Local SEO reporting: what to put in a monthly client report

Good local SEO reporting answers three questions for the client: where do we show up on the map, what did people do when they found us, and what are we doing next. A monthly report that covers those three in six short sections is enough for most local businesses: a one-paragraph summary, map rankings across the service area, Business Profile activity, reviews, website traffic from the listing, and next month’s plan. Everything in it can come from Google’s own free tools plus one source for map rankings. This guide walks through each section, where its numbers come from, and how to put the report together in under an hour per client.

It is written for a freelancer or small agency reporting on a handful of local clients, and for a business owner who wants to hold their own marketing to the same standard.

What local SEO reporting is for

A report has one job: to let the client decide whether the work is worth paying for, and to let you see what to do next. It fails in two familiar ways.

• Too many numbers. Forty charts with no sentence explaining them. The client skims, sees some lines going down, and worries.
• One number. “You rank #2 for plumber.” The client searches from their kitchen, sees themselves at #6, and stops trusting the report.

The fix for both is the same. Report a small set of numbers that tie to the client’s business, and say in plain words what each one means this month.

Every number in the report should answer “compared with what?” Last month, the same month last year, or a named competitor. A number on its own tells the client nothing.

The six sections of a local SEO report

The order matters. Put the summary first, because many clients read nothing else. Put the plan last, because it is what you want them to remember.

Section 1: The summary

Three or four sentences, written last. Say what moved, what you did that probably moved it, and what you are watching. For example:

Calls from the listing were up on last month. The listing now shows in the top three across most of the north side of town, where it was mostly outside the top ten in August. We added the second category and replied to every review. Next month we focus on the south side, where one competitor holds the top spot almost everywhere.

Write it as a person would say it on a call. No jargon, no percentages without a reason, and an honest line when something went down.

Section 2: Map rankings across the service area

This is the section most reports get wrong. A single rank number for “plumber” is checked from one spot, and Google’s local results change with where the searcher stands. A business can be first two streets away and absent across town for the same search. Our guide to local SEO rank tracking covers the setup in detail; for reporting, what matters is what to show.

Show, for each of three to five searches the client cares about:

1. A grid map of the service area with the business’s position at each point, so the client sees where they are strong and where they are missing.
2. The share of the grid in the top three, compared with last month. This is the single best number for a client, because the top three is what most people see first.
3. Who ranks first where the client does not. Naming the competitor turns “we are weak in the south” into something the client recognises.
4. One line of interpretation. “Strong near the shop, falls off past two miles” points at a different fix than “missing everywhere”, which usually means the category or the name does not match the search.

You can collect this by hand by searching from different places, but it is slow and hard to repeat the same way each month. A grid tool does it on a schedule. Local Rank Tracker searches Google Maps from every point of a 3×3, 5×5 or 7×7 grid around the business, from 0.5 to 10 miles out, and repeats the scan every week on its own. For each scan it shows:

• the business’s position at every point, coloured by top three, four to ten, and further out;
• the top businesses ranking at each point, with their rating and review count;
• a plain-language reading beneath the grid, such as how rank falls off with distance, which competitor dominates, a review gap against the leaders, and what moved since the previous scan.

That reading is close to what you would write in the report anyway, so it saves the hardest part of this section. It does not build the report for you. There is no white-label PDF or export: you take the grid and the readings into your own document, which for a handful of clients is a few screenshots and a few sentences.

It costs 20 credits a month per tracked search, and a new account gets 100 credits once, enough for five searches for the first month without a card. Current plans are on the pricing page.

Section 3: Business Profile activity

Google’s Business Profile has a Performance page for every verified profile. According to Google’s help page for it (read October 2026), it reports:

• Interactions, the total of the actions below;
• Searches, the search terms people used to find the business, updated at the start of each month;
• Views, how many people viewed the profile on Search and Maps;
• Directions, calls, website clicks, and, where they apply, messages, bookings, menus, products and offers.

Google’s page also notes that the views figure counts unique visitors, and that a person is counted once a day. So do not compare it with view numbers from a different tool or an older report; compare it with itself, month on month.

What to report:

• calls, direction requests and website clicks for the month, against last month and, once you have it, the same month last year;
• the top few search terms, and whether the searches you are working on are appearing more often;
• one sentence on what the numbers mean for the business. Calls matter more to a plumber; direction requests matter more to a restaurant.

Set the date range to the calendar month each time, so every report covers the same span.

Section 4: Reviews

Reviews affect both rank and whether a searcher picks the business, so they earn their own section. Report:

Add one line on anything notable: a run of complaints about the same thing, a negative review that was answered well, a competitor whose review count is pulling ahead. Our guide on how to respond to Google reviews has reply examples if the reply rate is the weak spot.

You can count reviews by hand from the profile each month. If you would rather be told when a one- or two-star review on the client’s listing still has no reply, Review Radar does that from the same credit balance as Local Rank Tracker. It keeps the nearest competitors’ reviews on the same board for the review section, and drafts a reply when you ask for one.

Section 5: Website traffic from the listing

Google Analytics usually lumps listing clicks in with ordinary search traffic. To separate them, tag the website link on the Business Profile with campaign parameters. Google’s Analytics help on URL builders describes the parameters; a common setup is:

https://example.com/?utm_source=google&utm_medium=organic&utm_campaign=gbp-listing

Once the tagged link is live, the campaign shows up in Analytics’ traffic acquisition report, and you can report visits and enquiries that came from the listing. Start this in the first month of the engagement: tagged data only exists from the day the link changes.

Report visits from the listing, and whatever counts as a lead on the site (form sends, quote requests, booking clicks), against last month.

Section 6: Next month’s plan

Two to four actions, each tied to something in the report. For example:

• “The south side grid is weak and one competitor leads there with far more reviews. We will ask recent customers in that area for reviews.”
• “The search terms show people looking for ‘emergency’ services. We will add an emergency service page and link it from the profile.”

A plan line that does not point at a number in the report is a guess. A plan line that does gives the next report something to check.

How to build the report each month

A routine that keeps it to under an hour per client:

1. On the first working day of the month, open the latest weekly grid for each tracked search and note the top-three share.
2. Open the Business Profile Performance page, set last month as the range, and copy calls, directions, website clicks and the top search terms.
3. Count new reviews, the rating and replies.
4. Pull listing visits and leads from Analytics.
5. Paste the grid screenshots and the numbers into a template you reuse every month.
6. Write the summary and the plan last.

Keep a short change log per client through the month (category added, photos uploaded, page published). Without it, a better grid tells you something worked and nothing about what.

When a spreadsheet is enough

Not every client needs a reporting tool. A shared document or spreadsheet with the six sections above is enough when:

• you have one to three clients, so screenshots and copy-paste take minutes;
• the client reads the summary and the plan and nothing else;
• you meet monthly and walk through it on a call anyway.

It stops being enough when you manage many locations, when clients expect a branded report on a fixed date, or when the data collection itself is the part you keep putting off. At that point, the map ranking section is usually the first thing worth automating, because it is the hardest to collect by hand and the easiest to get wrong. For a comparison of grid trackers by kind of job, see the best local rank tracker for each kind of job, and for a one-off review of where a listing stands before reporting starts, the free local SEO audit checklist.

The short version

Local SEO reporting works when it is short and comparative: six sections, each number against last month, each section ending in a sentence the client can act on. Google’s own tools cover the listing activity, reviews and traffic. The map ranking section needs a grid check across the service area, which you can do by hand or hand to Local Rank Tracker and have a fresh grid every week when the report is due.

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