How do we know this SEO is working? That’s a question we’ve heard, and you’ve probably asked, many times over the years. Are we looking at traffic? Keywords rankings? Aren’t they vanity metrics? Conversions from organic? It’s even worse now with AI overviews. But knowing how to measure SEO success doesn’t have to be as
How do we know this SEO is working?
That’s a question we’ve heard, and you’ve probably asked, many times over the years.
Are we looking at traffic? Keywords rankings? Aren’t they vanity metrics? Conversions from organic?
It’s even worse now with AI overviews.
But knowing how to measure SEO success doesn’t have to be as complicated as it sounds.
And it shouldn’t have to be, because SEO can have a real, tangible impact on your commercial success, not just bring loads of traffic to some pages on your website.
These are the things we think you should look at to track the performance of SEO for businesses.
Imagine paying thousands for an outdoor advertising campaign, and never actually checking that the ad is in place.
It’s a bit like investing in SEO and never checking that you’re showing up higher in SERPs. Or that you’re getting customers clicking through to you.
SEO is a long-term tactic. And it can take time before you start to see the “ultimate” goal of conversions and customers finding you in search engines.
But, you can track SEO performance in stages, making sure what you’re doing is working, and make changes to things that aren’t to speed up your results.
There are lots of things you can do and check to see whether SEO is working for your business.
Google and Bing are still the main search engines to focus on. But more people are using LLMs like ChatGPT and Perplexity to find faster answers to questions. Traffic from LLMs can be highly valuable as many people are using them to ask for recommendations for companies.
Organic traffic is the number of visitors coming to your website from SERPs who haven’t clicked on a paid ad:
Organic positions have become even more important lately.
It used to be you’d have a couple of ads at the top, a map search for local seo, and then 10 organic listings.
Nowadays, you’ve got ads, AI overviews (which give people answers to questions without clicking), “People Also Asked”, “people also search for” and sometimes even more ads moving up the first page of SERPs.
Organic traffic tells you how many people are coming to your business from search engines, and shows that your pages are ranking high enough in SERPs that people are finding them (realistically, you need to be on Page 1 – and really in the top 5 – to see the benefits from this).
The easiest (free) way to track organic traffic is to use Google Analytics (GA4) or Google Search Console.
You can use SEO tracking tools, but these tend to just give an estimate based on your keyword rankings.
Information from GA4 and GSC tend to be a lot more accurate.
To find organic traffic in GA4, just go to report:
Reports > Acquisition > Traffic Acquisition
It’s best to review these at regular intervals.
We suggest looking every month for a short view.
Looking every three months for a medium term view of your performance.
And every 12 months for the long view of your campaign.
We’d also recommend comparing your results to the previous period (for example, 2025 Q1 vs 2024 Q1) to see if you’re improving year on year.
What you’re looking for is a trend line creeping up to the right over a sustained period.
There can be periods when SERPs are a bit chaotic (like during an algorithm change), and your graph will look a bit like a rollercoaster, but you want to just make sure everything’s going in the right direction over a long time.
If there are any sudden increases or decreases in traffic, these could be anomalies that are worth investigating (it could be an algorithm change).
Keyword rankings show where you appear in SERPs for keywords and search terms related to your business.
For example: estate agent in St Helens.
Now, some people will say keyword rankings are a “vanity” metric.
But we disagree.
Sure, ranking high isn’t money in the bank. It’s not even guaranteed traffic anymore with AI overviews scraping content and giving it to users directly in the SERP.
But the higher you rank in SERPs, the more visible you are to potential customers, the more chance you have of them coming to you.
What we would say, focus on keywords that attract your ideal customers by answering their questions and using commercially relevant keywords on landing pages (don’t just look for random keywords
that have a lot of search volume)
There are lots of SEO tools you can use to measure your keyword rankings.
Wincher, AHrefs and SEMrush are all ones we’ve used before, and all are good at keyword tracking and different parts of SEO.
If you’re just looking at tracking keywords, we’d likely recommend Wincher as it’s affordable, provides all the information you need, and is updated every day so you always have the latest ranking position (unike AHrefs, which can sometimes take weeks to update)
A free way of tracking keywords is to use Google Search Console.
This can show you the search terms you’re getting impressions for (showing up in SERPs) and which are getting the most clicks.
To see this info in Search Console, just go to the left hand column and click Performance > Search Results > Queries.
This will show you the keywords and queries you’re being found for. Here’s an example of our GSC account so you can see what it looks like:
Like reviewing your organic traffic in GA4, we’d recommend looking at your keyword positions every month, three months, six months and 12 months.
SERPs can sometimes be volatile so if you make decisions based on a daily change you could actually risk your long term success.
Your CTR is the percentage of people who click through to your website after seeing you in SERPs.
If you look at our example GSC account above, we have 1,323 impressions for Paramount Digital in the time frame we’re looking at, and 637 clicks, which gives us a CTR of 48%.
Why does CTR matter?
Because ranking highly in search is great, but if you’re not getting clicks, then what’s the point?
A low click through rate could mean you need to optimise your meta data, or that you’re not matching search intent.
You can find your click through rate in Google Search Console.
Just go to Performance > Search results.
You’ll be shown the average click through rate across your entire site and can focus on CTR by query.
Conversions are the end game for your digital marketing and SEO.
This is the number of people who have taken the action you wanted them to, after clicking through to your page.
This could be downloading an eBook, signing up to a webinar or newsletter, or making a purchase directly if you’re an eCommerce business.
You can monitor conversions by setting up goals (events) in GA4 and tracking results.
Your website’s bounce rate is the percentage of people who visit your site but leave without doing anything or visiting any other page.
Google measures this as a rate of engagement, with an engaged user being someone who:
Bounce rate is a good indicator of whether your content matches user intent, or whether it’s engaging enough.
If users land on a page and leave immediately, it’s a sign that what you’re showing them isn’t what they expected to find by clicking through.
By default, Google doesn’t include engagement rates or bounce rates in its basic reports. But you can add them to your report by using the Customise report feature.
Core Web Vitals tells you how fast your website loads and reacts for users when they click through to you.
We’ve written another guide on website speed and core vitals that can give more information.
Backlinks are links from other websites pointing to yours.
The more backlinks you have from trusted, authority websites like news websites, industry or trade magazines and relevant blogs, the more likely you are to rank highly in SERPs.
You can review your backlinks (including what website is linking to you, which page they’re linking to, and what anchor text is used) using SEO tools like AHrefs and SEMrush.
Use Google Analytics to track your website traffic, user behaviour and conversions/goals.
See how your website is performing in Google search, understand which keywords are driving impressions and traffic, uncover indexing issues and check core web vitals with Google Search Console.
See how quickly your website loads and find areas for improvement with PageSpeed Insights.
Check your keyword rankings on a daily basis
Check your backlink profile, keyword rankings and compare against competitors
Track your keyword rankings
Tracking SEO performance is one thing. But without context, there’s no way of knowing just how successful your campaign has been.
Imagine you walk into a boardroom and tell the CEO, “conversions are up”.
They’re probably going to say, “compared to when”.
So before you start tracking SEO performance, take the time to understand how you’re currently performing, and set some benchmarks to compare to.
If you’ve never done SEO before and you have a brand new website, this is easy to do. Just start from the day the website went live.
If you’ve just changed your SEO agency, use the last report from your old agency as the benchmark to compare your new partner against.
Start by thinking what’s the goal of your SEO campaign? We’d always say it should be to increase conversions from organic search.
But maybe you want to rank for more keywords to raise brand awareness. Maybe you just want more traffic.
Whatever that goal, review your existing performance and base any future gains (or falls) against it.
Our search engine optimisation agency is full of experts who can help you optimise your website to higher in SERPs so you can be found by more customers looking for your products.
If you think you need help, get in touch and let’s start with a free SEO audit to see where the potential opportunities are for your website, and where the biggest fixes need to be made.
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