SEO metrics that can make poor performance look good

SEO reporting can be full of impressive-looking numbers.

Key takeaway: SEO metrics that can make poor performance look good include average position, impressions, domain authority and technical health scores, all of which can improve dramatically without generating any additional enquiries, leads or revenue for the business.

Average position is up. Impressions have doubled. Domain authority has increased. More keywords are ranking. Technical health is at 97%.

It all sounds positive.

The problem is that many of these metrics can improve while the website generates no more enquiries, no more sales and no more revenue.

That does not make the metrics useless. Most of them have a perfectly legitimate role in SEO. The issue is how they are presented. Poor SEO reporting often takes an intermediate metric and presents it as if it were a commercial result.

Here are some of the most common examples.

Why does average position often mislead?

Average position measures where a website tends to appear across the searches for which it receives impressions.

It can be useful for identifying broad ranking trends, but it is very easy to make the number sound more impressive than it really is.

A website moving from position 70 to position 35 for hundreds of low-value searches may produce a dramatic improvement in average position without generating a single additional enquiry.

The question should always be: average position for what?

What about organic impressions?

Impressions tell you how often your website appeared somewhere in Google’s search results.

More impressions generally mean greater visibility, but they do not necessarily mean more useful visibility.

A website could begin appearing for thousands of loosely related searches and generate a huge increase in impressions while producing almost no additional clicks.

Impressions are useful, but they are not customers.

Can click-through rate improvements be misleading?

Click-through rate measures the percentage of search impressions that resulted in someone clicking through to the website.

A rising CTR can certainly be positive, particularly when title tags and search snippets have been improved.

But the figure can also change because the mix of searches changed, branded searches increased or the website appeared fewer times for broader searches.

CTR needs context before it means very much.

What is the problem with keyword visibility scores?

Visibility is usually a calculated metric produced by an SEO platform that estimates how prominent a website is across a selected set of keywords.

The important words there are “selected set”.

Choose a favourable collection of keywords and visibility can look excellent. Choose the commercially important terms and the picture may be very different.

Visibility scores can be useful for tracking trends, but they are not revenue.

Does ranking for more keywords actually help?

SEO tools often report how many keywords a website ranks for.

Seeing this number rise can look extremely impressive. A site might go from ranking for 500 terms to 2,000.

But ranking at position 73 for another 1,500 obscure phrases does very little for the business.

The quality and commercial relevance of the keywords matter far more than the quantity. This is something we always emphasise when working through our SEO and AEO services with clients.

What about top 100 keyword rankings?

This is essentially a more generous version of the ranking-keyword metric.

It counts the number of searches where your website appears somewhere within the first 100 organic results.

For most commercial searches, being position 87 is effectively the same as not ranking at all.

It can be useful for identifying emerging opportunities, but it should never be confused with meaningful search visibility.

Are page-one rankings always valuable?

This sounds much more impressive.

And it can be.

The problem is that not all page-one rankings are equal.

Ranking first for a phrase searched five times a month may be commercially irrelevant, while ranking sixth for a highly valuable service term could be extremely important.

Any report boasting about page-one rankings should also tell you what those searches are worth.

What about top-three rankings?

Positions one to three are particularly valuable because they tend to attract a significant share of organic clicks.

But once again, the keyword matters.

An agency can easily build a report around niche, low-volume or highly specific phrases where competition is minimal.

A top-three position only matters if the people making that search are useful to the business.

Is increased organic traffic always good news?

More organic traffic sounds like one of the clearest signs that SEO is working.

Often it is.

But traffic alone still does not tell you whether the right people are visiting.

A blog post can attract thousands of visitors from around the world while a local service business receives no additional enquiries at all.

The important question is not simply whether traffic increased. It is whether relevant traffic increased. Understanding what actually influences visibility is essential, whether for traditional search or AI search ranking factors.

Sessions and users – what do they really tell you?

Sessions are simply visits to the website. They are useful for understanding overall activity, but they tell you very little about the commercial value of those visits.

An SEO report that celebrates more sessions without discussing what those visitors did next is only telling half the story.

More users means more individual visitors have reached the site. Again, that can be encouraging, but volume alone is not a commercial outcome.

An additional 10,000 irrelevant visitors are worth less than 20 genuinely interested prospects.

What about engagement metrics?

Engagement is one of those wonderfully flexible marketing words.

It might refer to engaged sessions, scroll depth, time on page, video plays, clicks or almost anything else configured in the analytics platform.

Those signals can help diagnose whether visitors are interacting with the site.

But “engagement increased” should never be allowed to substitute for explaining what visitors actually did.

Bounce rate

Bounce rate has historically been used to indicate how many visitors leave a website without meaningful interaction.

It can provide clues about landing-page quality, but it is notoriously easy to misinterpret.

A visitor who lands on a page, finds a telephone number immediately and calls the business may technically look less engaged than someone who spends five minutes wandering around trying to find it.

A lower bounce rate is not automatically a better business result.

Time on site

Longer sessions are often presented as evidence that visitors find the website more engaging.

Sometimes they do.

But spending longer on a website can also mean someone cannot find what they need.

Like most behavioural metrics, time on site needs to be interpreted alongside the user’s actual journey.

Pages per session

Viewing more pages can indicate that visitors are exploring the website.

It can also indicate that important information is difficult to find.

The metric is useful when diagnosing behaviour, but “people looked at more pages” is not necessarily a measure of success.

Why domain authority can be a vanity metric

Domain Authority is a third-party metric created by Moz. Similar metrics are offered by other SEO platforms.

It attempts to estimate the relative strength of a website’s backlink profile.

It can be useful when comparing websites, but it is not a metric used by Google to determine rankings.

Increasing Domain Authority should therefore never be presented as an SEO objective in itself.

Domain Rating

Domain Rating is Ahrefs’ equivalent measure of backlink strength.

Again, it can be useful for competitor research and link analysis.

But it is an SEO-tool metric, not a Google metric.

A site can increase its Domain Rating without necessarily improving its rankings, traffic or revenue.

What about backlink growth?

Links remain important to search visibility, so attracting good backlinks can be extremely valuable.

The problem comes when reporting focuses purely on the number of links acquired.

Twenty highly relevant links from authoritative industry websites may be far more valuable than 2,000 links from low-quality sites.

Quantity without quality is an easy number to inflate.

Referring domains

Referring domains count how many different websites link to you.

This is generally more useful than simply counting backlinks because one site can create hundreds of individual links.

Even so, the relevance and quality of those domains matter considerably more than the headline number.

“50 new referring domains” sounds excellent until you look at where they came from.

Technical SEO scores – helpful or misleading?

SEO platforms frequently give websites a technical health score.

Fixing broken links, duplicate titles, crawl issues and other technical problems is worthwhile. Without proper technical foundations, AI bots can’t recommend a site they can’t crawl.

But taking a website from a technical score of 82 to 98 does not mean the business is suddenly receiving more customers.

Technical SEO creates the conditions for better performance. It is not the commercial outcome itself.

Site health

Site health is usually another proprietary score produced by an SEO crawler.

It combines technical issues into a convenient percentage.

It is useful for identifying problems and monitoring maintenance.

It is also very easy to put at the front of a report because “site health increased from 71% to 94%” sounds impressive even when nothing commercially significant has changed.

Core Web Vitals

Core Web Vitals measure aspects of page speed, responsiveness and visual stability.

Improving them is good for users and can form part of good technical SEO.

But shaving a fraction of a second from a loading metric should not be presented as though it directly generated revenue.

It is an optimisation, not the end objective.

Indexed pages

An increase in indexed pages can be positive if useful new content has been added to the website.

It can also be a problem.

Google indexing tag archives, search pages, duplicate content or thousands of thin pages can increase the indexed-page count while making the site worse.

More indexed pages is not inherently better.

Crawlability

Search engines need to be able to find and understand a website, so crawlability is fundamental to SEO.

Fixing crawl problems can remove genuine barriers to ranking.

But once again, this is foundational work.

The fact that Google can crawl a page more efficiently does not tell you whether anybody wants what the page is offering.

Search visibility percentages and share of voice

Search visibility percentages are often based on proprietary formulas combining rankings, estimated click-through rates and tracked keywords.

They can be useful when comparing performance over time.

But without knowing which keywords are included, a percentage such as “visibility increased by 64%” tells you surprisingly little.

The impressive percentage often hides a much less impressive commercial story.

Share of voice

SEO share of voice estimates how much search visibility your website receives compared with competitors.

When built around a carefully selected set of commercially important searches, it can be a very useful competitive metric.

When built around hundreds of arbitrary keywords, it can also be made to tell almost any story.

Always look at what is included in the calculation.

SERP features and featured snippets

Featured snippets can place a website very prominently in search results and can be excellent for visibility.

But many featured snippets answer informational questions rather than commercial ones.

Winning more snippets is useful if they attract the right audience.

Counting them for the sake of producing a bigger number is not.

SERP feature presence

Search results now contain far more than conventional blue links.

Images, videos, snippets, local results, products and other features can all provide additional visibility.

Tracking these appearances can therefore be useful.

But an increase in SERP features is still only meaningful if those appearances contribute towards the objectives of the business.

Why conversion metrics need scrutiny

Conversions sound like the point where reporting finally becomes commercially meaningful.

The problem is that almost anything can be configured as a conversion.

A page scroll, PDF download, button click or visit to a particular page could all be recorded as one.

If an agency says conversions increased, ask what actually counted as a conversion.

Conversion rate

Conversion rate measures the percentage of visitors who complete a defined action.

It is an extremely useful metric when the conversion itself is meaningful.

But conversion rates can increase when overall traffic falls, particularly if less relevant visitors disappear.

A higher percentage does not necessarily mean more business was generated.

Leads

Lead generation is much closer to the metric most businesses actually care about.

Even here, though, definitions matter.

Spam submissions, recruitment enquiries, supplier approaches and poor-quality prospects can all end up counted as leads.

The useful number is not simply leads. It is qualified leads.

Cost per lead

Cost per lead is particularly useful when SEO performance is being compared with paid media or overall marketing expenditure.

A falling cost per lead can indicate improving efficiency.

But only if the quality of those leads remains consistent.

Generating twice as many worthless leads at half the cost is not an improvement.

The numbers that actually matter

None of these metrics should be discarded.

Average position, impressions, backlinks, technical health and search visibility all have legitimate roles in understanding SEO performance.

They become problematic when they are used as substitutes for commercial outcomes.

A useful way to think about SEO reporting is:

Visibility → qualified traffic → enquiries → qualified enquiries → revenue

Everything further to the left helps explain what is happening.

Everything further to the right tells you whether it actually matters.

A good SEO report should be able to connect the two. If you want to understand how we approach this, take a look at what we charge for SEO, AEO and digital marketing and the thinking behind our work.

Checklist – questions to ask about any SEO metric

• Does this metric measure something Google actually uses, or is it a third-party estimate?
• What specific keywords or pages does this number relate to?
• Are those keywords commercially relevant to my business?
• Has the improvement generated any additional enquiries or revenue?
• What would need to happen for this metric to translate into actual business results?
• Is this an intermediate measure being presented as a final outcome?

Frequently asked questions about SEO metrics that can make poor performance look good

Why do SEO agencies report on domain authority if Google does not use it?

Domain Authority and similar scores are easy to track and tend to move in predictable ways when link-building work is undertaken. They provide a convenient number for reports. The problem is that they can create the impression of progress without any actual improvement in rankings or traffic. A legitimate use is comparing your site with competitors. A problematic use is presenting DA increases as an SEO objective.

Should I ignore impressions in Google Search Console?

No. Impressions are useful for understanding where your site is appearing and spotting new opportunities. The issue arises when impressions are presented as a commercial win without any discussion of clicks, traffic quality or conversions. Impressions are the start of a journey, not the destination.

How can I tell if my SEO agency is using vanity metrics?

Ask them to explain the connection between the metrics they report and actual business outcomes. A good agency will be able to show the path from visibility to qualified traffic to enquiries. An agency relying on vanity metrics will struggle to make that connection clearly.

What is the most important metric for small B2B businesses?

Qualified enquiries. For most small B2B businesses, the ultimate measure of SEO success is whether the website is generating genuine business opportunities. Everything else supports that goal but should not be confused with it.

Can technical SEO scores be misleading?

Yes. A site can achieve a near-perfect technical score while still failing to rank for important keywords or generate any leads. Technical SEO removes barriers. It does not guarantee commercial success. The score is a useful diagnostic, not an outcome.

Why might increased organic traffic not lead to more business?

Traffic quality matters as much as quantity. A blog post attracting visitors searching for general information may bring thousands of sessions from people who will never become customers. A service page attracting 50 visitors with genuine buying intent may be far more valuable. Always look at what the traffic is doing, not just how much of it there is.