Someone at a barbecue finds out I do SEO. Their eyes light up. “Can you get me to number one on Google?”
That’s the ranking obsession. It’s the digital version of big arms that can’t carry anything useful.
Rankings matter. But judging SEO by rankings alone is like judging a restaurant by its signage. It gets people through the door. It tells you nothing about whether they come back, or whether you made any money feeding them.
The numbers that pay your bills
When I look at whether SEO is working for a business, these are the numbers I care about:
- Organic traffic to the pages that make money. Not all traffic. A blog post about National Donut Day can pull thousands of visits and never sell a thing. That’s entertainment you’re paying for.
- Enquiries and sales from search. Are people from Google actually doing the thing you want — calling, filling in the form, buying? Traffic that doesn’t convert is a popularity contest.
- What each customer costs you. If SEO costs $5,000 a month and brings in $2,000 of new business, that’s not a strategy. It’s an expensive hobby.
- Revenue from search. The one your accountant cares about, whatever they say about your bounce rate.
- Your share of the search results against the competitors you actually lose work to. Are you gaining ground, or slowly turning into the business everyone remembers and nobody calls?
Your analytics is probably lying to you
Not on purpose. Most businesses just credit the last click, and the last click is rarely the whole story.
A typical path looks like this. Someone searches a general question and reads your page. They leave and think about it for a week. They see your name again, search it, and come back by typing your address. Then they convert after an email.
Your analytics says: direct visit, nothing to do with SEO. Search started the whole thing.
Good measurement looks at the full path. Search often opens the relationship, keeps you in the running during the middle bit, and closes the deal, sometimes weeks apart.
Separating SEO from the noise
The ads person, the social media person and probably the sales team are all claiming the same sale. To see what SEO is actually contributing:
- Compare year on year, so seasonality doesn’t fool you.
- Break results down by landing page and query type, not one big number.
- Test where you can. Push SEO harder on one product or service while everything else stays the same, and watch what happens.
Without that, you’re driving with a blindfold on and peeking every now and then to check you’re still on the road.
You don’t need more data. You need answers.
Most businesses are drowning in dashboards. The useful part is the handful of answers in there:
- Which pages are earning their keep, and which are vanity projects
- What customers keep asking that you haven’t answered anywhere
- Where the site itself is losing people (the mobile checkout that needs toothpick fingers)
- What’s changing in how people search before your competitors notice
And now there’s a second scoreboard
In 2026 a lot of people ask ChatGPT or Google’s AI Overviews before they ever look at a list of links. Those answers don’t show a position number. They either mention you or they don’t.
So add one more check: ask the AI tools the questions your customers ask, and see whose name comes up. If it isn’t yours, your rankings report won’t tell you.
Play the long game
The most common measurement mistake is expecting SEO to pay off in a month and giving up when it doesn’t. That’s planting an apple tree and getting cranky three weeks later that there’s no pie.
Early wins come from fixing what’s broken. Mid-term results come as your content earns trust. The big results compound over years.
Your business doesn’t run on rankings, or traffic, or even leads. It runs on revenue. That’s the number to measure SEO against.