Topic evidence page
Source-backed creator statements and evidence excerpts related to SEO measurement.
Your rankings are completely irrelevant. I don't know how many more ways I can tell people that your website's keyword rankings are actually not important. Let's say you're ranking position 1 for a load of keywords, but they don't actually bring you any website traffic. Or maybe they do bring you traffic, but you're getting no conversions from them. Why w...
OpenIf you're investing any time or money in SEO, you don't need to wait six months to know if it's working. Check these metrics regularly and you will know in the first two to three months if your SEO strategy is working. Go to performance search results and tick average position. Don't even bother looking at position 1 rankings at this stage. You're not the...
OpenYour rankings are completely irrelevant. I don't know how many more ways I can tell people that your website's keyword rankings are actually not important. Let's say you're ranking position 1 for a load of keywords, but they don't actually bring you any website traffic. Or maybe they do bring you traffic, but you're getting no conversions from them. Why w...
OpenIf you're investing any time or money in SEO, you don't need to wait six months to know if it's working. Check these metrics regularly and you will know in the first two to three months if your SEO strategy is working. Go to performance search results and tick average position. Don't even bother looking at position 1 rankings at this stage. You're not the...
OpenAs we're approaching the end of 2025, there is no doubt that AI has had a huge impact on SEO, and Ahrefs have released a super interesting study that shows exactly what that looks like now. And it's probably not what you think. We're gonna start with the negatives, and probably the most obvious, to be honest, top rankings have lost a third of their clicks. This means if you're ranking position 1 on Google, and you were before AI overviews were introduced, you have probably noticed a big drop in traffic. And that...
Your rankings are completely irrelevant. I don't know how many more ways I can tell people that your website's keyword rankings are actually not important. Let's say you're ranking position 1 for a load of keywords, but they don't actually bring you any website traffic. Or maybe they do bring you traffic, but you're getting no conversions from them. Why would you care about those rankings? Why would you wanna rank for those terms? Let's say they do bring decent traffic and conversions, but your rankings fluctuat...
If you're running an SEO campaign, you're probably tracking keyword rankings, and this makes sense, right? To know how well the SEO campaign is doing, you need to know if you're moving up in the ranks. However, as someone who's been doing SEO for 16 years, I'm gonna tell you that rank tracking is one of the worst ways to track the performance of an SEO campaign. I'll tell you why it's so unreliable. One exception to this rule, and then the best way to track the performance of your SEO campaign. So there's two ma...
you don't care about all traffic. For example, branded traffic. If someone is searching for your brand by name, you should rank at the top of Google no matter what you're doing on the SEO side. So when you're trying to evaluate the performance of your SEO campaign, you should filter out branded traffic. Also, it's important to understand that some traffic is just much more valuable than others. Typically, you would rather have one visit to a product or service page than 100 visits to some blog post. So that's wh...
If you're investing any time or money in SEO, you don't need to wait six months to know if it's working. Check these metrics regularly and you will know in the first two to three months if your SEO strategy is working. Go to performance search results and tick average position. Don't even bother looking at position 1 rankings at this stage. You're not there yet. Just look for keywords seeing a significant jump in position. Then check your total impressions. If you see this gap widening, Google is showing your pa...