SEO Reports Are Fiction

Every month, agencies across the world send their clients PDF reports, twenty, thirty, sometimes fifty pages of graphs and metrics and analysis, impressive-looking documents that justify the retainer and demonstrate progress and give everyone involved something to point at when someone asks what exactly the SEO team has been doing, and most of it, I regret to inform you, is fiction, not lies exactly, because the numbers are usually real, they were pulled from real dashboards and exported from real tools, but the narrative wrapped around those numbers, the cause-and-effect stories, the implications of success, the confident assertions about what went up and why it went up and what we should do to make more things go up, that's where the creative writing begins.

The Art of Metric Selection

The first fiction technique, and the most fundamental one, the one upon which all other fictions are built, is choosing which numbers to show, because SEO generates hundreds of metrics, truly an embarrassment of riches if your goal is to find something, anything, that looks good: rankings for individual keywords, traffic from different sources, impressions in search, clicks, bounce rates, time on site, pages per session, conversion rates, domain authority, referring domains, indexed pages, Core Web Vitals scores, and on and on, a cornucopia of data points, and some of these went up this month, and some went down, and some stayed flat, and the agency's job, the core competency for which they are handsomely compensated, is to build a story from whichever ones happen to look good.

Traffic down? Focus on ranking improvements. Rankings down? Focus on impressions growth. Impressions down? Focus on click-through rate improvements. Everything down? Well, now we focus on the technical fixes that will pay off later, we plant seeds for future growth, we build foundations, we invest in long-term success, we deploy whatever forward-looking euphemism sounds most plausible for the simple fact that nothing good happened this month, because there's always a positive story to tell if you're selective enough about which numbers you show, and selectivity is the name of the game.

The Causation Illusion

The second fiction technique, equally important and equally pervasive, is implying that the agency's work caused the good things that happened, the classic post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy dressed up in professional clothing: "After implementing our recommended title tag changes, organic traffic increased 23%."

Did the title tags cause the increase? Maybe. Or maybe there was a seasonal uptick that happens every year at this time. Or maybe a competitor dropped out of the market for reasons entirely unrelated to anything either of you did. Or maybe Google's algorithm shifted in a way that happened to favor your client. Or maybe the client got press coverage that drove awareness and search demand, coverage that had nothing whatsoever to do with SEO. Or maybe, and this is the most likely explanation of all, it's just normal fluctuation, the kind of up and down that would have happened anyway whether the agency existed or not.

SEO operates in a chaotic environment with countless variables, and establishing clear cause-and-effect is genuinely difficult, arguably impossible, but reports need to justify fees, so agencies write as though they control outcomes they often can't measure, let alone influence directly, and the honest version, the version no one writes, would be something like: "Traffic went up this month, and we did some things, and these might be related, but we're not sure, and anyone who tells you they're sure is either lying or deluded." (The same causation problem plagues most SEO case studies too.)

The Vanity Metric Parade

Some metrics in SEO reports are genuinely meaningless, included not because they matter but because they look good on graphs, because they reliably go up and to the right, because they fill space and create the impression of activity: Domain Authority, for instance, which is a made-up number from Moz that Google doesn't use and that isn't predictive of anything specific, but which usually increases over time if you're doing anything at all, so it gets reported; or Keywords Ranked, the total number of keywords your site appears for, a number that almost always increases simply by adding more content, regardless of whether that content is good, regardless of whether you rank for keywords that anyone actually searches, regardless of whether any of this translates to a single dollar of revenue; or Impressions, which measures how many times your site appeared in search results, not how many people clicked, not how many converted, not how many did anything useful whatsoever, just appearances, a number that can grow even as actual value shrinks; or Backlinks Acquired, how many new sites linked to you this month, which without context about quality is completely meaningless, since a thousand spam links from link farms count exactly the same in the raw number as one link from a major publication that actually sends traffic and builds authority.

These metrics fill space in reports, they make charts go up and to the right, they create the impression of progress and momentum, but they're proxies for things that matter, several degrees removed from actual business value, shadows on the wall of a cave that everyone has agreed to treat as reality.

The Progress That Isn't

Many SEO reports show "progress" that's actually just activity, the two being fundamentally different things that the report format conveniently obscures: "We published 8 blog posts this month," which is activity, which tells you nothing about whether those posts accomplished anything, whether anyone read them, whether they rank for anything, whether they'll ever generate a single visitor; or "We optimized 15 pages for target keywords," which sounds impressive until you ask whether rankings improved, whether traffic increased, whether conversions went up, whether any measurable outcome followed from this optimization; or "We acquired 12 new backlinks," which prompts the immediate questions of from where, do they matter, will they help rankings, are they worth the paper they're printed on, questions that the report does not answer because the answers might be uncomfortable.

Activity reports feel like progress, they have the shape and texture of progress, they allow everyone to point at things and say look at all this work we did, but work without results is just busyness, motion mistaken for movement, and the report should show outcomes, not tasks completed, except that tasks are easier to guarantee than outcomes, because you can always publish more blog posts, you can always "optimize" more pages, you can always acquire more links of questionable provenance, whereas results are not within anyone's control, and so agencies report tasks and hope clients conflate the two. (Learn what actually matters in SEO analytics.)

The Comparison Game

Reports love comparisons, month over month, year over year, against "industry benchmarks," and each comparison frame tells a different story, which is precisely the point, because if traffic is down 10% month-over-month but up 40% year-over-year, you lead with the year-over-year number, you emphasize the long-term trajectory, you mention the seasonal factors that caused the monthly dip, and if rankings dropped since last month but remain above where they were before you started the engagement, you emphasize the before-and-after, you focus on the journey, you remind everyone how far we've come.

Industry benchmarks are particularly malleable, wonderfully flexible instruments for making any data look flattering: "Your click-through rate is 15% above industry average," which sounds impressive until you ask which industry, which average, from what source, whose data, from what time period, using what methodology, questions that are rarely answered because the point isn't accuracy, the point is a favorable comparison, and any data can be made to look good with the right comparison frame, which is why finding that frame is the core skill of the report writer, the alchemy that transforms lead into gold, or at least into something shiny enough to justify another month's invoice.

The Future Promise

When the present doesn't look good, when the metrics are stubbornly refusing to cooperate, when even the most creative comparison framing can't salvage the story, reports pivot to the future, that magical place where everything works out and current difficulties are revealed to have been necessary investments: "While traffic was flat this month, the technical foundation we're building will enable significant growth in Q3," or "Rankings haven't moved yet, but based on our competitive analysis, we expect to see improvement as our content matures," or "The links we acquired this month typically take 3-6 months to impact rankings."

These statements might be true, SEO does take time, results do lag effort, the work you do today often doesn't show up in the data for months, but they're also unfalsifiable in the moment, which is their primary utility, because by the time Q3 arrives there will be a new explanation for whatever happens, a new story about why the foundation is still being built, why the content is still maturing, why the links are still percolating through Google's systems, and the future promise is the ultimate escape hatch, the get-out-of-jail-free card that every struggling engagement keeps in its back pocket: disappointing present? Promising future. Always. SEO predictions are horoscopes written in spreadsheet form.

What Honest Reporting Looks Like

Not all SEO reporting is fiction, and it would be unfair to suggest otherwise, because some agencies and practitioners do it honestly, and what honest reporting looks like is this: a focus on business metrics rather than vanity metrics, not rankings or domain authority but traffic that converts, revenue influenced by organic search, actual business outcomes that someone in finance would recognize as meaningful; an acknowledgment of uncertainty, a willingness to say "traffic increased this month and we made changes that may have contributed, but we can't isolate the exact cause with confidence"; a commitment to showing the full picture, including metrics that don't look good, an honest accounting of what went down and not just what went up; a clear separation of activity from results, something like "here's what we did, here's what happened, here's what we think about the connection, and here's what we don't know"; and time-bound accountability, a practice of saying "we predicted X would happen by Y date, and it did or didn't, and here's our updated thinking in light of what we learned."

This kind of reporting is rare because it requires confidence and integrity, because it means admitting what you don't know, which is a lot, because it means sometimes delivering bad news, which is uncomfortable, because it means being honest about the limits of SEO as a practice, limits that most practitioners prefer to obscure rather than acknowledge.

Why Clients Accept Fiction

If SEO reports are often fiction, why do clients accept them? Because they want to believe, because they're paying for results, because they need to justify the expense internally to their boss or their board or their own sense that they made a good decision, and a report full of green arrows and positive-sounding numbers provides that justification, it gives everyone something to point at, it creates the appearance of accountability even when the substance is thin.

Because they can't evaluate the claims, because most clients aren't SEO experts, because they can't tell meaningful metrics from vanity metrics, can't spot cherry-picked comparisons, can't recognize the subtle sleight of hand that transforms activity into apparent results, and so they trust the agency to tell them the truth, which is touching, really, and also somewhat naive.

Because questioning the report means questioning the relationship, and if you push back too hard on reporting, you're essentially saying you don't trust your agency, which is uncomfortable, which creates tension, which might lead to difficult conversations, and it's so much easier to nod and move on, to accept the fiction, to schedule the next meeting and do the whole thing again.

The relationship between agency and client often becomes a mutual agreement to maintain pleasant fictions, a kind of folie a deux where the agency pretends everything is going great and the client pretends to be satisfied and everyone gets what they need in the short term, even though no one is actually being served by this arrangement, even though the truth would ultimately be more useful than the comfortable lie.

The Alternative

The solution isn't abandoning SEO reporting, because reporting has value, because understanding what's happening and why matters, but the solution is demanding better, asking harder questions, refusing to accept comfortable fictions in place of uncomfortable truths.

If you're a client, ask what the connection is between activity and outcomes, ask why you're measuring these specific metrics rather than other metrics, ask what failure would look like in this report, ask how you would know if things were going badly, because if the answer is "you wouldn't know, because this report only shows the good stuff," then you have learned something important about the report.

If you're an agency, be more honest, because your best clients will appreciate it, because yes, some clients want comforting fiction, want to be told that everything is fine, want reports that make them look good to their bosses regardless of reality, but the clients worth keeping, the clients who build long-term relationships, the clients who actually succeed, those clients want the truth, even when it's complicated, even when it's uncomfortable, even when it doesn't fit neatly into a chart that goes up and to the right.

If you're an in-house SEO, report with integrity even when the numbers aren't great, because your credibility is more valuable than looking good in any single month, because the reputation you build for telling the truth will serve you far better in the long run than the short-term comfort of a flattering fiction.

The best SEO report is one that accurately describes reality, admits what's unknown, and holds itself accountable to predictions. Almost no one produces these.

Don't let pretty PDFs substitute for actual understanding, don't let green arrows hypnotize you into thinking everything is fine, don't let the comforting hum of data visualization lull you into complacency, because the chart going up doesn't mean you're succeeding, and the narrative being compelling doesn't make it true, and the fiction being well-written doesn't make it any less fictional.