Enterprise SEO Metrics & How to Report On Your Successes

Money is what businesses care about. It’s the end result of all of your SEO efforts. If you can show your SEO initiatives had an impact on the bottom line of the business, then you’ll get more buy-in and resources.

You want to report on revenue, or any metrics that are closely related to money. Most of this is going to come from your own business data.

Here are some enterprise SEO metrics related to money:

• Revenue. This is as direct of a number as you can get. It’s not often easy to get to though. In many cases, you’ll be combining data from a lot of sources and taking partial credit as part of a multi-touch attribution system.
• Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs). These are leads your sales team has determined are potential customers.
• Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs). Leads generated from marketing.
• Conversions. When a lead has performed some action you wanted them to take.
• Customer Lifetime Value (LTV). The average revenue a customer will generate over their lifetime with a business.
• Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC). The total cost of acquiring a new customer.
• Opportunity value. For these, you typically create a few scenarios saying if I do these things, this is what I forecast the results will be. So if you want to do a project like cleaning up redirects, you can say this is the number of links you’ll reclaim, this is the value of a link or cost of buying a link, and you can come up with a value number for the project.
• Return on Investment (ROI). This is how much you make in return for an investment of money after you account for your costs. You may see this as a yearly number or based on things like the total lifetime value of a customer.
• Cost efficiency. Saving money can be as important as seeing an increase in revenue. Typically you will find synergies with PPC and SEO teams such as using the same landing page for both instead of each team creating their own pages. Or you may choose to cut spending on paid ads for branded terms if no competitors are bidding on them, since that traffic will just go to organic instead.

In an enterprise environment, you’ll be fighting other teams for resources or budget. You need to be able to show why your company should invest more in SEO vs. other channels. If another channel is better at showing their value, they will get additional funding that could have gone to your team and your initiatives.

Another way to get buy-in at companies is to compare your site vs. your competitors. This relies on a more emotional sales play. No one wants to lose to their competitors!

If you can show that you’re losing or falling further behind on various SEO metrics, it makes it much easier to argue for additional funding and resources to carry out the projects you believe will have the biggest impact.

Competitor SEO scorecards offer an in-depth view of your performance against competitors, showcasing areas of strength and areas for improvement.

These can be done a number of different ways. You’ll often see some all-in-one scorecards with different sections like website health, visibility, and links. Other times these will be individual scorecards broken out into different sections. They typically include changes to the values such as MoM or YoY numbers.

Some metrics you may want to include in a competitor scorecard:

• Share of Traffic Value (SoTV)
• Share of Voice (SoV)
• Traffic Value
• Traffic
• Organic Pages
• Links
• Referring Domains
• Website Health
• Core Web Vitals
• Average Content Scores

SoV is commonly used, but I feel like I should explain SoTV since I haven’t seen this mentioned anywhere before. SoTV takes SoV a step further by equating it to money, which execs would like more. It helps identify your share of valuable traffic instead of traffic in general. I believe it is a stronger metric than SoV to use for reporting, but you could use both.

Our Traffic Value metric is what it would cost to buy ads for all of the organic traffic you get. The formula to calculate SoTV would be similar to calculating SoV. Here’s the calculation:

Your Traffic Value / (Total of your Traffic Value + the Traffic Values of each of your competitors) x 100

We don’t have exactly what I’d want for a competitor scorecard view in Ahrefs yet, but the data exists in many parts of the tool and you could pull the data with the API to create your own scorecard. We also have some views that are close like the competitor view on the Dashboard.

You may want to show individual metrics over time vs. competitors. The main chart in Overview is made to do exactly that. You can compare multiple metrics including:

• Organic traffic value
• Organic traffic
• Referring Domains
• Domain Rating
• Organic pages

Your boss and execs usually want to know what you and your team are working on and how things are going. For instance, you might report on the progress of any initiatives like 3/9 planned projects completed, you improved website health by three points, etc.

You might also want to create impact reports. For example, let’s say you’re running A/B tests for related things in a group of pages. By adding these pages to a Portfolio on the Dashboard, you’ll be able to see improvements or compare any two dates to better see the impact of your testing.

Almost every company has projects around creating new pages or updating existing pages, so you could report the numbers for those. This type of report could really include anything like indexing issues fixed, outreach emails sent, etc.

You might want to create these in scorecard views as well so that you can see the progress different products or groups are making towards initiatives. That way you can see if someone or some group is stuck and figure out how you can help them make progress.