SEO client report: what to include, with a Google Analytics template

A good SEO client report answers one question: is organic search bringing this business more of the visitors and leads it wants, and what are we doing next? It needs five parts: a short summary, search visibility from Search Console (clicks, impressions, average position), organic sessions and key events from GA4, the landing pages that moved, and next steps. Everything else is an appendix.

Most templates ranking for this query come from reporting tools, and they list twenty metrics with backlinks and domain scores near the top. They rarely say where each number lives in GA4, or why GA4 and Search Console will never agree. This guide covers both, then gives you a template to copy. For the wider picture of reporting to clients, see our complete guide to client reporting.

What to include in an SEO client report

Two free Google tools cover almost everything a client needs to see. They measure different stages of the same journey:

Question the client has	Tool	Metric
Are we showing up on Google?	Search Console	Impressions, average position
Are people clicking?	Search Console	Clicks, CTR
Did the visits come and stay?	GA4	Organic sessions, engagement rate
Did they do something useful?	GA4	Key events (leads, sign-ups, purchases)
Which pages did the work?	GA4 and Search Console	Landing pages, top queries

Leave out what the client cannot act on. Backlink counts, domain scores and crawl stats belong in your working files unless one of them explains a result in this month’s report.

The GA4 part: organic sessions, landing pages, key events

Organic sessions

In GA4, open Reports > Acquisition > Traffic acquisition. The table’s default dimension is Session default channel group, and one of its rows is Organic Search (Google’s traffic acquisition report doc). Google defines that channel as visits from non-ad links in organic search results, and its current definition includes AI Overviews and AI Mode (default channel group). Note it also counts Bing, DuckDuckGo and other search engines, not only Google.

Report organic sessions against the previous period and the same period last year, since seasonality distorts month-over-month comparisons for most businesses.

Landing pages

Open Reports > Engagement > Landing page and add a filter on Session default channel group = Organic Search. The report shows the first page of each session, with sessions, engagement time and key events per page (landing page report). Pick the three to five pages that moved most, up or down. A client understands “the pricing guide lost 40% of its organic visits” far better than a sitewide average.

Key events

Key events are what GA4 used to call conversions (conversions vs. key events): form submissions, demo requests, purchases. In the Traffic acquisition report, the Key events column on the Organic Search row tells you how many came from organic visits. This is the line the client’s boss cares about. If no key events are set up, fix that before you send the first report, because a report with no outcome metric invites the question “so what?”.

The Search Console part: clicks, impressions, average position

Search Console’s Performance report gives four numbers (what are impressions, position, and clicks):

• Clicks: how often someone clicked through to the site from Google Search results.
• Impressions: how often a link to the site appeared in results.
• CTR: clicks divided by impressions.
• Average position: the topmost position the site held, averaged across the queries it appeared for. Google recommends watching how position changes over time, especially sudden shifts, rather than reading a single number.

Impressions are the early signal. When impressions rise on a page while clicks stay flat, the page is ranking for new queries but not yet high enough, or its title is not earning the click. That is a concrete next step for the report.

You can also link Search Console to GA4 (you need the Editor role on the GA4 property and verified ownership of the Search Console property). The link adds two reports, Google Organic Search Queries and Google Organic Search Traffic, the second pairing landing pages with Search Console and GA4 metrics side by side (connect Search Console to Google Analytics). The collection is unpublished by default: find it in the report Library and publish it.

Why GA4 and Search Console numbers don’t match

Every client who sees both tools will ask why “organic clicks” and “organic sessions” differ. Have the answer in the report before they ask. Google’s own explanation (using Search Console and Google Analytics data for SEO) covers most of the causes:

• Clicks are not sessions. A click is one action on a search result; a session is a period of activity on the site, with its own rules for starting and ending.
• Different scope. Search Console counts Google Search only. GA4’s Organic Search channel includes every search engine (default channel group).
• Consent and tagging. Visitors who decline tracking, or pages missing the tag, are invisible to GA4 but still count as clicks in Search Console.
• Time zones. Search Console reports in Pacific Time; GA4 uses the property’s time zone, which shifts daily totals.
• Other differences: Search Console reports canonical URLs only and does not necessarily filter bots, while GA4 filters known bots automatically.

An SEO client report template you can copy

The structure below fits on one page plus an appendix. The client name and numbers are an illustrative example made up for this article, to show the format.

SEO report, September 2026, Northfield Dental (illustrative example)

Summary: organic search brought 12 new booking requests in September, up from 8 in August. Most of the gain came from the new “emergency dentist” page, which now appears for 140 more queries than in August.

Visibility (Search Console, Google only): 2,310 clicks (+11% vs August), 64,800 impressions (+19%), CTR 3.6%. Average position on “dentist near me [city]” moved from 9.4 to 6.8.

Visits and outcomes (GA4, all search engines): 2,540 organic sessions (+9% vs August, +22% vs September 2025). Engagement rate 61%. Booking requests from organic: 12.

Pages that moved: /emergency-dentist (+310 organic sessions, 5 bookings). /teeth-whitening-cost (-120 sessions after a competitor’s new guide outranked it).

What we did: published the emergency page, rewrote titles on six service pages, fixed the redirect loop on /contact.

Next month: expand the whitening cost page with current prices and an FAQ; request indexing for the two new location pages.

One decision for you: do you want us to prioritise the Kingsbury location page or the Invisalign page in October?

Appendix: top 20 queries, full landing page table, link to the dashboard.

What makes this format work:

1. Lead with the outcome (bookings, leads, sales), then explain it with visibility and traffic.
2. Label the source on every number, so nobody compares Search Console clicks with GA4 sessions.
3. Name pages, not averages. Two or three specific pages tell the story.
4. Say what you did and what is next. The client pays for the work, not the chart.
5. End with one question that needs a decision.

How often to send it

Send the full report monthly. SEO moves slowly, and a week of Search Console data is mostly noise. Keep in mind that Search Console data shows up in GA4 about 48 hours after Search Console collects it, so wait a few days into the month before you pull the numbers (Search Console link doc).

Between monthly reports, send a short note only when something changed: a key landing page lost a chunk of its organic traffic, a fix shipped, a page broke into the top results. Quarterly, step back and review strategy against the client’s goals. If your clients skip the monthly PDF, the problem is usually the format, which we covered in your clients don’t read your reports.

Spotting organic drops between reports

The risk with a monthly rhythm is learning about a drop four weeks late. For the GA4 half of the report, you can automate the watching. Dialytics, our product, reads each client’s GA4 property and posts to that client’s Slack channel: a digest every Monday on what moved and why, plus an alert when a day is unusual for that weekday. Anyone in the channel can mention the bot in the thread to ask, for example, how organic sessions compare with last week. It does not connect to Search Console, so clicks, impressions and positions still come from Search Console itself. If a drop does show up, our GA4 traffic drop checklist walks through the causes.