What’s your goal? To be successful? How will you know you’re successful? Is it the amount of money in your bank account? Is it the number of customers you’ve helped? Is it the number of vacations you’ve taken? The definition of “success”, needs to be defined.
Choosing Key Performance Indicators For An SEO Contract
If you’re an agency or a freelance consultant, then it’s important for you and your customer to agree to speak the same language when it comes to your success or failure to deliver results from your contracted seo work. Anyone can provide a detailed list of actions they’ve taken that they SAY will lead your business to “success”, but that’s pretty far from showing the impact of your work.
From the broad range of potential SEO related metrics that are available through Google Search Console, Google Analytics and whatever combination of CRM or spreadsheets your client is using for their managing their business you have to choose what numbers are going to define your success. As SEO consultant Eli Schwartz asked earlier today, what do you want to be held to?
What’s A KPI Vs A Metric?
What is a KPI? It is a “key performance indicator”, usually a numerical value that’s observed over a period of time and is the number that’s understood to reflect the success or failure of the project. The biggest difference between a “metric” and a “KPI” is that a metric is a numerical value that could be for any number of facets of your digital marketing campaign and may not actually reflect a value that directly impacts the business in a meaningful way.
A good example of this would be the metric of a “Bounce rate” which you COULD use as a metric, because the it has a numerical value and you could take actions that could change that metric, say improving the quality of the writing and images on a page or reducing load speed.
However, it’s a poor KPI because as much as you might change your bounce rate for a particular page, or even your aggregate bounce rate for all of your pages that’s not neccesarily a change that’s going to have a causative impact on a business’s fundamental success.
What Are the Metrics I Should Choose For KPIs for SEO?
- Revenue from organic traffic
- Sales rate from organic leads(conversions) – AKA how many leads/conversions actually purchased. (Or how many transactions came from organic “Add to cart”
- Lead conversions
- Soft conversions – eBook, Downloadable, new
- Number of pages with organic traffic
- Increases in organic traffic to groups of related content
- % increase in unique queries for groups of related content
Jeremy’s 2026 Refresh: Add AI-Visibility KPIs and Always Report Business Outcomes
When I first wrote this, organic traffic was still a reasonable headline number to report. In 2026 it’s only a proxy. With AI Overviews and AI Mode answering more queries directly, a client can lose sessions while their brand is actually being cited more often by the systems people now trust. That’s why I tell every client the same thing I said on the podcast with Robert Spinrad, where we unpacked how good SEO is now good AI visibility: your KPI scorecard needs a citation and AI-visibility layer sitting right next to revenue, not instead of it. Track how often you’re referenced in AI answers, how many AI-surfaced queries name your brand, and which pages earn those mentions.
The good news is you don’t need a brand-new toolset. Google confirms that AI feature impressions and clicks are already reported in the Search Console Performance report, and the same crawlability and quality fundamentals still drive inclusion. So my 2026 KPI rule is simple: lead with the business outcome (organic-sourced revenue, qualified leads, pipeline), treat traffic as a leading indicator, and add AI-visibility and citation metrics as the early-warning signal for where search is heading next. If a number doesn’t connect to one of those three, it’s a metric to monitor, not a KPI to be held to.