One of the first questions to ask at the start of a project is: how do I measure the success of my project? To answer it, one of the first jobs is defining objectives.
It sounds simple but it is not, especially when the client does not really know what they want or what to expect from an SEO strategy. Whether you are a brand or a digital marketing agency, there are several factors to consider when deciding which KPIs to use. The answer depends on questions like:
- Why are you hiring an SEO service with an agency? For example: lost sales after a platform change, or organic traffic that has suddenly dropped by half.
- Do you run an e-commerce or a services site?
- Do you care about the visibility of your brand and already have a team focused on turning visits into purchases once they reach the site?
- Do you have conversions beyond sales?
Listen to your consultant’s recommendations
A common pattern at the start of a collaboration is that the client arrives with a mistaken perception of what SEO can deliver. If the decision has been made to bring in a specialized agency, we recommend letting the consultant guide that conversation. An expert can read which objectives are achievable with specific tasks and what a strategy can realistically deliver.
The clearest example is when a client sets traffic as their primary objective. But if your site is an e-commerce, sales conversions usually deserve to be the main goal. With that framing, the SEO consultant aims the strategy in that direction and prioritizes actions that move sales, without obsessing over inflating organic traffic “just because”.
What are the most common SEO objectives?
The most common goals in an SEO strategy are:
Increase organic traffic
The consultant works actions aimed at reaching a wider audience. Usually that means spotting keyword opportunities the site is not yet covering and creating optimized pages to show up for those searches, lifting the traffic received.
The main tools to measure this are analytics platforms like Google Analytics 4, plus webmaster tools like Google Search Console or its equivalents on other search engines.
In GA4 the most common KPIs are sessions, which start when a user lands on a page and end after 30 minutes of inactivity, views, how many pages the users saw on your site, and active users, the number of users who completed a session of at least 10 seconds, a conversion, or two pageviews. Here are more details on Analytics KPIs.
In Search Console the main objective is organic clicks, which measure how many times users clicked on one of your pages in the organic results (not ads) of Google Search. The downside is that you cannot measure what happens after the user lands on the site. The upside is that once the site is verified, no manual configuration is needed to track interactions correctly, which is not the case with Analytics.
- Pro: it is an easy objective to understand and to plan actions for: with good keyword research you find new queries to target, get them ranked, optimize content to improve rankings, and pull in more users.
- Con: it often becomes a vanity metric, because traffic volume does not necessarily match traffic quality. A small volume of quality traffic that converts is worth more than a flood of users who have no interest in your service.
Increase sales and revenue
The ideal objective for e-commerce, since the whole point is to sell. Even if you do not sell directly through your site but use it as a catalogue, Analytics lets you record the number of users who, for example, click a CTA to request a quote or contact sales.
A consultant working towards this goal prioritizes transactional keywords (e.g. “buy chaise longue sofa bed”) over informational ones (e.g. “what is a chaise longue”). That said, it is worth remembering that other actions that are not strictly “transactional” can indirectly drive sales: more quality traffic builds visibility, which builds authority, which builds rankings, which potentially builds sales.
Another key factor here is that it has to go hand in hand with strong UX (“user experience”) and CRO (“conversion rate optimization”) work. SEO can do a great job bringing traffic to your site, but if the page is not set up to sell, that visit will not turn into a sale.
- Pro: an immediate, easy-to-quantify KPI. Compared to “increase traffic”, it gives SEO a clearer direction when prioritizing types of content or pages.
- Con: not a KPI fully under SEO’s control. Beyond UX and CRO, external factors like product pricing have a relevant impact on the purchase decision.
Conversions
Whether you run an e-commerce or not, your site probably has some form of conversion (and if it does not, why do you have a site?). There are many types: sales-related (e.g. how many products were added to the cart), contacts (e.g. how many quote-request forms were submitted), leads (e.g. newsletter signups) and more.
A site can pursue many different conversion types and each one can map to an action. Did I add a banner linking to a featured product inside a blog post? The conversion could be measuring how many users click that banner, telling me whether the blog is actually driving traffic to my catalogue. Do I prefer that users contact my sales team rather than buy directly online? I add a form and measure how many users fill it out.
- Pro: almost any content action can be measured with a conversion. With a good conversion as the objective, you have a way to measure SEO’s impact on your site.
- Con: it almost always requires solid setup on analytics platforms like Google Analytics. A conversion as an objective is useless if you are not measuring it correctly. On top of that, to know SEO’s impact you need to segment conversions by the channel that brought the user in.
Ranking for key searches
Sometimes a brand wants nothing more than “visibility” from an SEO project. After all, what SEO optimizations chase is ranking at the top of Google, and that can be set as a goal in itself.
If you go with this KPI, picking the right keywords becomes critical. A keyword may feel important to a brand, but the SEO consultant has to say whether it is genuinely relevant to the business, whether it has search volume, whether your target user actually types it, and so on.
- Pro: easy to monitor (as long as you do not go overboard with the number of target keywords).
- Con: hard to reconcile with a more business-oriented view. Optimizing a page just to chase the first position falls short if you also want to grow sales or general traffic, because you have only focused on a few keywords.
Visibility
There is no official Google metric that tells you how much visibility your site has. To fill that gap, specialized platforms invented their own metrics. Among the best known are Sistrix’s Visibility Index, Moz’s Domain Authority and Semrush’s Authority Score.
Each metric uses a different formula. At SEOCOM we use Sistrix’s Visibility Index, which is based on the volume of keywords your site ranks for, the positions it holds and the search volumes those keywords generate.
- Pro: an objective brands like because it lets you compare yourself to competitors with numbers. These metrics can also help you spot site issues: if you see a significant drop in an index, you can start investigating where it came from and fix it.
- Con: these metrics belong to third-party platforms, not Google. So a rise or drop in one of these metrics will not always match a rise or drop in traffic or conversions. These indexes also rely on databases that, while they monitor millions of searches, are still limited and cannot represent 100% of the queries happening worldwide.
”Site health”: Core Web Vitals, 404s, and the like
Sometimes a client looks for an SEO project because they see their site is slow, or they spot many errors in Search Console or other marketing platforms. In that case, the consultant analyzes whether those errors are relevant and what real impact they have on performance.
The most common error comes from internal linking, where links can point to pages that do not exist (404). These can be detected with crawlers like Screaming Frog, and the same tool lets you verify everything is correct after making fixes.
Another very common KPI is site speed. The metric here is usually Core Web Vitals, a set of metrics defined by Google that evaluate things like how long the most important element of the page takes to load (LCP), how fast the page responds to interactions (INP), and visual stability during load (CLS).
Beyond these, there are many other technical SEO elements tied to site “health”. They tag the factors that determine whether the page can load properly and whether Google can index it without issues.
- Pro: every site needs to be technically sound because Google has to be able to index it. The correct implementation of these actions can be verified with tools like Search Console or Screaming Frog. A site with issues can hurt your conversion rate.
- Con: it is very hard to see a direct correlation between completing a task like this and a lift in traffic or rankings. For example, improving load speed will probably reduce the abandonment rate, but it does not necessarily produce a clear lift in traffic.
Domain authority
Similar to Visibility, Authority is another metric that tries to assign a score to a site’s relevance within its sector. Ahrefs’ Domain Rating is well known here, scoring a domain based on the quality and quantity of inbound backlinks.
We know backlinks have a major impact on Google’s algorithm, although much smaller than years ago, because many people took advantage of techniques like link buying or spam to artificially inflate the number of links received.
The theory of link building says that a quality link ideally comes from a domain that itself has strong authority. Between two high-authority domains, the link from the one whose topic is closer to your sector carries more weight.
In a link building strategy, you look for actions that make others want to mention and link to your site. The goal is to earn those links organically to grow your domain’s relevance and authority. Metrics like Domain Authority are estimates of that authority through proprietary algorithms from tools like Ahrefs.
- Pro: link building actions are very positive because external links are signals of trust other sites give to your domain. Even though their weight in Google’s algorithm keeps shrinking, they are still a factor.
- Con: metrics like Domain Rating are estimates and we will never really know how much authority your domain has according to Google. It is also a long-term metric that requires consistent work, often without a clear return in traffic or conversions.
Special mentions
Mentions or links in AI
For now we do not have real data on how often AI mentions or links us. Paid tools track whether AI mentions you in queries extracted from their databases of “short” keywords, but the queries users send to AI are long, detailed and personalized. So it is hard to plan a strategy without a full picture of the real impact AI can have on traffic and conversions.
Engagement rate
With proper Analytics setup, you can track how many users interact with your site’s content. Engagement rate tells you whether the content you have built is actually interesting to the user. If it is not, optimizations are due. In GA4 this is the “engagement rate”.
Conclusions
Defining how a project will be measured gives clear direction to a site’s SEO strategy. At SEOCOM we help our clients find the objectives that make the most sense for their needs and walk with them through every phase of the project, from defining the strategy to its implementation.
