A weekly report that shows different things each week cannot be skimmed, and a report that cannot be skimmed does not get read for long. This one shows the same six lines in the same order, forever, and that consistency is most of why it survives.
Key takeaways
The same six themes, in the same order, every week.
Each line: position, clicks, impressions, and the direction against last year.
The page carrying each theme is named, with what share of it lands there.
Correlations are stated as correlations. The report never claims a cause.
One monthly addition: the top twenty unmatched queries.
Unmatched — 18% of impressions. Top queries listed monthly.
Six lines, the same six, in the same order. The first one is the finding this week and it is obvious at a glance precisely because the other five look like they always do. A report that only showed movement would have shown one line, and a reader would have no idea whether the other five were fine or missing.
Naming the page
The page carrying a theme is what somebody can actually change, and the share matters as much as the name. “92% lands on /emergency-plumber” says the theme has one page and the finding is about that page. A theme spread across nine pages at eleven per cent each is a different situation entirely and the report says that too.
Fig 1. How a theme’s movement is attributed to pages. Concentration is the first question, because it determines whether this is a page problem or a site problem.
Database
App integration
Analytics
Front-end & mobile
What it refuses to claim
Correlation, stated as correlation
It says: “/emergency-plumber was edited on the 21st. The position change first appears in the week beginning the 20th.”
It does not say: “the edit on the 21st caused the drop.”
Why: search rankings move for reasons entirely invisible from your side — a competitor’s change, an algorithm update, a new result format. Claiming causation from a timestamp is how businesses spend a fortnight reverting an edit that was fine.
What it will say: “nothing changed on this page in the last 60 days”, which is genuinely informative and rules something out.
That restraint is not pedantry. A confident wrong cause is worse than no cause at all, because somebody acts on it. Presenting a timing correlation as a timing correlation lets a person weigh it against everything else they know, which is what they are for.
The monthly addition
Fig 2. The three reporting cadences. The raw query-level data remains available and deliberately never arrives in an inbox.
Networking
Security & identity
Analytics
The unmatched top twenty is a monthly rather than weekly item because it changes slowly and reading it takes five minutes of genuine attention rather than nine seconds of skimming. Putting it in the weekly report would mean it was skimmed, which would waste the most valuable thing in the system.