The question every SEO report should answer first
My Favorite Therapists, a paediatric therapy practice in Deerfield Beach, started with about ten referring domains, almost no keyword visibility, and no page for any of the four services it offered. Three months later Search Console showed 99.6K impressions and 1.72K clicks, 26 keywords in the top ten, and organic sitting beside direct as a top source of visits. Paid had become the supporting channel rather than the whole channel.
None of those numbers is the one that matters. The one that matters is how many parents called, and that is the number this agency puts at the top of the report. Everything else on the page is there to explain how it gets produced.
Why the report and the bank disagree
Three things happen, and none of them is a lie.
Impressions move first and mean least. Google tests a site for a wider set of queries as it earns trust, and impressions rise whether or not those queries have a budget behind them. A chart of impressions going up is a chart of Google being curious.
Brand searches were always coming. Somebody who types your company name has already decided to find you. Reporting those clicks as growth is reporting your existing customers as new ones. Split them out and the growth curve usually flattens, which is why the split so rarely gets made.
Conversions are whatever somebody set them to. In more than one account that has arrived here, a conversion action had been counting page views since the day it was created. Every optimisation for years had been aimed at a number that meant nothing.
So the first month here is spent on the plumbing: what counts as an enquiry, whether the tracking records it, and what the honest starting number is. You get a copy before anything else is touched.
The report you should be getting
Two pages, sent monthly. This is the format used here, and it is the format to ask any agency for.
Enquiries from organic search, and what each one cost.
Non-branded clicks, with branded reported on a separate line.
Impressions and average position for the commercial terms that were mapped in month one, not for every term the site happens to appear for.
Pages indexed against pages that should be indexed.
What changed this month, as a list, so the work can be checked against the invoice.
If a report cannot be produced in that shape, the tracking is not set up to produce it, and that is the first thing to fix.
Where this is the wrong agency
Search captures demand that already exists. If nobody is typing your category into Google yet, no SEO agency can produce a buyer, and the honest advice is paid social or a longer content game that teaches the category first.
Search is also slow. Technical fixes can show inside weeks. Competitive commercial rankings take months, and if the business needs revenue this month, paid search is the answer and it gets said on the first call rather than after a retainer.
And the guarantee only works because some accounts get declined. An account that cannot be moved costs this agency money rather than earning it less. That is why the fit section on this page says who it is not for, and why it is worth reading before the form.
The report opens with enquiries or it is hiding something. That is the whole standard.