A What question

What metrics does an SEO company track for performance?

5 min read Cites 10 sources

An SEO company tracks metrics from two main tools, and each tool sees a different part of the picture. Google Search Console shows what happens on Google before anyone reaches your site: impressions, clicks, click-through rate, position, and the links pointing to you. Google Analytics shows what happens after the visit: sessions, engagement, and the actions that matter to your business. On top of those sit the outcomes you record yourself, such as inquiries, sales, and revenue. A useful metric set says, for every number, which question it answers and which tool it comes from, and it reads the outcomes first and the rest as explanation.

What Search Console measures

Search Console’s Performance report counts what Google shows and what people click. Google’s definitions of the Performance report metrics describe impressions as “how often someone saw a link to your site on Google” and clicks as “how often someone clicked a link from Google to your site.” Click-through rate is clicks divided by impressions. Average position is an average across every query you appeared for, so it is best read alongside the query list rather than on its own.

These metrics become useful when they are split. By query, they show which searches bring visitors. By page, they show which pages earn those visits. Separating searches that include your brand name from the rest separates people who already knew you from people who found you through search, and the second group is the one SEO work is meant to grow. Search Console has a branded and non-branded queries filter for this, but its Performance report help notes that the filter is not available for sub-properties, such as a single folder of a site, or for sites with a low number of impressions, and that its data starts in March 2025, so grouping queries by brand name yourself remains the fallback where the filter is missing.

Search Console is also a free source for links from other sites. Its Links report lists top linking sites, which shows “the root domain of sites with the most links to your site, sorted by count of links.” A company may add third-party tools that score the strength of those links. Those scores are each tool’s own estimate. Google’s guide to hiring an SEO notes that third-party tools “don’t have access to Google’s internal ranking data”, so an authority score is a vendor’s model, not a Google metric.

What Google Analytics measures

Analytics counts sessions, and for SEO the relevant ones are sessions from organic search. Engagement in the current version of Google Analytics has precise definitions that older report templates may not use. Google’s explanation of engagement rate and bounce rate builds both on the engaged session, defined by its length, by key events, and by page views; engagement rate is the share of sessions that were engaged, and bounce rate is now simply the share that were not. A report that still talks about time on page and bounce in the old sense is describing a different measurement.

The business actions you care about are tracked as key events. Google renamed them: “events that measure actions that are important to the success of your business are now called ‘key events.'” In Analytics, the word “conversion” now refers to actions used to measure ad campaigns. When an SEO report shows conversions from organic search, ask which key events it counts, so you know whether a form submission, a call click, or a newsletter sign-up is behind the number.

Why the two tools never match

Search Console clicks and Analytics sessions will not agree, and that is expected. Google’s guide to using Search Console and Google Analytics data together says plainly that “clicks and sessions are calculated differently, which means that when you compare the data, you’ll likely see different numbers”, and that “what’s important is that the general trends have the same pattern.” One of the reasons it lists for a large gap is an implementation problem, such as pages where the Analytics tag is missing.

That gives you a simple test for any report. If clicks rise and organic sessions fall, or the reverse, over the same period, ask the company to explain the gap before you read anything else in the report.

Technical health metrics

Core Web Vitals measure real-world user experience: how pages load, respond, and stay visually stable. Google’s Core Web Vitals guidance sets the targets: Largest Contentful Paint within the first 2.5 seconds of the page starting to load, Interaction to Next Paint of less than 200 milliseconds, and Cumulative Layout Shift of less than 0.1. Indexing is the other technical metric worth seeing every month: the Page indexing report in Search Console shows how many pages are indexed and why others are not.

One label is a sign of an out-of-date report template. Google’s documentation updates log records that in December 2023 it “removed mentions of the Mobile Friendly Test and the Mobile Usability report throughout.” A report that still cites the Mobile Usability report is quoting a tool Google has retired.

Business outcomes

Inquiries, calls, sales, and revenue that start from organic search are the numbers that justify the work. Some of them live in Analytics as key events. Others, such as whether an inquiry became a customer, live in your own records, and only you can supply them. A metric set that stops at Analytics can show that people took an action, but not whether the action was worth anything to you.

How to read the set

Read the outcomes first. If they moved, the other metrics explain why: which queries and pages brought the visitors, whether those sessions were engaged, whether technical problems held pages back. If the outcomes did not move, the same metrics show where the chain broke. Impressions without clicks, clicks without engaged sessions, and engaged sessions without key events each point to a different problem. A report that leads with impressions and positions while outcomes are flat is asking you to judge the work by its explanations instead of its results.

Related posts:

  1. Can an SEO company track competitor performance? Yes, within limits worth understanding before you pay for it. An SEO company cannot see a competitor's analytics, revenue, or conversion rates. It can follow the signals that are visible......
  2. Can an SEO company track mobile performance separately? Yes, and the separation is built into the tools it should already be using. Search Console splits search data by device, its Core Web Vitals report has separate summaries for......
  3. How does an SEO company track rankings? With two kinds of measurement that answer different questions. A rank tracking tool checks a fixed list of searches under the same controlled conditions each time, so changes from one......
  4. How does an SEO company track user engagement? Mainly in Google Analytics, by reading what visitors from search do after they land: whether the visit counts as engaged, how long the page held their attention, how far they......
  5. Can an SEO company track conversion improvements? Yes, at the level of the pages people arrive on, provided tracking is set up before the work starts. A company can show how many inquiries, bookings, or sales came......
  6. How does an SEO company measure content performance? Page by page, against three questions: is the page found in search, does it hold the people who arrive, and does it contribute to what the business needs? A service......
  7. How does an SEO company measure local search performance? It measures two layers: how visible your business is in local results across the area you serve, and what people do after they find you, from calls and direction requests......
  8. Can an SEO company offer performance-based pricing? Yes, some do: you pay little or nothing up front, and payment is triggered when agreed targets are met, such as a keyword reaching the first page. The model sounds......
  9. Can an SEO company predict future performance? It can make a projection, but not a prediction you can hold it to. A useful projection is a range rather than a single number, built from data you can......
  10. What performance guarantees can an SEO company make? An SEO company can guarantee the work it controls: what it will do, by when, by which methods, how it will report, and who owns the accounts and content. It......
  11. How does an SEO company handle negative SEO attacks? Calmly, and with evidence before action. Negative SEO means a third party trying to harm your search visibility: pointing spammy links at your site, copying your content elsewhere, breaking into......
  12. Can an SEO company help with international SEO? Yes, if it has done this specific work before, because international SEO is mostly structural decisions that are expensive to reverse. The company has to help you choose how each......
  13. Can an SEO company help with social media SEO? Yes, with the parts where social media and search overlap: making your profiles complete and consistent so they serve people who search for your name, connecting those profiles to your......
  14. Should I hire an SEO company or do SEO myself? It depends on four things: the hours you can give it every week, how much you are willing to learn, how competitive your market is, and how technically complex your......