Guides / Choosing an agency and measuring results
Why more traffic is not the same as growth
Traffic charts are easy to read and easy to celebrate. But more visitors do not automatically mean more customers, and higher rankings do not automatically mean more revenue.
Start from the business outcome
Decide what a good result looks like for your business: enquiries, bookings, sales, or something else. Then pick the few numbers that show progress toward it.
A simple set of metrics
- Visibility: impressions and clicks from search, and whether you appear in AI answers.
- Engagement: whether visitors reach the pages that matter.
- Conversion: how many visitors become enquiries or customers.
- Cost: what each enquiry or sale costs you, including ad spend and time.
Record a baseline
Whatever you choose, write down where you start before changing anything. Without a baseline you cannot tell whether a change helped, or whether the numbers moved because of the season.
Check the tracking first
Numbers are only useful if they are right. Duplicate events, missing conversions and mixed-up traffic sources are common. Fixing the tracking is often the most valuable first step.
Free tools: AI crawler checker · llms.txt generator · robots.txt AI rules generator