SEO Is Changing, but Businesses Are Still Measuring the Wrong Things

A Ranking Increase Is the Start of the Question

If a client moves from position eight to position three for an important keyword, I’m happy about it. Something we did is probably working.

But I don’t want the analysis to stop there.

I want to know how many more impressions the page received. Then I want to see what happened to clicks. After that, I want to know what people did once they were on the site.

Did they actually stay on the page? Did they look at another service? Did they call? Submit a form? Request a quote?

That is especially important with local SEO because keyword volumes can look tiny compared with national or informational searches.

A roofing company might only have a relatively small number of people searching for one particular roofing service in its city each month. But if one new roofing customer is worth several thousand dollars, that small keyword can be worth a lot more than a broad informational keyword generating thousands of visits.

This is one reason I don’t like making SEO decisions purely from search volume.

Ahrefs makes a similar point when discussing SEO metrics. Organic traffic can increase without sales increasing with it. I think that distinction sounds obvious, but it gets ignored surprisingly often.

I Would Rather Have the Right 500 Visitors Than the Wrong 5,000

Traffic is probably the easiest SEO metric to make look impressive.

Publish enough broad informational content and there is a good chance you can grow it. That can absolutely be useful, especially if those articles support the rest of the website.

But traffic for the sake of traffic has never interested me much.

If I have a local service business as a client, I would rather bring 500 people to the website who have a realistic chance of becoming customers than 5,000 people who are there because we found a loosely relevant keyword with high search volume.

That changes the keyword research process quite a bit.

I still look at volume, competition and current rankings. But I also want to understand why somebody is making the search. What are they actually looking for? Which service does it connect to? Is there a logical page we can create or improve for it? What happens if we rank?

And most importantly, what could that traffic be worth?

Sometimes the answer is that a keyword with 40 or 50 monthly searches deserves more attention than one with several thousand.

SEO tools are extremely useful here, but they are still tools. Their traffic numbers are estimates. Ahrefs, for example, explains how its organic traffic estimates are calculated from rankings, search volume and estimated click-through rates.

I use those numbers constantly for research. I just wouldn’t put them in front of a business owner and pretend estimated organic traffic is the same thing as actual visitors or customers.

A Lot of “SEO Problems” Are Actually Page Problems

I still come across websites where one generic Services page is supposed to do everything.

A company offers ten different services, but Google and the customer both get one page with a few paragraphs explaining all of them.

Then everyone wonders why the site struggles to rank for the individual services.

If roofing matters, give roofing a proper page. If commercial roofing is a major part of the business, that may need its own page too. If Nanaimo is an important market, there should probably be something on the website that genuinely speaks to customers in Nanaimo.

This helps SEO, but it also helps conversion.

Someone searching for a very specific service does not want to land on a vague page and figure out for themselves whether the company can help.

They want to know what you do, whether you do it in their area, what the process looks like, whether other people trust you and what they should do next.

That is where I think SEO and CRO overlap much more than people sometimes realize.

If rankings are improving but leads are not, I don’t immediately conclude that SEO is failing. I start looking at the system.

Are we targeting searches that could actually make money? Are we sending people to the right pages? Is the offer clear? Is there enough proof? Are the calls to action obvious? Are we creating unnecessary friction before someone can contact the company?

You can rank a bad page. It is still a bad page.

Content Needs a Reason to Exist

The same applies to content.

I’m not a fan of producing five blog posts every month simply because a package says the client gets five blog posts every month.

There should be a reason for the article.

Maybe customers repeatedly ask a particular question before buying. Maybe a competitor is attracting qualified traffic with a topic we have completely ignored. Maybe a service page needs supporting information. Maybe there is a search happening earlier in the buying process where we can introduce the business before the customer is ready to contact anyone.

Those are useful reasons to publish something.

Finding a keyword with volume is not enough for me.

Google’s own guidance on creating helpful, reliable, people-first content says publishers should create content primarily for people rather than content made mainly to attract search traffic.

I actually think that is a pretty good test.

Would this article still be worth having on the website if Google sent it less traffic than expected?

If it answers a useful customer question, supports an important service and helps someone make a decision, probably yes.

If its entire purpose disappears the moment it fails to rank, I would question why we created it in the first place.

Reviews Are Part of the SEO Picture Too

For local businesses, I think reviews are still underestimated as an SEO asset.

Obviously reviews help conversion. If someone is deciding between two contractors and one has dozens of strong recent reviews while the other barely has any, that matters.

But I also look at what customers actually say.

A natural review can mention the service, location, type of project and experience with the company all in a few sentences. When that happens across a large number of reviews, it creates a surprisingly detailed picture of what the business does and where people trust it.

That is useful information for customers. It also gives search platforms more context around the business.

Google confirms in its local ranking guidance that prominence is one of the main factors behind local results and that reviews and positive ratings can help local ranking.

So I don’t see reputation management as something completely separate from SEO anymore.

For a local business, it is part of the same system.

AI Search Is Adding Another Set of Metrics

Now we have AI visibility to think about as well.

Businesses want to know whether they appear in AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Gemini and other AI-driven search experiences. I think they should know. We track that kind of visibility too.

What I don’t want is for AI visibility to become another vanity metric.

Saying a company appeared in 200 AI answers this month sounds great. But what did those appearances actually mean?

Were they relevant questions? Was the company recommended positively? Which sources were being cited? Did branded searches increase? Did referral traffic change? Did more people discover the business?

Those questions are harder to answer than checking a traditional ranking, which is exactly why I think we need to be careful with how we report AI search.

The customer journey is becoming less linear.

Someone could discover a company in an AI answer and never click anything. Two days later they might search the company name directly. Then they look at Google reviews. Then they visit the website. A week later they call.

There probably isn’t going to be a perfect attribution model for that.

Google also makes an important point in its documentation about AI features and your website: there are no special additional technical requirements for appearing in AI Overviews or AI Mode. The same SEO fundamentals still matter.

That lines up with what I have seen.

I don’t really view “AI SEO” as a replacement for traditional SEO. Better service pages, stronger internal linking, useful content, reviews, authority and clear information about the business help traditional search and also give AI systems better information to work with.

Reporting Should Tell You What to Do Next

This is probably my biggest issue with a lot of SEO reporting.

There can be fifty metrics in the report, but at the end of it nobody really knows what decision should be made.

I would rather have a smaller report that tells me something useful.

If rankings increased but clicks didn’t, why?

If clicks increased but leads stayed flat, why?

If leads increased but sales didn’t, are we attracting the wrong people or is something breaking later in the sales process?

Those are much more interesting questions than whether organic sessions happened to increase 12 percent compared with last month.

It is also where SEO becomes connected to the rest of the company.

The SEO person cannot always answer why a qualified lead did not close. But if we know where leads came from and what happened to them afterward, we can at least separate a traffic problem from a conversion problem or a sales problem.

Without that connection, a lot of SEO decisions are still guesses.

Start With the Business, Then Build the SEO Strategy

If I am looking at a new client, I don’t want to start with a giant keyword export.

I want to understand the business first.

Which services actually make money? Which services do they want more of? Where do they want to grow? What does a good customer look like? What is a typical project worth? Where are leads currently coming from?

Then the SEO data has context.

Maybe we discover a service where the company has great margins but almost no organic visibility. That gets my attention.

Maybe there is another service generating a lot of traffic but consistently poor-quality inquiries. That tells us something too.

Once I understand the business, keyword research, content, local SEO, CRO and authority building become much easier to prioritize.

I still want rankings to improve. I still want more organic traffic. I still want stronger backlinks and more visibility across Google Maps and AI search.

I just want all of those things to lead somewhere.

For me, the best SEO strategy is not the one with the prettiest ranking report. It is the one where you can follow the path from stronger visibility to more qualified inquiries, more customers and, eventually, more revenue.

By Felix Kirsch, Van Isle SEO.