What to Look for in an SEO Report

What are the most important metrics for an SEO report?

Any good SEO report will provide a few basic metrics, including:

• Traffic
• Engagement rate
• Average engagement time
• Visited pages
• Rankings and visibility for important keywords, including Google AI Overviews
• Conversions
• Leads
• Revenue

These are some of the easiest metrics to understand, regardless of your amount of experience with digital marketing, and they will typically be right at the beginning of the report.

Let’s dig into three of the most important metrics:

Conversions

One of the main goals of your SEO strategy is undoubtedly attracting more traffic to your site. However, the actions that your visitors take once they arrive are just as important, if not more important, than the fact that they found you in the first place.

Where visitors come from shapes those actions, too. In WebFX’s analysis of 2.3 billion sessions, visitors from generative AI platforms converted about 1.2x higher than organic search visitors.

That’s where conversion data becomes critical. This information, tracked as key events in GA4, tells you how many of your visitors are taking steps towards becoming customers, whether that means filling out contact forms or picking up the phone and calling you.

Leads and revenue

With traditional marketing, it’s sometimes difficult to determine what strategies are working and what aren’t. Unless you directly ask your customers how they heard about you, you have no way of knowing whether they saw a billboard, heard a radio ad, or noticed an ad in the paper.

With online marketing, however, that isn’t the case.

Lead and revenue attribution shows where your leads and sales come from, such as search engines, AI assistants like ChatGPT, recommendations, and emails, which helps you decide where your marketing dollars are best invested.

P.S. GA4 now includes an AI Assistant channel for measuring referral traffic from ChatGPT, Gemini, and other AI platforms.

What are the most important dimensions for an SEO report?

Your SEO strategy is designed to bring in organic traffic and AI search referrals, but there are many ways to look at how well it’s accomplishing that goal. One of the best is by tracking which of the pages on your site attract and keep the most visitors.

This shows you where your strategy is succeeding, and when combined with metrics like engagement rate, it shows room for improvement.

If certain pages are attracting searchers but not convincing them to visit other pages on your site, there’s a clear opportunity to revise the page to be more effective.

What are the most important metrics for AI SEO?

An SEO report should show how often AI-generated answers, such as Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, and Perplexity responses, mention your brand or cite your pages.

Those answers often sit above the organic results, so buyers can build a shortlist of providers without clicking a single link.

Look for these AI SEO details in your report:

• Mentions and citations for priority topics. Teams use OmniSEO®, WebFX’s AI search visibility platform, to track which prompts mention or cite a brand, then decide which pages to strengthen first.
• Share of voice against competitors. This shows how often your brand appears compared to competitors when AI tools generate answers for a topic, so you can see whether you’re gaining ground.
• A tie to traffic and leads. AI visibility belongs next to your AI referral and conversion data, so you can see whether citations turn into visits and leads.

What are some additional metrics and dimensions for an SEO report?

Experienced marketers know that every business is different, and a one-size-fits-all strategy isn’t a good idea. The same goes for reporting.

You know your business better than anyone else, and you likely have certain metrics that are specific to your site and strategy.

For example, you may want detailed information about:

• Traffic reporting by channel
• Your average cost-per-lead (CPL)
• Ecommerce reporting

Let your agency know what metrics you want to see, and they should be able to come up with a way to track and deliver the information you need. And if they can’t, it may be time to consider working with an agency that is more willing to work with your business’s goals.

Ready to make the most of your SEO reports?

With all the advanced marketing data available today, it can be difficult to determine which metrics and figures are the most important for your business. If you haven’t already, take the time to discuss these metrics with your marketing department or agency, and figure out a marketing agency reports structure that works for you.

At WebFX, we understand the importance of keeping our clients in the loop on their SEO strategies, which is why we offer monthly reporting that ties SEO and AI search performance to leads and revenue. Contact us today to speak with a strategist about how we can help improve your online marketing success—and show you results every step of the way.