It’s quite hard to bring executives along with you on an SEO journey.
It’s easy to explain it all at a high level because everyone has used Google. But it’s much harder for outsiders to understand why it matters, how hard it is to get right and why they must support you in spending time and money on it. I am unsure it helps that SEO is so often bundled with PPC and paid media, which is very binary in its reporting.
Sometimes it feels like SEO reporting is all about communicating upwards…maintaining belief long enough for results to compound.
Why SEO reporting fails in B2B organisations
There are three structural reasons SEO reporting struggles to garner support internally:
Buying cycles are long, so revenue takes time to arrive
SEO delivers influence before conversion; not last click wins.
Most reporting defaults to consumer style metrics, which do not reflect how prospects actually buy in B2B.
When those three collide, SEO can look slow, fuzzy, and optional to people that don’t quite ‘get it’.
Start by agreeing what SEO is responsible for
Before you build a single report, align on what SEO is meant to do.
In our world, SEO is often responsible for:
• Increasing visibility for priority prospect problems
• Educating prospects earlier in the buying process
• Supporting sales conversations with credible content
• Improving conversion quality rather than volume
If SEO is expected to drive revenue in the same way as paid media, it will fail the test unfairly and B2B marketers have to acknowledge the comparisons outsiders will automatically make.
Reality check
If SEO’s role is not articulated well, it will be judged against the wrong criteria.
Stop reporting the wrong things first
Before improving SEO reporting, most teams need to stop reporting something else.
If your report leads with rankings, total traffic, or an SEO score, you are training stakeholders to ask the wrong questions. Those metrics are not useless, but when they dominate reporting they crowd out the signals that actually matter.
Good SEO reporting replaces vanity with relevance.
Separate leading and lagging indicators in every report
Leading indicators are early signals that progress is happening.
Lagging indicators are outcomes that appear later.
This usually looks like:
Leading indicators:
• Impressions in Google Search Console
• Click through rate on priority queries
• Query breadth across a topic
• Ranking stability over time
Lagging indicators
• Conversions
• Assisted conversions
• Pipeline influence
• Revenue
Leading indicators build confidence that the things you and the team are doing are starting to work. Lagging indicators validate that it did.
Reality check
If you only report lagging indicators, SEO will always look like it is underperforming.
Use Search Console
Google Search Console should sit at the heart of SEO reporting because it comes directly from Google and reflects actual search visibility.
Key technical terms to explain internally:
Impressions
How often your pages appear in search results. This measures visibility, not interest.
Clicks
How often searchers choose your result. This reflects interest.
Click through rate
Clicks divided by impressions. This reflects how relevant and credible your result appears in the SERP (Search Engine Results Page).
Average position
The average ranking across impressions. Useful for trend context, not precision.
Query
The exact phrase a prospect searched for. This reveals how prospects describe problems.
Query breadth
The range of related queries you appear for. This indicates growing topical authority.
Search Console should be used to show whether visibility is expanding in the right problem spaces, not whether one keyword moved up or down.
Give executives a simple reporting spine
Good B2B SEO reporting should always answer three questions:
Are we visible for the right prospect problems?
Is trust and credibility increasing?
Is that trust showing up in pipeline behaviour?
Whenever I stepped into new CMO roles, it would make me so happy to see something that at least resembled that thought process.
Explain SERPs and intent to non-marketers
A SERP, or Search Engine Results Page, is what Google shows after a search.
You cannot report on SEO properly without referencing the SERP, because the SERP reveals search intent, meaning what the searcher is actually trying to achieve.
Intent typically falls into patterns like learning, comparing, validating, or deciding.
If your content does not match the dominant intent of the SERP, rankings alone will not convert.
Reality check
If traffic is not converting, the answer is usually in the SERP. A spreadsheet shows performance while the gold ol’ SERP shows intent. If Google is rewarding educational content, expect education behaviour, not conversions.
Show contribution without overclaiming revenue
This is where B2B marketers can look a little silly. Most SEO value shows up as assisted influence, not last click revenue.
An assisted conversion is when SEO influenced a prospect’s journey but was not the final interaction before conversion.
Prospects often discover, research, and validate through organic search weeks before they speak to sales. By the time they convert, they already know who you are.
If reporting only credits the final click, SEO will appear invisible. It’s really important that B2B marketers control the narrative and communicate the full picture, every time.
Reality check
If SEO never appears in assisted conversions, either SEO is failing or attribution is broken.
Connect SEO reporting to GA4 and CRM language
GA4 measures what prospects do after they land on your site.
Key concepts to explain simply:
Conversion
A tracked action that matters commercially.
Attribution
How credit for conversions is assigned across channels.
Assisted influence
Where SEO supports the journey without closing it.
In CRM terms, SEO should be discussed in relation to
• Deal quality
• Sales velocity
• Objection handling
• Content usage in live deals
The best Chief Marketing/Commercial/Revenue Officer’s care less about where you rank and more about whether prospects arrive informed, confident, and easier to close. Why? Because they can use that narrative and evidence upwards (and sidewards with sales peers).
Report less often, but with more narrative
Quarterly SEO reporting can focus on:
• Leading indicators
• Visibility trends
• Early behavioural signals
With a narrative rich story around:
• Assisted influence
• Pipeline contribution
• Strategic progress against priority topics
Giving your CMO that insight is so useful for them to have in their arsenal.
Reality check
If your report cannot be explained verbally to a sales leader in five minutes, you may not understand it well enough.
Understand evidence versus proof
SEO reporting rarely provides courtroom proof and, like many things with marketing, there does need to be some level of believe that if you do the right things, the results will come. Reporting should gradually build that evidence that value is accruing over time.
It builds evidence that value is accruing over time.
Expecting certainty too early is one of the fastest ways to increase the risk of killing a good programme that would have produced in the end.
The metrics that quietly kill SEO programmes
Avoid these in senior reporting:
• Vanity ranking snapshots
• Total organic traffic without intent segmentation
• Single KPI SEO scorecards
• Last click only revenue charts
• Data overload
As a former CMO, I can tell you that I really don’t want to see table after table or screenshot after screenshot of SEMrush or various tools. I want the numbers I should care about and your, evidenced, narrative. Leave the rest for the appendix.
The simple rule to remember
SEO reporting exists to maintain confidence while authority compounds.
If SEO is reported like a channel that should perform instantly, you are encouraging your stakeholders to come to the wrong conclusions and it will be hard to get them back after you’ve lost them.
Call to action
If you want SEO to survive and thrive internally, stop reporting it like a consumer channel.
Agree what SEO is responsible for. Separate leading and lagging indicators. Use Search Console to show growing visibility in the right problem spaces. Connect that visibility to assisted influence, sales confidence, and pipeline quality over time.
If you want help building an SEO reporting approach that senior stakeholders actually trust, get in touch and we will introduce you to people who genuinely know what good looks like.
