Most visibility reports are unread, because they are long, full of metrics nobody can act on, and written to demonstrate effort rather than to inform a decision. A useful report is one page and answers four questions.
The four questions
- What did we do? The work completed this month.
- What happened? The five numbers, with last month and last year alongside.
- What does it mean? A short, honest interpretation.
- What next? The two or three things happening next month.
Anything not serving one of those four questions is padding.
The structure
Header. Month, and which offices are covered.
Work completed. Specific and dated. Not improved local SEO, but corrected the address on two aggregators, claimed Bing Places for the second office, added services to both profiles. The dates are what make later attribution possible.
The numbers. A small table, per office, with three columns: this month, last month, same month last year. Include:
- New patient enquiries, and the source split.
- Profile actions: calls, direction requests, website clicks.
- Directory coverage: how many priority listings correct out of the total.
- AI presence rate across your prompt set.
- Reviews: total and how many in the last ninety days.
Interpretation. Three or four sentences, in plain language, saying what you believe changed and what you are unsure about.
Next. Two or three specific actions with owners.
Honesty rules
These matter more than the format, particularly if the report goes to an owner paying for the work:
- Show the baseline. Every claim of improvement needs a stated starting point and date.
- Never claim a gain you cannot evidence. If a metric moved and you do not know why, say so.
- Report flat and declining numbers with the same prominence as gains. A report that only ever shows improvement is marketing, not measurement.
- Distinguish correlation from causation. Say enquiries rose after we corrected the payer listings, not because.
- Do not cherry-pick the window to make a trend look better.
- Do not present a single favourable AI answer as evidence. Use presence rate across runs, and state the number of runs.
- Include no patient information. Aggregate counts only, never names, and never reviewer identities in a written report.
What to leave out
- Screenshots of dashboards, which look like substance and convey nothing.
- Rank position as a headline number.
- Total website traffic.
- Impressions on their own.
- Citation counts and keyword counts.
- Anything nobody will act on.
Why one page
The audience is a practice owner who is also seeing patients. A one-page report gets read monthly; a twenty-page deck gets skimmed once. Length also tends to be inversely related to clarity: reports get long when there is nothing definite to say.
If a month produced little, say that in two sentences. It is more useful and more credible than fifteen pages of charts.
Keep the history
Keep every monthly report and the underlying numbers in one place. Over a year this becomes the most valuable asset in your measurement: a dated record of what was done and what followed, which is the only basis for judging whether any of it worked.
The final lesson in this chapter covers exactly that judgement.