407-233-3387Rankings and traffic are not results. Booked jobs are. Most businesses cannot tell whether SEO is paying because nobody ever connected a phone call to the search that produced it — and that is a setup problem, not an SEO problem.
Here is the tracking that answers the question, and the scorecard to read each month.
Thinking of doing SEO?
We can help. Drop your info below and we’ll take a free look at your Google Business Profile and website, then tell you straight what’s holding your rankings back.
Prefer to talk it through? Call (407) 233-3387 or send us a message.
The setup, in the order it matters
1. Call tracking
For most local businesses the majority of leads arrive by phone, so without call tracking you are blind to most of your results. Use dynamic number insertion so visitors from organic search see a tracked number while your real number stays in the page source and schema — that keeps your business data consistent.
Own the call tracking account yourself. If the agency owns it, they are marking their own homework.
2. Form tracking
Every form submission should record which page it came from and which channel brought the visitor. Most form plugins support hidden fields for this.
3. Google Business Profile insights
Calls, direction requests, and website clicks straight from the profile. This is your map pack scoreboard and it is free.
4. Ask every caller
The least technical and most reliable method. “How did you find us?” written on the job sheet, every time. Imperfect, but it catches what software misses.
The numbers worth watching
Split them into three tiers so you know what to react to.
Leading indicators — move first, in the first ninety days
- Search Console impressions
- Average position
- Indexed page count
- Live referring domains
- Profile views and searches
Middle indicators — months three to six
- Organic sessions
- Calls from organic traffic
- Form fills from organic
- Direction requests
Real results — month six onward
- Booked jobs traced to organic
- Revenue from those jobs
- Cost per lead and cost per booked job
- Return on the retainer
The calculation
Once you have three months of tracked data:
- Cost per lead = monthly SEO spend divided by organic leads
- Cost per job = cost per lead divided by your close rate
- Return = revenue from organic jobs divided by SEO spend
Compare cost per job against your ads cost per job and against what a lead is worth to you. That single comparison ends most arguments about whether SEO is working.
A one-page monthly scorecard
Ask your agency, or yourself, for exactly this and nothing more:
- Impressions and average position, this month against last
- Organic sessions
- Calls and form fills from organic
- Profile views, calls, and direction requests
- Pages published this month, with URLs
- Links built this month, with URLs
- Reviews gained
- What is planned next month
Two traps
- Judging revenue at month two. Leading indicators are the only fair measure that early.
- Ignoring the phone. A business tracking only form fills will conclude SEO is failing while the phone rings all day.
Keep reading
- Verifying the work itself: how to know if your SEO company is doing anything.
- Setting expectations: how long SEO takes to work.
- Browse what we do on our SEO and web design services page.
- See recent builds in our project gallery.
- Ready to talk? Get in touch with Mamba Media.
Thinking of doing SEO?
We can help. Drop your info below and we’ll take a free look at your Google Business Profile and website, then tell you straight what’s holding your rankings back.
Prefer to talk it through? Call (407) 233-3387 or send us a message.