Best SEO Reporting Metrics for Business Owners

Your SEO report came in. It looks good. Your rankings have improved and traffic is up. Do you still wonder is organic marketing paid for itself?

The agency probably has impressive list of tasked completed. Do you understand how the work done correlates to revenue?

We look at revenue. That’s the number we check. If a metric doesn’t help hit revenue goals, it’s probably not that important. We use that as the filter for everything in this piece.

Authority SEO does SEO for a living. You already know that. Doesn’t change what we’d tell you if you hired somebody else. Informed buyers make better clients.

What SEO metrics should I track if I care about revenue?

We want to create a set of metrics that connect to revenue. We need to ask ourselves a few questions. Does this KPI impact revenue? If it does how. Every business is going to have their own set of important KPIs. What matters is make sure the metric connects to revenue.

Conversion rate on the landing pages that get organic traffic. Cost of each organic lead next to what you pay in ads. And SEO ROI, with the whole cost of SEO in the denominator. Retainer. Content. Tools. Your people’s time. Not just the invoice from the agency.

Next, we start track how ChatGPT and AI Overviews talks about you. The team audits if AI cites you or recommends you. The key is delivering data and trust so AI recommends your brand. Attribution is an issue for this metric. This is why our team measures manual AI prompts.

One case stuck with our team. Paid agency was generating high-quality leads. Contacts were converting at a good clip. The company mishandled the leads. Over-filtering. Leads slipped through cracks. Sales never got them. Client fired the agency thinking SEO had no ROI.

Want to see if AI cites your brand? Checkout our AI Content Citation Tracking tool.

What’s the difference between an SEO KPI and an SEO metric?

You can count a lot of things in SEO. Sessions. Impressions. Backlinks. Where a keyword sits. Those are metrics.

A KPI is the one our team actually holds to. There’s a target, and money is on the line.

Page speed. Rankings on pages that sell. Those tell us where to work. They don’t go at the top of a report to an owner though. An owner can’t do much with average position moved from 14 to 11. They can do something with more organic leads and how many sales closed.