Track SEO in three layers. Health tells you whether Google can index and load the pages. Visibility, from Search Console, tells you whether they appear and get clicked. Business, from analytics key events and your lead record, tells you whether search produces inquiries and revenue. Read them in that order; judge the last over quarters.
This guide is part of our SEO series. For KPIs across every marketing channel, see marketing KPIs for B2B companies; for the method behind attribution, how to measure marketing performance.
Layer 1: health
Health KPIs say whether Google can find, index and load the pages. They move first after technical work and should be stable thereafter:
- Pages indexed, and the reasons others are not, from Search Console's Page indexing report. A fall in indexed key pages is the first thing to explain.
- Core Web Vitals pass rate, by template, against web.dev's targets: LCP within 2.5 seconds, INP within 200 milliseconds, CLS within 0.1 at the 75th percentile.
- Crawl and server errors reported in Search Console.
Layer 2: visibility
Search Console's Performance report is the truth for search visibility, with Google's own definitions: clicks are the times a user clicked your site from Google Search results; impressions, how many times your site appeared in results; CTR, clicks divided by impressions; and average position, the average position of the topmost result from your site. The default view covers three months, and the newest data is preliminary for a few hours.
Read them by page and by query. Rising impressions on a page that was just improved show Google is testing it; rising clicks show it is winning; a high-impression, low-CTR query shows a title or answer that does not match the search. Average position is useful as a trend for a page or query, and misleading as a site-wide number.
Layer 3: business
Business KPIs say whether search produces customers. They move last and are judged over quarters. Our analytics team sets them up:
- Inquiries from organic search: forms, calls and bookings, set up as key events in Google Analytics, which Google describes as the actions that matter to your business. Marking an event as a key event changes data only from that day forward, so set them up before you need them.
- People in your lead record with organic search as their source: the count that matters, because an event is not a person.
- Pipeline and revenue from those people, from the CRM.
- Cost per inquiry from organic search: the SEO spend divided by inquiries, compared with paid channels.
How AI summaries change the picture
Where Google shows an AI summary, fewer people click: Pew Research found that users clicked a result link in 8% of visits with an AI summary against 15% without, in a study published 22 July 2025. So a page can gain impressions and lose clicks while still being the source the summary draws on. Two adjustments follow: read impressions and inquiries alongside clicks rather than clicks alone, and track whether your pages are cited in AI answers for your key questions. Our guide to zero-click searches covers the trend.
What to ignore, or read with care
Six numbers that fill reports and rarely change a decision:
- Rankings for a handful of vanity terms. Positions move daily, vary by location and device, and a single term says little about the site.
- Total organic traffic without intent: a blog post that ranks for a definition can add thousands of visits that never buy.
- Third-party domain scores. Useful for comparing sites in a tool; Google does not use them.
- Keyword counts ("you rank for 4,000 keywords") without the clicks and inquiries those keywords bring.
- Bounce rate alone, which says little about a page that answers the question in one screen.
- Any promised position. Google's page on hiring an SEO says no one can promise a number-one ranking, and suggests asking how success is measured instead.
How often to read each layer
Health weekly during technical work and monthly after it. Visibility monthly, by page and query, with a three-month trend. Business monthly for the count and quarterly for the judgment, because inquiries from search follow rankings with a lag and sales cycles add another. The table below sets each KPI against its source, its reading rhythm and the decision it informs. Our guide to the SEO retainer shows how the same layers apply to judging a provider.
Conclusion
SEO KPIs come in three layers: health (indexing and speed), visibility (impressions, clicks, CTR and average position, by page and query, from Search Console) and business (inquiries, pipeline and revenue from organic search, from key events and your lead record). Read them in that order, judge the business layer over quarters, read impressions alongside clicks now that AI summaries take some clicks, and ignore vanity rankings, raw traffic, tool scores and promised positions.
PromotEdge International is an international strategy, technology, marketing and design company, and our delivery team is in India. Our SEO services report all three layers from your own Search Console and lead record each month, and our analytics team sets up the key events that make the business layer possible.
Facts we rely on: see our company facts for what we state about ourselves and where each fact comes from.