SEO KPIs: The Few Numbers Worth Tracking

Open any SEO tool and you'll find dozens of numbers. Most help someone fixing a website. Very few tell you whether SEO is paying off.

That's the difference between a metric and a KPI. Pick three or four KPIs, watch them monthly, and let the rest explain why they moved.

What makes a number a KPI

A key performance indicator is a number you'd make a decision on. If it fell for three months running, you would change something.

Everything else is a diagnostic. Diagnostics answer "why?", not "is it working?". Mixing the two is how reports end up with 40 charts and no conclusion.

The four worth tracking

You won't need all four on day one.

Enquiries or sales from search

This is the one your business feels: calls, form messages, bookings or orders that started with a Google search.

In Google Analytics, mark the action that matters, such as a sent form or a purchase, as a key event. Then read the key events column for Organic Search in the Traffic acquisition report. If most people phone you, ask new callers how they found you. A rough tally beats none.

Clicks from Google, without your brand name

Clicks come from Search Console, Google's own record of your site in search. Filter out searches containing your business name. People who type your name already knew you, so those clicks follow your reputation more than your SEO.

They won't match the visits in Analytics either, and here's why clicks and sessions never match.

Keywords on page one

Count how many of your tracked searches sit in the top ten. Hardly anyone opens page two, so this count tells you more than any average. A keyword moving from 12 to 9 counts. A move from 58 to 41 doesn't, yet.

Impressions, while the site is young

Impressions count how often you appeared in Google's results at all. On a new site they rise weeks before clicks do, so they're the first sign the work is landing. Once clicks are steady, demote them to a diagnostic.

The diagnostics behind them

When a KPI moves, these explain why.

• Click-through rate. Impressions up and clicks flat usually means your titles and descriptions aren't winning the click.
• Average position. Fine for one search on one device, misleading across a whole site. Here's why it doesn't match your rank tracker.
• Sessions and engagement rate. Visits, and how many of them did something.
• Page speed and site health. Slow to change, so a sudden drop usually means something broke.
• Backlinks and referring domains. Worth a monthly look, rarely a target.

Numbers that look important but aren't

Some figures fill reports because they're easy to produce, not because they matter.

Total keywords you rank for. Most sit on page five for searches nobody makes. The count can double without one extra visitor.

Authority scores. Domain authority and its cousins come from SEO tools, not Google, and Google doesn't use them. Check yours now and then with our free domain authority checker, but don't chase it.

Bounce rate on its own. In GA4 it's simply the share of visits that weren't engaged. Someone who spots your number in five seconds and rings you is a bounce, unless you track that tap.

Choosing for your kind of business

A local service business

Calls and form messages from search, plus page-one keywords for your service and town. Often that's enough.

An online shop

Revenue from organic search, then non-branded clicks to product and category pages.

An agency or freelancer

Agree the KPIs with each client in writing before the first report, so every report answers the same questions. We cover the layout in how to report SEO success.

Set targets from your own numbers

Industry benchmarks rarely fit a small site. Use your own last three months as the baseline and aim to beat it, or the same month last year if your trade is seasonal.

On a site under six months old, set a direction rather than a number. Rising impressions and a growing page-one count make a good first year.

How often to look

Monthly. Weekly figures bounce around, and Search Console runs two or three days behind. A change that holds for three or four weeks is a trend, a rule that also helps when reading an SEO report someone sends you.

Putting your KPIs on one screen

Duality reads your Search Console and Analytics figures and checks your keywords on Google every week. You choose the three headline numbers at the top of each site's dashboard, and the shared client report shows the same three. It doesn't count enquiries, so keep that tally beside it. See what's in the report.