Written by RHILLANE Ayoub
TLDR: For years our monthly SEO reports led with ranking positions, because that is the number every client asked about first. We moved rankings to page three and put booked leads on page one instead, and it changed which pages we prioritised building. A ranking is not the outcome a client is paying for; it is a proxy for one, and treating the proxy as the headline number trains everyone to chase the wrong target.
A client asked me last year why a page ranking third for its target keyword was producing fewer enquiries than a page ranking eighth for a different one. I did not have a good answer, because our own report had trained both of us to treat rank position as the finish line. Once I actually pulled the enquiry data by page, the eighth-ranked page was answering a specific buyer question the third-ranked page never addressed, and it was converting visitors at close to three times the rate.
The Problem With Leading a Report on Rankings
Most SEO reporting, ours included until that point, opens with a rankings table: keyword, position, change since last month. It is the easiest number to produce and the one clients recognise, so it becomes the headline by default. The problem is that rank position measures visibility, not outcome, and a client who sees “position 3, up from position 7” reasonably assumes the work is succeeding, even when the page in question has never produced a booked call.
We were guilty of building toward the report rather than the result. A ranking climb is satisfying to show and easy to chart. An enquiry count that moved sideways for three months, even while rankings improved, was a harder story to tell, so it stayed buried on page four of a five-page PDF.
What We Changed
Page one of every client report is now enquiries by landing page, not rankings by keyword. Underneath each page’s enquiry count sits the specific ranking data that explains the movement, but the ranking number is now context for the result, not the result itself. The reprioritisation this forced was immediate: a page ranking well for a broad, high-volume term but converting almost nobody moved down our roadmap, and a page ranking modestly for a narrower, buyer-intent term that was actually converting moved up it.
Search Engine Journal’s history of Google’s algorithm updates is a useful reminder of how much of visible ranking behaviour is volatile month to month for reasons entirely outside a site’s own changes. Reporting a client’s success against a number that moves for reasons unrelated to their business always struck me as an odd place to put the headline. Moz’s beginner’s guide to SEO still frames rankings correctly, as one signal inside a larger picture, even though most reporting templates in the industry, including our old one, treat them as the whole picture.
The second example that stuck with me: a Casablanca client’s homepage ranked on page one for its brand name, a ranking that required zero work and told us nothing useful, and our old report counted it as a win every single month. We now exclude branded-term rankings from the headline metrics entirely, because a page ranking for a company’s own name is not evidence the SEO work is doing anything.
What I’d Tell Another Agency
If your monthly report’s first page is a rankings table, ask what decision a client is supposed to make from it. Rank position tells you visibility moved. It does not tell you whether the page is doing its job. Put the outcome metric first, keep the ranking data as supporting context underneath it, and watch which pages on your own roadmap suddenly look less impressive than they did last month. The same shift changed how a digital marketing agency restructured its own reporting stack this year.
Author Bio:
RHILLANE Ayoub is the founder and CEO of a digital marketing agency working with clients across Morocco, France, the Gulf and the United States. If your agency or in-house team wants to rebuild a reporting structure around outcomes instead of proxies, the team at Rhillane Marketing Digital has already made the switch and can walk through what changed.