The report call ends. You say “great, thanks.”
Answer 11 quick questions. See whether your monthly report shows the work you’re paying for, what’s missing, and exactly what to ask your provider so your money isn’t going into work you can’t see.
A report you can check shows you things like
The check covers all seven, plus four things at your end that decide whether good work would even be visible to you.
Plenty of reports skip several of these. That doesn’t mean your provider is doing a bad job. It means nobody outside the agency can tell either way, including you.
Free · 11 questions · about a minute
Example result
Plus the exact questions to send your provider about each gap
Answer from memory. “Not sure” is a fine answer.
I ask for your email at the end so I can send the printable version.
Last step
Tell me where to send the printable version and I'll show you what it came to.
I'll also send a short series on reading SEO reports. Unsubscribe any time.
Your result
A gap on their end means something is not being documented. It does not mean it was not done. The fix for that is usually a better conversation, not a new agency.
Their end, item by item
Your end, item by item
What to ask for
Each of these follows directly from a gap above. All of them are reasonable requests and none of them is an accusation.
What to sort out at your end
These are the ones nobody can do for you, and they're usually the faster half to fix.
Two ways to get to the bottom of it
None of this tells you yet why the phone is flat. It tells you whether anybody could find out. The next step is comparing what you were promised against what was reported, and checking the pieces that can be verified from outside.
I’ve looked at more than a hundred of these over fifteen years, and more often than not the provider was doing the work and describing it badly. Either way, you get to stop wondering.