Monthly client review template

A monthly review has one job: show that the retainer produced change, and that you know which change. This structure does that in twenty minutes.

What you'll learn

• The five sections, in order, and what belongs in each
• Which numbers to lead with
• How to run a review after a bad month

Before the meeting

Pull three things and nothing else:

1. The monthly report from Reports, with your commentary written.
2. The Changes ledger for the month, grouped by tier.
3. Two verbatim sentences from Proof, with dates and surfaces.

Section 1: Where we stand (3 minutes)

Share of voice first, then citation rate, then the surface spread. Name the window and name any excluded surface out loud rather than leaving a gap in a chart.

One slide. If the client wants to interrogate a number, offer them access rather than more slides.

Section 2: What moved, and which kind (4 minutes)

Every movement is one of two kinds and saying which is what separates you from a reporting tool:

• We changed. Citations rose or fell.
• The space changed. More or fewer businesses being named, so share moved without citations moving.

If the whole benchmark moved, say so. Industry Pulse is the sanity check, with the caveat that it is a platform-wide benchmark rather than their industry.

Section 3: What we shipped (6 minutes)

The ledger, by tier. Read the not-measurable group out loud:

A review where everything worked is a review that will not be believed the first time something does not. Showing the unmeasurable group is what makes the confirmed group land.

Section 4: The competitive picture (3 minutes)

The rival that gained most, the rival that lost most, any new entrant in the landscape, and one sentence an engine wrote about the gainer. That sentence is the most memorable item in the meeting.

Section 5: Next month (4 minutes)

Three items from This week, in its order, with the caveat stated: the ordering is the reliable part, the projected sizes are estimates with no measured error band.

Then one ask. Most AEO work stalls on a developer, not on a decision, so make the ask specific.

Running a bad month

1. Open with it. Two sentences.
2. Separate cause from execution. If the benchmark moved, show it. If the client's own site regressed, the ledger will say Drifted and that is a fact rather than an argument.
3. Convert it into the ask. A bad month with a named cause and a specific next action reads as control. A bad month with a caveat reads as evasion.

What not to bring

• An industry average as a target.
• A projected lift as a forecast.
• A confidence score averaged into a headline number.
• Any figure whose window you cannot state.

Try this in Outercite

Before your next review, count the changes at Confirmed moved for the month. If the answer is zero, the review should be about fixing the measurement loop, not about the rate.

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