Sample monthly SEO report
This is the report you'd get from us each month, filled in with real numbers from one of the three sites we run: the card game guides site, September 2026. It was a bad month. Clicks fell by about half, and the report shows where they went.
- Site
- Trading card game guides, use case 3 (domain hidden)
- Period
- September 1 to 30, 2026, compared with August
- Source
- Google Search Console, web search, final data
- Prepared by
- Tyler Phan, founder of Elmrank
Summary
Clicks fell 49%, from 10,938 in August to 5,577 in September. Average position hardly moved (7.6 to 7.4), so most pages kept their rankings and fewer people searched for what they cover. The biggest exception was the meta page, which lost rankings as well (see what slipped, below). A new card set launched at the end of August, and the pages written before launch lost almost all their searches. Deck guides for the new set gained 1,328 clicks, which didn't fill the gap.
Search Console numbers
| Metric | August | September | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Clicks | 10,938 | 5,577 | −49% |
| Impressions | 434,605 | 282,292 | −35% |
| Click-through rate | 2.5% | 2.0% | −0.5 points |
| Average position | 7.6 | 7.4 | Slightly better |
What we did in September
- Published 78 new articles, and wrote 29 more that go live in October.
- Merged seven pre-launch articles whose searches had run out into newer pages, with redirects (September 21 and 24).
- Updated 17 articles on September 30 for a card ban the game's publisher announced on September 24.
- Re-audited older articles in batches: 146 of 246 done by September 18.
- Added internal links to five pages sitting at positions 11 to 20, as a test (September 23).
- Gave 143 articles their own lead image where several had been sharing one.
- Converted every image to WebP and preloaded each article's main image, for speed.
- Applied a critical Next.js security patch (September 25).
Top pages
| Page | Clicks | Position | In August |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ban list explainer | 441 | 6.9 | No impressions |
| Deck guide, new set | 329 | 6.4 | No impressions |
| Deck guide, new set | 226 | 6.0 | No impressions |
| Deck guide, previous set | 217 | 6.6 | 372 clicks |
| Tier list, new set | 216 | 6.8 | No impressions |
What slipped
| Pages | August | September | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pages about the new set written before it came out (previews, spoilers, pre-orders, release date) | 4,331 | 195 | −4,136 |
| Deck guides, tier lists and card lists for the new set | 33 | 1,361 | +1,328 |
| The site's meta page (current competitive decks) | 1,179 | 92 | −1,087 |
| Guides for the previous set | 1,656 | 839 | −817 |
| Five pages no longer on the site | 791 | 0 | −791 |
| Everything else | 3,143 | 3,108 | −35 |
People search for a set before it comes out, then for how to play it. The pages we wrote before launch had 4,331 clicks in August, from the 23 of them that showed up in search that month, and 195 in September, from 24. Late in the month we merged seven of them into newer pages.
The meta page fell from position 8.2 to 13.7 and from 1,179 clicks to 92, so it lost rankings as well as searches. On September 30 we added structured data listing its decks. October will show whether that helped.
Guides for the previous set fell from 1,656 clicks to 839, about what we'd expect once a newer set is out. Five pages that are no longer on the site had 791 clicks in August and none in September.
Five rules explainers showed up 54,675 times in September at positions 6.3 to 7.7 and got 184 clicks, a 0.3% click-through rate. We don't know why yet. Our guess, which we haven't checked, is that Google's AI Overviews answer these questions on the results page.
The rest of the site held at 3,143 clicks in August and 3,108 in September.
Next month
- October 12: the announced ban takes effect. Update the ban list explainer (done October 12) and the 16 other articles that mention it.
- Refresh the two monthly best-decks pages, keeping their URLs.
- After checking the results page, retitle the previous set's top deck guide toward "decklist".
- Two pages about the previous set's most valuable cards compete for the same searches. Merge them or split their topics.
- Work through 70 articles that are overdue for a freshness check.
- Find out why the five rules explainers get so few clicks for how often they show up.
Ten days into October the site had 1,509 clicks, against 1,745 in the first ten days of September. It hasn't recovered yet. Data through Oct 10, 2026.
What the $300 plan would do with this site next month
This site publishes more than our plan's limit of 30 articles a month and isn't on the plan. If it were, this is the work $300 would cover in October, taken from the list above and kept to what our terms put in the plan.
- Up to 30 articles, each approved by a person before it goes live. We'd put them where this report points: deck guides for the new set, the one page group that gained clicks in September, and updates to the 16 articles that mention the ban taking effect on October 12.
- Technical fixes: settle the two pages about the previous set's most valuable cards that compete for the same searches, by merging them with a redirect or splitting their topics, and check in Search Console that the structured data added to the meta page on September 30 is valid.
- Hosting, the domain and updates, such as the Next.js security patch this site needed in September.
- The October report, in this format: what we published, what we fixed, and the Search Console clicks and impressions.
- Not in the plan: links. If the meta page needs links to win back its rankings, that's outside the $300.
Your report
Every report covers what we published, what we fixed, and your Search Console clicks and impressions, as our terms set out. We write it up the way this page does, with your real URLs. What a report should cover, and why, is in our post on monthly SEO reports.
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