decision.
The second one is the only signal I care about. A client asking me about a real decision means the report is doing its job. It means they read it, they understood it, and they trust the framing enough to push back on it. That is what reporting is for. Not proof of activity. Proof of judgement.
If your current SEO agency sends you 14 tabs and a generic recap, run the 4-minute test. Open last month's report. Set a timer. At the end, write down what moved and why. If you cannot, the report is not failing you. The agency is.
Liam Lytton is the founder of The 66th, a Vancouver-based SEO and GEO agency. He works directly with every client on strategy and writes the monthly update himself.
