SEO reporting: the KPIs that matter

The SEO KPIs that matter are the ones a business owner would recognise without a glossary: enquiries, calls, bookings and sales that came from organic search. Everything else in an SEO report is there to explain why those numbers went up or down. This guide sets out which measures belong in a report, where each one comes from, and which ones can be ignored.

Start with outcomes

An SEO report should open with what the business gained:

• Enquiry forms submitted by visitors who arrived from organic search
• Phone calls started from the website or from the Google Business Profile
• Bookings or reservations completed
• Online sales, for shops

In Google Analytics these actions are recorded as key events. Google defines a key event as an event that measures an action particularly important to the success of the business. Any event can be marked as one.

This only works if tracking is in place. Without it, a report can show traffic but cannot show whether that traffic did anything. Stryx sets up tracking for enquiries, calls and bookings when a site launches, and checks it as part of conversion tracking work on existing sites.

The four Search Console numbers

Google Search Console is the primary source for how a site performs in Google Search. Its Performance report gives four measures:

• Clicks: how many times someone clicked through to the site from Google Search results.
• Impressions: how often the site appeared in results.
• Click-through rate: clicks divided by impressions.
• Average position: the average position of the site's topmost result.

These are early indicators. A page has to appear before it can be clicked, and be clicked before it can produce an enquiry, so impressions move first. The numbers are most useful when broken down by page and by search query, which the report allows.

Two habits make these numbers more honest:

• Separate searches that include the business name from those that do not. Growth in searches for the brand reflects reputation and marketing in general. Growth in other searches reflects SEO work more directly.
• Read average position with care. It is an average across every search the site appeared for, so a site that starts appearing for many new searches can show a worse average while doing better.

Google Business Profile measures

For a business that serves a local area, the profile produces calls and direction requests of its own. Google's profile performance data includes the search terms people used to find the profile, the number of people who viewed it, calls, direction requests, website clicks, messages and bookings. Only the measures that apply to the business are shown. These belong in a local SEO report alongside the website figures.

AI search visibility

Google now reports on this directly. The Generative AI performance report in Search Console became available to all websites on 31 August 2026. According to Google's help page, it covers AI Overviews and AI Mode, and shows impressions, meaning how many times links to the site appeared in those features. The data can be split by page, country, date and device. The help page does not list search queries or clicks among its measures.

Third-party tools estimate visibility in ChatGPT and other AI systems by running sample questions. They are useful for spotting patterns. Google's own guidance warns that no third-party tool has access to its internal ranking or AI systems, so treat those scores as samples and not as measurements. An AI visibility audit is a structured version of the same check.

Health measures

Some numbers are conditions for success, not goals in themselves. They belong in a report when something is wrong:

• Indexing: whether the pages that should be in Google are in Google.
• Core Web Vitals: Google's thresholds for a good result are a Largest Contentful Paint within 2.5 seconds, an Interaction to Next Paint under 200 milliseconds and a Cumulative Layout Shift below 0.1.
• Errors: broken pages, failed redirects and structured data problems.

Numbers that matter less

• A ranking for one phrase. A first-place result means little if nobody searches the phrase or the searchers never enquire.
• Third-party authority scores. These are calculated by software vendors. They are not Google measures.
• Total traffic with no source. A rise in visits can come from ads, email or social media. Only the organic share reflects SEO.
• Word counts and pages published. Google's SEO Starter Guide says there is no ideal content length. Activity is not a result.

What a useful monthly report contains

1. Outcomes: enquiries, calls, bookings or sales from organic search, compared with the previous period and the same period last year.
2. Early indicators: clicks and impressions, split by brand and non-brand searches, with the pages that gained or lost most.
3. Local and AI visibility, where relevant.
4. Work completed, in plain language.
5. Problems found.
6. What happens next, and why.

A report that leaves out the first and last items is a data export.

Stryx measures SEO on enquiries, calls and bookings. For how long those numbers take to move, see how long SEO takes. To discuss reporting for a site, get in touch.