How Do You Know If Your SEO Is Actually Working? The Metrics That Matter

You've been paying for SEO for six months. Your agency sends a report every month. The report shows rankings improving and traffic going up. But your phone isn't ringing more. Your contact form submissions look the same. And you're not entirely sure whether the SEO is working or whether you're just being shown numbers that look good.

This is one of the most common frustrations SME owners have with digital marketing, and it has a specific cause: the metrics most agencies report on are not the metrics that predict business outcomes.

This article gives you a clear framework for evaluating whether your SEO investment is actually working, using data you can check yourself in Google Search Console.

Why Rankings Tell You Almost Nothing

Rankings are the most commonly reported SEO metric. They're also the least useful for evaluating whether SEO is generating business value.

Here's why.

A single keyword ranking tells you your position for one query, at one moment, for one searcher profile, in one location. Google personalises search results. A ranking of position 3 for "accounting firm Singapore" on a Monday might be position 6 on Thursday, and different again for someone searching in Jurong versus Toa Payoh.

More importantly, a ranking tells you nothing about whether anyone clicked, whether they stayed, or whether they became a customer. You can rank position 1 for a term that sends zero qualified visitors. You can rank position 5 for a term that sends your best-converting traffic.

Tracking rankings as your primary SEO metric is the equivalent of evaluating your Google Ads campaign by ad position rather than by cost per lead.

The 3 Metrics That Actually Matter

1. Qualified organic traffic by landing page

Total organic traffic is easy to inflate and easy to misread. What matters is whether the right pages are getting more visits from the right type of searcher.

In Google Search Console, go to Performance > Search Results. Filter by page. For each of your main service pages, look at the trend over the past 6 months. Are your highest-priority service pages getting more impressions and clicks than they were before the SEO engagement started?

If your "tax advisory services" page was getting 15 clicks a month in August and is now getting 80 clicks a month in February, that's meaningful. If total site traffic has doubled but it's driven by a blog post about a tangential topic, the metric is noisy.

Ask your SEO provider to report on traffic specifically to your main service and category pages, not just total site traffic.

2. Click-through rate (CTR) in Search Console

CTR is the percentage of people who saw your page in search results and clicked. Industry averages sit around 2-5% for most positions, with position 1 results averaging closer to 25-30%.

If your pages are showing in search results but not getting clicked, the problem is your title and meta description, not your ranking. Good SEO work includes testing and improving these. If your CTR on key pages has improved over time (even if rankings haven't shifted dramatically), your pages are becoming more competitive.

In Search Console, go to Performance > Search Results. Set the date range to the last 6 months. Sort by Impressions to find pages with high visibility. Look at the CTR column for those pages. If high-impression pages have CTR below 2%, that's a gap worth flagging.

3. Organic-to-lead conversion ratio

This one requires connecting Search Console data to your contact form or CRM, but it's the most direct signal of whether SEO is generating business value.

The core question: of the organic visitors arriving at your key pages, what percentage is taking an action (calling, submitting a form, starting a chat)?

If you're getting 500 organic visitors per month to your service pages and converting 1%, you're generating 5 leads per month from SEO. If three months later you're getting 800 visitors and still converting 1%, SEO is working. If you're getting 800 visitors but conversion has dropped to 0.5%, the traffic quality may have shifted, or the page has a conversion problem that good SEO work should flag.

Most SMEs don't track this because it requires setting up goal tracking in Google Analytics. But your SEO provider should be. If they're not including conversion data in their monthly report, ask why.

The 3 Metrics That Waste Your Time

1. Domain Authority / Domain Rating

Domain Authority (Moz) and Domain Rating (Ahrefs) are third-party scores that attempt to predict how well a domain will rank. They are not Google metrics. Google does not use either score as a ranking factor.

These scores are useful for competitive analysis (is this website broadly trusted?). They are not useful as primary indicators of whether your SEO is working. An agency that leads every report with "Your DA increased from 18 to 24 this month" without connecting that to traffic or leads is optimising for a number that Google doesn't look at.

2. Total organic traffic without segmentation

A raw traffic number is easy to inflate. One viral blog post, one seasonal spike, one change in how Google counts bot traffic: all of these can move total organic traffic without affecting your business at all.

The question is never "how much organic traffic do we have?" The question is "how much organic traffic are our priority pages getting, and is it growing?"

3. Keyword rankings for broad, high-competition terms

There's a common pattern in SEO reports: the rankings table shows your site moving up for terms like "digital marketing Singapore" or "accounting firm Singapore" without noting that these terms have a combined difficulty score that puts page 1 rankings out of reach for a new domain, and that even if you ranked on page 1, those terms attract a broad mix of searchers that may not convert.

Good SEO work targets a mix of high-volume terms (long-term goals), medium-volume terms (achievable in 6-12 months), and high-intent, lower-volume terms (quick wins with strong conversion). Reporting that focuses entirely on broad terms often hides whether the high-intent traffic work is actually progressing.

A Simple Search Console Review You Can Do Today

You don't need an SEO background to do this. You need 20 minutes and Search Console access.

Step 1: Open Google Search Console. Go to Performance > Search Results.

Step 2: Set the date range to "Last 6 months" and compare it to the previous 6 months (use the "Compare" toggle).

Step 3: Click on "Pages" to see your most-clicked pages. Are your main service pages in the top 10? Are they growing (clicks and impressions) compared to the prior period?

Step 4: Click on each priority service page. Look at the queries that bring traffic to that page. Are they the right queries (people who might actually hire you)? Or are they informational queries that won't convert?

Step 5: Check CTR on your highest-impression pages. Anything below 2% on a page getting substantial impressions is a gap your SEO provider should have a plan to improve.

This review takes 20 minutes and tells you more about whether your SEO is working than any rankings report.

What Good SEO Reporting Looks Like

A well-run SEO engagement should give you a monthly report covering:

• Traffic to priority service pages (with trend)
• Impressions and CTR for priority pages (with trend)
• New keywords entering the top 10 for each service area
• Indexation status (are your pages being found by Google?)
• Conversion events from organic traffic (calls, form submissions)
• Commentary on what changed and why

If your current reports look different from this, it is worth a conversation with your provider. Good SEO work produces measurable movement in each of these areas over a 6-12 month horizon. It does not produce impressive-looking rankings reports for irrelevant keywords.

Setting Realistic Expectations

One final piece of context that belongs in any honest conversation about SEO measurement: the timeline.

Months 1-2 of a new SEO engagement are primarily technical. The work involves fixing indexation issues, improving page structure, setting up Search Console correctly, and resolving crawl problems. You should not expect to see significant traffic growth yet. But you should be able to see evidence of this work in Search Console: pages appearing in the index, crawl errors being resolved, sitemap status improving.

Months 3-4 are when content and on-page optimisation start to compound. Newer content begins appearing for long-tail queries. Pages that were previously not ranking start showing impressions. You may see CTR improvements as title tags get refined. Traffic to service pages may start growing modestly.

Months 5-8 are when results become more visible. If the keyword research and content strategy were sound, you should see meaningful growth in organic visits to your priority service pages, and the organic-to-lead conversion ratio should be trackable.

Months 9-12 are when the compounding effect becomes clear. A well-executed SEO engagement in months 1-6 produces increasingly visible results in months 9-12 as Google's trust in the domain builds and content matures.

If you're at month 8 and cannot see any of the metrics above moving, the engagement has a problem. Either the strategy was wrong, the execution was weak, or the goals were misaligned from the start. These are conversations worth having with your SEO provider before signing a renewal.

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Magnified provides monthly SEO retainers that include transparent Search Console reporting and organic lead tracking. If your current SEO reporting leaves you unsure what's working, let's talk.