The five numbers a local business should track

A monthly SEO report is usually twelve pages containing about forty numbers, none of which tells the owner whether to keep paying. That is not an accident of design. Forty numbers is what you produce when you do not want any single one to be judged.

Five is enough. Each of these answers a question you would actually ask, and each has a defined thing you should do when it moves.

1. Enquiries, counted by source

Calls, form submissions and messages, counted, with where each came from. This is the only number on the list that is directly about money, and it is the one most reports leave out because it is the hardest to fake. Getting the source without wrecking your listing is the whole of call tracking without breaking your consistency.

If it goes up and nothing else did, something is working and you should find out what. If it goes down while rankings go up, you have a conversion problem on the page rather than a visibility problem, and more ranking will not fix it.

2. Actions on your Business Profile

Calls, direction requests, website clicks and messages, straight from the profile. These are people who found you in the map pack and did something about it.

Direction requests are the underrated one. Nobody asks for directions to a business they are not going to. For a business with premises, it is close to a purchase intent counter.

Watch the ratio, not just the totals. If views climb and actions do not, you are being shown to people your listing is not convincing, which usually means photos, hours, reviews or the description.

3. Rankings, measured across a geography

Not one position for one keyword. Where you rank across the area you serve, for the handful of searches that actually generate work.

This is the number most reports get wrong in the most self-serving way. A single reported position, checked from a single point, is almost meaningless in local search, because distance is one of the three factors and the answer changes street by street. A grid of results across your service area is a different instrument, and it will often show you ranking first at your door and nowhere three suburbs away.

One ranking number for a local business is not a measurement, it is a sample of one.

4. Impressions and clicks from Search Console

How many times your pages appeared in results, how many times they were clicked, and for which queries. This is the free, first party record of what search is doing for you, and it is the only source that tells you which words people used.

The report worth building from it is not the totals. It is the query list. Read it every month and you will find searches you did not know existed, questions you should be answering, and a slow drift in how people describe what you sell.

Rising impressions with flat clicks means you are appearing for things you are not winning, which is usually a title and description problem rather than a ranking one.

5. Cost per enquiry

Everything you spent on marketing this month, divided by the number of enquiries it produced. One number, calculated the same way every month. It is also the only fair way to compare local SEO against paid ads, because the two are usually argued about on impressions instead.

It is blunt, it ignores the lag between work and result, and it is still the most useful single figure a local business can keep, because it is the one that makes channels comparable. Ads, SEO, the directory subscription, the sponsored post: all of them produce enquiries and all of them cost money, and this puts them on the same axis.

Track it as a rolling three month figure rather than monthly. SEO spending in March produces enquiries in June, and a strict monthly calculation makes the channel look worse than it is early and better than it is later.

What is not on the list, and why

• Total website traffic. Includes everyone who was never going to call you, and rises reliably when you publish content nobody buys from.
• Bounce rate. Ambiguous in both directions. Someone who read your number and phoned you looks identical to someone who left immediately.
• Domain authority scores. Invented by tool vendors, not used by Google, and reported because they move.
• Keyword counts. The number of terms you rank for somewhere in the top hundred is a number that only goes up and means nothing.
• Social followers, unless you sell through social. For most local businesses this is a vanity line in a report.

If you want to work out what any of this is worth against what you are paying, the arithmetic is in what local SEO should cost. And if your numbers all look flat, the diagnosis order is in why you are not in the map pack.