Many SEO reports are full of numbers that look impressive but say nothing about your business: "domain authority up 3 points", "200 backlinks built", "ranking for 1,400 keywords". Here's what to actually measure.
The KPI hierarchy
Think of SEO metrics in three levels:
- Business results: enquiries, sales, revenue from organic search
- Traffic: clicks and visits from Google to important pages
- Visibility: rankings and impressions for target keywords
Level 1 is what matters. Levels 2 and 3 are leading indicators that explain level 1.
Business KPIs
- Organic leads: form submissions, calls, WhatsApp clicks from organic search
- Organic revenue: for online stores, sales from organic search
- Cost per lead from SEO compared with ads
- Lead quality: are SEO enquiries turning into customers?
These need conversion tracking. See the GA4 setup guide.
Traffic KPIs
- Organic clicks from Search Console, ideally excluding your brand name
- Organic sessions to money pages: service, product and location pages, not just the blog
- Landing page conversion rate for organic visitors
Visibility KPIs
- Rankings for target keywords, a focused list of 10 to 30 commercial searches, tracked weekly
- Impressions in Search Console
- Google Maps visibility for local businesses
- Share of AI answers for important questions, an emerging metric
Health KPIs
- Indexed pages vs pages you want indexed
- Core Web Vitals status
- Crawl errors
Vanity metrics to treat carefully
- Total keywords ranked: includes thousands of irrelevant positions on page 9
- Domain authority / domain rating: third-party scores, not used by Google
- Number of backlinks built: quantity says nothing about quality
- Total traffic: a viral blog post from overseas may not bring a single customer
- Bounce rate: context-dependent and often misleading
These aren't useless, but they shouldn't headline a report.
Branded vs non-branded
Searches for your business name mostly come from people who already know you. Growth in non-branded searches like "accountant Colombo" or "SEO Sri Lanka" shows SEO reaching new customers.
Timelines
SEO metrics move in order:
- Technical health and impressions: first weeks
- Rankings: first months
- Traffic: months 3 to 6
- Leads and revenue: months 4 to 12
Judging SEO by leads in month one is like judging a mango tree by fruit in week one. See how long SEO takes.
What a good monthly report includes
- One-page dashboard with the KPIs above, compared month on month and year on year
- What was done this month
- What changed and why
- What's planned next
We build exactly this. See building a Looker Studio SEO dashboard, or let our Google Analytics setup service do it for you.