Chapter 29 — Exercises

Work these in order; they climb from recall to interpretation, diagnosis, and judgment. Several assume a live browser and, ideally, a site you can measure (your own, your employer's, or a client's) plus the three free tools this chapter relies on: Google Search Console (search.google.com/search-console), Google Analytics 4 (analytics.google.com), and Looker Studio (lookerstudio.google.com). Nothing here costs anything — reporting well is a discipline, not a subscription. Items marked with a dagger (†) have full worked solutions in Appendix — Answers to Selected Exercises; odd-numbered items are worked there too. Attempt every item before you look.

A reminder in the spirit of the chapter: the goal is never a prettier chart. It is a report a non-specialist can understand, believe, and fund — told straight, including the parts that didn't work. Grade yourself on honesty and legibility, not on how impressive the numbers look.

A. Recall and vocabulary

Exercise 29.1 — Define KPI. Then give the one-sentence test that separates a real KPI from "just a number a tool produced."

Exercise 29.2 † — Define baseline. Explain why a report that lacks one cannot honestly claim "improvement," even when the numbers really did rise.

Exercise 29.3 — Define vanity metric and give the "what decision would this number change?" test. Name the three vanity metrics the chapter singles out.

Exercise 29.4 — Define organic conversion. Distinguish it from a plain "conversion" (Chapter 28) and from an "organic session," and explain why it is the hinge metric of an SEO value report.

Exercise 29.5 — Define reporting cadence. Name the four intervals, and for each, name the audience and the altitude (what the report is about at that level).

Exercise 29.6 — Define share of voice in one sentence, and say why it is a relative metric rather than an absolute one.

B. Applied reasoning

Exercise 29.7 † — Using two specific KPIs from the chapter, explain the difference between a leading indicator and a lagging indicator, and why confusing them causes owners to cancel programs in month three.

Exercise 29.8 — Explain why non-branded organic sessions are a better measure of what SEO is adding than total organic sessions. What population does each represent?

Exercise 29.9 — Give three concrete reasons Search Console "organic clicks" and GA4 "organic sessions" will almost never match. Which tool should you use for which metric, and why is forcing them to agree a mistake?

Exercise 29.10 † — Third-party Domain Authority (DA). In two parts: (a) explain why it does not belong on a value report handed to an owner, and (b) name the one narrow, legitimate use it does have (and which chapter owns it).

Exercise 29.11 — Explain why "we rank for 10,000 keywords" is a vanity metric rather than evidence of success. What three numbers would you report instead?

Exercise 29.12 — Explain the difference between organic-attributed and organic-caused revenue, and give one concrete customer journey in which attributing all the revenue to organic would be an overclaim.

Exercise 29.13 — Why does the chapter insist on reporting on the same date, in the same format, every month? Connect predictability to trust and to a program surviving a wobbly quarter.

Exercise 29.14 — Explain the counter-intuitive claim that a monthly report containing no misses at all is a warning sign rather than a triumph. Give both reasons.

C. Read the report

Exercise 29.15 † — Interpret this dashboard an agency sent a small-business owner, then say exactly how you would rebuild it.

FIGURE E.29a — "Six months of 'great progress'"                 [constructed teaching example]
  REPORT            "Monthly SEO Report — everything is up!"
  CHARTS            Keywords ranked:  6,200 → 11,800   (▲ 90%)
                    Domain Authority: 19 → 27          (▲ 8 pts)
                    Impressions:      180k → 520k      (▲ 189%)
  CAPTION           "Fantastic momentum — SEO is clearly working."
  NOT SHOWN         clicks · click-through rate · organic conversions · leads · revenue ·
                    non-branded split · a baseline · which terms or pages actually matter

What is wrong with this report even if every number is true? Name the vanity metrics, and list the five KPIs (plus the one narrative) you would put in its place.

Exercise 29.16 — Interpret this discrepancy a client flagged in a panic, and write the two-sentence reply.

FIGURE E.29b — "The tools disagree"                             [constructed teaching example]
  METRIC (last month)          SEARCH CONSOLE     GA4
  Organic, from Google         12,400 clicks      9,900 organic sessions
  "Why don't these match?? Is one of them broken?"

Is either tool broken? Explain the gap mechanically, and state which number you would put on the report for "how many people arrived from search" and which for "how many became leads."

Exercise 29.17 † — Interpret this month's one-pager excerpt and draft the single plain-language sentence you would say to the owner.

FIGURE E.29c — "A mixed month"                                  [constructed teaching example]
  Non-branded clicks         ▲  +28% vs baseline
  Priority terms on page 1   ▲  5 of 20 (was 3)
  Organic leads              ▬  118 (was 120 last month)
  New comparison-guide posts ✗  indexed, ~40 clicks total (intent looks off)
  One down week              ⚠  aligned with a confirmed Google core update; recovered

Is this a good month, a bad month, or a normal in-progress month? What do you say to the owner, and what is the adjustment you propose?

Exercise 29.18 — In a monthly report a priority query shows 41,000 impressions but a 0.4% click-through rate and an average position of 6.2. Diagnose the most likely problem and prescribe the fix (connect to Chapters 9 and 27). Is this a ranking problem?

Exercise 29.19 — Rewrite this sentence from a report so a home-services owner who has never heard the jargon would understand it: "Non-branded impressions grew 44% MoM and average position on the tracked corpus improved from 15.1 to 11.9, though CTR remained flat pending title-tag remediation."

D. Diagnose and respond

Exercise 29.20 † — It is month three. Your report shows priority rankings clearly up but revenue essentially flat, and the owner emails: "I'm thinking of canceling — I'm not seeing the money." You believe the work is on track. Draft your reply: which metrics do you lead with, how do you frame the lag, and what do you refuse to do to save the account?

Exercise 29.21 — A report shows organic conversions dropped 15% month over month. Before you tell the owner "SEO is failing," list at least four non-catastrophe explanations you would check first (think measurement, seasonality, tracking, and channel shifts).

Exercise 29.22 — Organic traffic dipped mid-month and you traced it to a confirmed Google core update, after which it partly recovered. Write the two or three sentences that report this honestly without it reading as an excuse. What is the difference between an explanation and an excuse here?

Exercise 29.23 — A CFO says, "Prove SEO made us money." State precisely what you can claim with confidence, what you must hedge, and the exact phrase you use instead of "SEO caused \$X." (Do not build the full ROI model — that is Chapter 39; stay at the reporting-honesty level.)

E. On your own site (use a free tool)

Exercise 29.24 † — Build your baseline. In GA4, record last complete month's organic sessions and each defined conversion; in Search Console, record last three months' clicks, impressions, average position, and indexed-vs-not-indexed pages. Put the seven-or-so numbers in a dated file and freeze it. Write one sentence on why you must not edit it later.

Exercise 29.25 — Build a four-scorecard Looker Studio dashboard (non-branded clicks, priority-term average position, organic sessions, organic conversions), each with month-over-month comparison on. Share it as a live link. Note one thing the auto-dashboard cannot do that you still must.

Exercise 29.26 — In Search Console, filter your queries to compute a rough branded vs non-branded split for last month. Report the non-branded share and whether it is trending up. State the limitation of your brand-term filter honestly.

Exercise 29.27 — Choose 15–20 priority terms to track for your site (the analog of keyword research for reporting). Justify the list: why these and not the thousands of others you rank for? What makes a term "priority"?

F. Myths, ethics, and judgment

Exercise 29.28 — Spot the myth. A vendor pitch: "Our dashboard tracks your Domain Authority daily, grows your ranked-keyword count into the tens of thousands, and guarantees first-page results in 90 days." Identify the three separate false or misleading claims and rewrite each as an honest practitioner would state it.

Exercise 29.29 † — Ethics/judgment. It was a genuinely weak month. Your manager says, "Just lead with the Domain Authority chart and the keyword count, and leave out the flat leads and the blog posts that flopped — the client doesn't understand this stuff anyway." Write your response: what you will and won't do, and the business reason (not just the moral one) that honesty is the correct call.

Exercise 29.30 — Ethics/judgment. You are pressured to tell the board that "SEO generated \$220,000 in revenue" when your data shows \$220,000 in organic-attributed revenue under a last-click model. Explain why you hold the line, what you say instead, and how overclaiming here costs you the next budget cycle.

Exercise 29.31 — Optimize the report. Take FIGURE E.29a (Exercise 29.15) and rewrite it into a proper one-page KPI report: pick the metrics, add the missing baseline and non-branded split, and write the headline and the one owner-facing sentence. (You may invent illustrative numbers — label them as such.)

G. The Strategy File (Rivertown Home Services)

Exercise 29.32 — Reproduce, from memory then by checking, the structure of Rivertown's one-page monthly report (FIGURE 29.3): name the headline, the five KPIs shown three ways, the four short prose blocks, the single owner-facing sentence, and the honest "fine print." Why is the report addressed in leads-and-dollars rather than impressions-and-positions?

Exercise 29.33 — Do Rivertown's Chapter 29 task on your own (or a client's) site: produce a one-page monthly report for a non-technical owner. Lead with the outcome they feel, show the five KPIs against your frozen baseline, include one honest "what didn't work," and end with a plain-language sentence and honest limits. Keep it to a single page.

Where these go next. Keep your answers to 29.24, 29.26, 29.27, 29.32, and 29.33 — they are the measurement and reporting layer of your running Strategy File (Appendix C's worksheet). The one-page report becomes the reporting instrument you will fold into the full business case in Chapter 39 and the complete, assembled strategy in Chapter 40.