There is a particular kind of monthly report that arrives with a green upward arrow, a chart of ranking positions, and a number called something like authority score. It is reassuring, it is easy to produce, and it can be entirely disconnected from whether the phone rang.
The awkward truth about measuring search is that the things easiest to chart are the least useful, and the thing that actually matters is often the hardest to attribute. Getting this straight is worth doing early, because it decides which work gets continued and which gets abandoned just as it starts to pay.
Start at the end
The only number that finally matters is enquiries, or orders, or bookings. Everything else is a step on the way to one of those.
So before looking at anything else, make sure you can count them. That means knowing how many enquiries arrived, and ideally roughly where each came from. A form submission is easy to count. A phone call is not, unless somebody writes it down or you ask.
The simplest version, and it is genuinely enough for most businesses, is a note of how many enquiries came in each month and how many turned into work. If a search improvement is real, that is where it shows up.
Then the numbers that lead to it
Once enquiries are counted, four things from Search Console are worth watching, and they are all free.
Clicks. How many people actually came to your site from a search. This is the honest version of “are we doing better”, and it is the one to watch month on month.
Impressions. How often you appeared at all. Rising impressions with flat clicks usually means you are appearing for things that are not quite right, which is useful to know.
Queries. The phrases you appeared for. Watch for new ones arriving, because that is what growth looks like before it becomes clicks.
Pages. Which of your pages earn the clicks. Almost always a shorter list than people expect, and it tells you where to spend effort.
If you work locally, add the actions on your Business Profile: calls, direction requests, and clicks to your website. Those are people deciding to do something, which puts them a long way above most website statistics.
Branded and non-branded, kept apart
This is the distinction that changes how a report reads, and it is missing from most of them.
Searches for your business name are branded. Everything else is not. Both matter, and they mean completely different things.
Branded searches going up means your name is getting about, usually because of work that has nothing to do with search: a van, a job well done, a recommendation, an advert. Non-branded searches going up means people who did not know you existed are finding you, which is what search work is actually for.
A report showing impressive growth that turns out to be entirely branded is describing your reputation, not your search performance. Both are good news. Only one of them is evidence that the search work is working.
Ask every enquiry how they found you, and write the answer down. It takes seconds, the answers are imperfect, and after three months you will have something no analytics package can give you: the connection between the work you are paying for and the people who actually got in touch.
What to cheerfully ignore
The position of one phrase. Rankings vary by who is searching, where they are standing, what they searched before, and which day it is. Two people in the same room can see different results. A chart of one phrase’s position is a chart of one sample of a moving thing.
Third-party authority scores. Numbers with names like authority or trust score are invented by the companies selling the tools. Google does not publish a score like that and does not use theirs. They are useful for rough comparison and meaningless as a target.
Bounce rate on its own. Somebody arriving, reading the answer, and leaving satisfied looks identical to somebody arriving and recoiling. On a page whose job is to answer a question, a high bounce rate can be a success.
Traffic without enquiries. Visitor numbers going up while enquiries stay flat usually means you are attracting the wrong people, and it is worth investigating rather than celebrating.
Keyword density. Whatever percentage a tool tells you to hit, ignore it. This has not been how any of it works for a very long time.
Position in a report you cannot reproduce. If you cannot see where a number came from, treat it as decoration.
How long to wait
Search moves slowly and reports monthly, which is an uncomfortable combination.
A technical fix, like pages that were not being indexed, can show up in a fortnight. A new page competing for something meaningful takes months, and something in the region of three to six is normal before you can judge it. Anything seasonal needs comparing with the same month last year rather than last month, or you will conclude that every August is a disaster.
The practical consequence is to set the review interval to match. Looking weekly produces anxiety and knee-jerk changes. Looking quarterly, with a proper before-and-after, produces decisions.
Which is also why the most valuable thing you can do is record where you are now. Take a snapshot of clicks, impressions, enquiries and the pages earning them before any work starts. Almost nobody does, and without it every later conversation about whether it worked is a matter of opinion.
A report worth having
If somebody reports to you on search, a good one answers four questions in plain language.
What changed this period, and what was done. Whether enquiries moved. Which pages and phrases are responsible. And what happens next, with a reason.
If a report is mostly charts of positions, or leads with a proprietary score, it is describing activity rather than results. That is not necessarily dishonesty, and it is worth asking for the four questions above instead.
Where to start
Count your enquiries this month, however roughly, and start asking people how they found you.
Then open Search Console, look at the last three months, and write down four numbers: clicks, impressions, your best-performing page, and one query you did not expect. That is your baseline, and it took ten minutes.
Reporting that connects search work to enquiries rather than to charts is how we prefer to do it, because it is the only version that helps anybody decide what to do next. If you would like a second opinion on a report you are currently receiving, get in touch, or read more about how we approach search.