SEO KPIs: What to Measure to Know if SEO is Working

When a brand tells us, "SEO isn’t working," there are typically two scenarios. The first is that isolated metrics (such as sessions, bounce rate, or average position) are being measured without any clear context. The second is that business outcomes—leads, calls, forms, purchases, or any other commercial action—are not being measured or attributed correctly. This approach often leads to the wrong conclusion that "SEO doesn’t work" because the metrics being tracked don’t address the key question: Is this driving sales?

To avoid these mistakes, it’s crucial that your SEO KPIs align with your business goals. Below, we’ll go over the essential KPIs you should track in your SEO reports, how to interpret them correctly, and how to link them to sales or leads so SEO stops being a "feeling" and becomes a measurable, controllable channel.

What to Measure to Know if SEO is Really Working

Organic Visibility (Search Console)

Visibility is the foundation of any SEO strategy. Without it, there is nothing to convert, no matter how many optimizations you make on your site. It’s essential to ensure your page is being seen by the right audience. To measure organic visibility, you can use tools like Search Console.

In this tool, you should track:

• Impressions: How often your page appears in search results.
• Clicks: How many times users click on your link.
• CTR (Click-Through Rate): The click-through rate, which indicates how effective your titles and descriptions are at attracting users.
• Average Position: Although useful, this data should be interpreted with care, especially when segmented by URL cluster.

If you notice that you have many impressions but a low CTR, it suggests your title or description might not be enticing enough to attract clicks. Additionally, if any URL experiences drops in its position, it's essential to review issues such as content cannibalization, outdated content, or changes in the SERP.

Qualified Organic Traffic (GA4)

Traffic isn’t just a number. It’s not enough to increase sessions if you’re not attracting the right type of user. The traffic that truly matters is qualified traffic—the kind that has the potential to convert into customers, driving engagement and valuable actions on your site.

With Google Analytics 4 (GA4), you can segment this traffic to better understand its quality. Some important metrics to monitor include:

• Organic Sessions/Users: It’s helpful to segment traffic by brand (brand vs non-brand) and by business areas.
• Engagement: This metric shows how users are interacting with your page, such as time on site, events (scrolling, clicks, etc.), and session duration.
• Relevant Landing Pages: Identify which pages are attracting traffic aligned with your core services or business categories.

While growth in sessions can seem like a positive outcome, if engagement is dropping, this suggests that the "growing" traffic may not be the right kind, or it may not be interacting as expected.

Organic Conversions (The KPI That Matters)

This is where the SEO that’s simply "doing okay" is separated from the SEO that actually sells. Measuring organic conversions is key, as they are the tangible result of your SEO efforts. Depending on your business, these conversions might be:

• Form submissions
• Clicks on phone numbers or WhatsApp
• Reservations or demo requests
• Subscriptions

The key KPIs you should track include:

• Total Organic Conversions: The total number of conversions generated through organic traffic.
• Organic Conversion Rate: Calculated as organic conversions divided by organic sessions.
• Conversion by Landing Page: This helps you determine which pages are driving conversions and which are only attracting traffic without converting.

“Good” Leads (Quality, Not Quantity)

One of the most overlooked metrics is lead quality. While it’s common to see an increase in the number of leads generated, not all leads are equal in value. Many leads are of poor quality, which can create a false sense of success.

The best way to measure this is by tagging leads in your CRM (or in a spreadsheet) according to their quality: good, medium, or bad. It’s also important to cross-reference this data with the landing page and the specific queries generating these leads. In some cases, a small number of high-quality leads is much more valuable than a large volume of poorly qualified contacts.

Organic Revenue (If You Have E-commerce or Measurable Sales)

For e-commerce sites or any business that sells products or services online, this KPI is crucial. If you're selling online, you should measure:

• Organic Revenue: The amount of money generated through organic traffic.
• Transactions: The number of transactions completed by users coming from organic search.
• Average Order Value (AOV): The average value of each transaction.
• Organic Conversion by Category: This helps you see which product or service categories are converting the best.

If your business is B2B, it’s ideal to measure the sales pipeline or sales in your CRM, even though attribution will never be perfect.

Technical SEO Health (The Things You Don’t See... Until They Stop You)

Finally, we can’t forget about technical SEO health. You can have the best content in the world, but if Google can’t index your site correctly or if the site is slow, your SEO efforts will be hampered. Key areas to monitor include:

• Indexing Status: Ensure that relevant URLs are properly indexed.
• Core Web Vitals: Monitor these metrics, as they are crucial for user experience on your site.
• 4xx/5xx Errors, Redirects, Canonicals: Check for technical issues that could impact the visibility of your site.
• Internal Linking and Depth: Assess how many clicks it takes to reach key pages on your site.

Conclusion: The Right SEO KPI Helps You Decide

A good SEO report is not just a PDF with graphs and metrics. It should be a tool to answer key questions every month, such as:

• What is growing and why?
• What is declining and what should we improve?
• Where is the money? Which pages are converting and which are not?

At La Teva Web, we approach SEO with a clear vision: measure to prioritize and improve results, not just to fill reports. If you’d like, we can review your current KPIs and help you identify what’s missing to connect SEO with your business. Get in touch and let’s review it together!