The directories continue to ask for positioning reports while organic traffic is fragmented between five different platforms. They continue to celebrate keywords in position #1 while their competitors generate revenue from ChatGPT without appearing in any SERP.
The metrics that defined success in SEO until 2023 no longer tell the whole story. And in fact (and quite honestly) some of them never did.
I worked with a B2B SaaS company that reported an incredible average position. Wonderful isn't it? It's just that they were all brand keywords.
Another fintech client had flat organic traffic for six months, but qualified leads from search had grown 34%.
There isn't a problem in the channel, but there is a big problem in measurement and attribution models.
The positions of individual keywords still serve to get a general idea of performance. In fact, I love to measure them and use them as a basis for my strategy.
The problem is to obsess over whether you're in position 3 vs. position 5 for a specific keyword.
What matters are the patterns. Yes 40 Keywords they fall out of the top 10 at the same time, you have a problem. If a content cluster on a specific topic is growing consistently, something is working.
But reporting the exact position for 200 individual keywords every month is theater.
Google customizes results by location, history, device, time of day. The keyword “[insert industry] software” shows a different SERP for each person.
Look at trends, not exact positions.
Traffic is not synonymous with value. A viral article about “10 fun facts” can bring 50,000 views. Zero leads. Zero revenue. Or maybe, with a good funnel, that same note can be one of the most important parts of your funnel, but let's leave that for another conversation.
I saw this in a service client. Organic traffic is up 23% year over year. Celebrations at the executive session. Except that 78% of that growth came from informational content that never converted (largely because there was no funnel, but again, more of that for another conversation). Product pages, those that did generate sales, had fallen 12%.
The CMO reported growth. The CFO saw the decline in organic CAC.
Proprietary metrics from tools you don't control. Moz and Ahrefs calculate them differently. None of them tell you if you're going to rank or generate traffic.
I've seen sites with DA 45 that generate more pipeline than competitors with DA 65. Authority matters, but these metrics are imperfect proxies of something you can't directly control either.
If your strategy is based on “raising the DA”, you're optimizing for a number invented by a third-party tool.
What percentage of the total search volume in your category are you capturing?
If there are 100,000 monthly searches related to your product and you're getting 8,000 organic views, you have an 8% share. Your competitor with 15,000 has 15%.
This tells you if you're gaining or losing ground against real competition. Not against an abstract benchmark, against companies that are taking customers away from you.
It's simple to calculate: your organic traffic for relevant keywords divided by the total search volume for those same keywords. Semrush and Ahrefs are already showing this in their dashboards.
A human resources software client had stable organic traffic for eight months. It looked like stagnation. But their share of search had risen from 11% to 16% because the total search volume in their category had fallen. They were winning in a shrinking market.
Not all traffic is worth the same. Traffic to product pages, pricing, use cases, comparisons. That's the traffic that matters.
Create a segment in Analytics that includes only conversion URLs. Pages where people make buying decisions. Measure that traffic separately.
An insurance customer had 30% of their organic traffic going to product pages. The other 60% went to comparators. That 30% generated 75% of leads (although be careful, because a lot of traffic to product pages came from comparators)
When we prioritized strategies that fueled that 30%, organic leads grew 28% while total traffic rose only 9%.
ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini. In some verticals, it already represents 1% of traffic that comes from Google.
But Google Analytics 4 doesn't always track them well. It reports them as direct or groups them under generic referrals. In addition, in many cases people see the brand and then Google.
A fintech SaaS client saw “chatgpt.com” traffic grow 700% in six months. That traffic converted 3x better than Google traffic because it came with a more specific intention.
If you're not measuring this, you don't know what percentage of your audience no longer uses Google as an entry point.
Most people don't convert on the first visit. They enter through a blog article, they come back three days later directly, and that's where they convert.
Google Analytics has an “Assisted Conversions” report that shows how many conversions included organic traffic at some point in the journey, even if it wasn't the last click.
A B2B SaaS customer found that organic accounted for 43% of all their conversions, but only received 22% credit in last-click attribution models.
When we showed this to the CFO, organic stopped seeing itself as an “awareness channel” and began to receive budget as a revenue channel.
How many of the relevant searches in your category do you have content ranking for?
If there are 200 relevant queries in your vertical and you're ranking in the top 20 for 80 of them, your coverage is 40%.
This tells you how comprehensive your content is. A competitor with 65% coverage has more attack surface. It's visible in more conversations.
It is measured by reviewing a complete keyword research for your category and checking for how many of those keywords you appear in the results. Tedious (a lot) but revealing.
You can't show 15 metrics in each meeting. Choose three or four depending on what matters to your specific CEO or board of directors.
If you care about competition: share of search and intent coverage.
If efficiency matters to you: traffic to conversion pages and assisted conversions.
If you care about the future: traffic from AI platforms.
And always, always, it shows a business metric. Leads generated. Influenced pipeline. Attributed revenue. Something that appears in the P&L.
Technical SEO metrics (positions, backlinks, crawl budget) are for you. To diagnose and optimize. The CEO doesn't need to see them unless they explain why a business metric moved.
Most CMOs still ask for reports that seem important but don't measure what matters. And most SEO consultants do them because it's easier than educating.
But if you want organic to look like a revenue channel and not a “nice to have”, you need to talk in metrics that the CFO and CEO understand.
Share of search tells you if you're winning the market. Traffic to conversion pages tells you if you're attracting people who buy. Revenue per page tells you where to invest more.
The keyword positions and the DA are left for your internal dashboard. For the boardroom, it has numbers that move the business needle.
That's what separates SEO consultants from growth partners.
.png){kind=small}
SEO consulting that scales traffic, grows your brand, increases revenue, and helps you win on Google and AI platforms and LLMs like ChatGPT.
%402x.svg){kind=icon}
