Stop Guessing: The Three Metrics Your Website Should Tell You Every Week

If you did some of the SEO work we talked about back in February, you probably changed a few things that were easy to control. You made page titles clearer. You cleaned up links. You might have even shaped key pages so they match the words customers actually type into Google.

That work is visible on the page.

What isn’t visible is whether it changed the dynamic behind the scenes in Google. Are the right people arriving? Did they land on the right page?  Did they take a valuable action on your site, like completing an enquiry form or adding a product to a shopping cart.

If you’re avoiding looking at the stats, it’s probably not because you don’t care.  It might well be because, reporting is built for statistics geeks who love reporting. You log in to Google and get hit with charts, jargon, and a hundred things you could look at.  All the time not finding any clear answer to the question you have, which is likely to be: is the website helping my business succeed this week, or not.

I want to outline the three website metrics I think are well worth checking regularly, that will tell you what’s working and what needs an extra nudge.

Visitors from Google search

Start with how many people came to your site from Google search.

This is different from impressions, it’s not about your rank, or a search that makes your business name appear.  Here we are talking about actual visits from real people, who searched for something in Google and clicked on the link leading to your website.

If that number is trending upwards over time, Google is sending traffic your way for searches that relate to what you offer.

If it’s flat, the site isn’t earning much search traffic yet.

This is high quality information that tells you whether your work you did is converting into website arrivals, and if it isn’t, you know you should keep your focus on building pages that match the searches you care about.

The page search visitors landed on

Next, understand the pages where your searchers most landed.

This is where the story becomes practical, because Google is showing you the pages that really matter. Search results should landing on the pages that answer questions real people have.

If most search visitors land on your homepage, that might be fine, but often it isn’t. A homepage is broad by design while someone searching is usually after something specific.

Someone searching “WordPress maintenance Canberra” wants to find someone in Canberra who will do WordPress maintenance. It’s not a vague, general request.

They don’t want to land somewhere that makes them hunt for that answer.

When the landing page matches the search intent, people stay. When it doesn’t, they drift away.

What action did they take?

The third metric is whether visitors took a meaningful action. Traffic on its own is just movement.

An action is what connects the website to the business.

For some reading this, that action be results from a web form, a phone call, a booking or a purchase. Pick the one that matters most and treat it as the number that you’re watching like a hawk.

The reality is a site can look busy and still do nothing useful. Tracking website actions is what demonstrates whether the website is seeing ‘conversions’, not just visits.

How to use what you find

Once those three metrics are visible, it’s like the path ahead of you being lit with a floodlight.

If search traffic is low, it generally means your site doesn’t yet have enough pages that match the searches people use (or Google doesn’t trust those pages enough to send traffic).

If search traffic is decent but the landing page is wrong, you know the fix: strengthen the page that should be ranking, or create it if it doesn’t exist.

If people arrive on the right page but meaningful actions are low, the page itself needs tightening: clearer opening, clearer promise, clearer next step, fewer distractions.

Why these three metrics matter

These three website metrics give you a clear picture of what’s working.

They tell you whether people are finding you, whether they’re arriving in the right place, and whether they’re taking a step that matters.

With measurement, improvements move from random tweaks to deliberate choices decided by the evidence in front of you.