Stop Reporting Data. Start Driving Progress.

For years, the world of search engine optimization revolved around a simple equation: higher rankings brought more traffic, and more traffic supposedly meant success. SEO practitioners learned to justify their work with metrics like rankings, clicks, and traffic volume. This approach functioned as a reasonable stand-in for real business results for a long time. However, in the B2B sector, this foundation was always shaky, and it is now showing significant cracks. The rise of zero-click searches, the dominance of SERP features over traditional listings, and the emergence of generative search engines that provide immediate answers are collectively dismantling the old model. What was once considered solid performance is increasingly viewed as hopeful speculation rather than a measurable driver of growth.

The central challenge for modern SEO professionals is not demonstrating activity, but rather translating their specialized knowledge into outcomes that resonate with business leaders. Aligning with core business objectives is absolutely critical.

A clear example of this emerged during my time at Optus. When sales figures were disappointing, I seized the opportunity to connect significant technical SEO problems, such as missing canonical tags and client-side rendered content, to the broader business issue of declining revenue. These technical flaws were directly limiting the number of pages being indexed and discovered. The crucial takeaway wasn’t the technical fixes themselves, but how I framed the SEO issues within the context of a problem leadership already prioritized: generating sales.

Metrics like pages indexed, year-over-year traffic, and search visibility are too far removed from revenue to capture the attention of a CMO or Managing Director. To make an impact, you must demonstrate how resolving SEO challenges will directly unlock sales opportunities. This is the unique advantage SEO experts possess: we are hired for our deep technical knowledge. That expertise provides leverage, but only if we communicate its value using the language of business.

This principle should apply to every metric we track. If a data point cannot confidently predict resource allocation or revenue generation, it has no place in our reports.

It’s worth noting that the old model of using traffic as a proxy held up somewhat better in ecommerce. If an SEO campaign drove 50,000 extra visits and a 2% conversion rate, the revenue impact was directly visible in shopping cart data. While rankings and traffic were imperfect indicators, they were close enough to the final business outcome to be useful. SEO tools perpetuated this thinking by presenting estimated keyword traffic and conversion potential in a way that felt scientific.

The underlying math appeared straightforward: a certain number of searches multiplied by a click-through rate and a conversion rate. Dashboards transformed these estimates into an illusion of certainty. However, this certainty was always misleading, especially in B2B, where customer journeys are rarely linear, and even in B2C, where attribution is never as clean as a spreadsheet implies.

In B2B, the shortcomings were glaring. You could attract thousands of visits to a solutions page without seeing any corresponding increase in qualified sales pipeline. Enterprise sales cycles often span months, involve numerous decision-makers, and depend on a consistent brand presence to cultivate demand. Using traffic as a measure of success was always a weak strategy, and today, even that fragile connection is disappearing.

To be clear, traditional Google searches have not vanished as rapidly as some forecasts suggested. Data indicates that people still turn to Google, particularly when they are validating potential vendors, comparing solutions, or seeking specific information. In essence, Google maintains a role in the final stages of discovery.

Nevertheless, this does not redeem metrics like rankings, traffic, or impressions. In the B2B world, these proxies were never reliable indicators of pipeline impact. They might have looked impressive on a dashboard, but they told executives nothing about whether the right target accounts were moving closer to a purchase. Now, with generative engines influencing the initial stages of discovery, clinging to these outdated metrics only widens the gap between what SEO teams report and what business leaders need to see.

This is where the industry risks making familiar errors. Some vendors are already exploiting the hype around artificial intelligence, promoting “AI visibility” and “prompt volume” as the new key performance indicators for the generative age. On the surface, these metrics appear to be clean, simple numbers, much like keyword search volume once did. However, measuring visibility in AI outputs is fraught with issues that make it even less dependable than the proxies we are moving away from.

Monitoring your brand’s presence in generative engines does hold value, but it is not the ultimate goal. Keeping a consistent check on pre-determined prompts can offer insights into whether your core messaging is being reinforced, ignored, or misrepresented. This makes AI visibility a useful piece of situational awareness, a signal to respond to, rather than a universal source of truth.

The danger arises when practitioners begin treating these data snapshots as primary KPIs. Appearing in a large language model’s output does not automatically equate to customer demand, influence, or progression in a buying journey. It is not proof of impact; it is merely one perspective.

Prompt volume is an even less reliable metric. A significant portion of this “activity” is not generated by humans at all. It is artificially inflated by bots and synthetic testing tools designed to produce data for dashboards. This creates a self-referential loop where tools prompt other tools to generate numbers that justify their own existence. This approach mistakenly equates activity with intent, provides no indication of signal quality, varies widely between users, and is inherently unstable.

Compounding the problem, the methodology behind these metrics is often opaque. Tools frequently do not disclose how prompts are collected, which models are being queried, or how the results are standardized. Most importantly, none of this data is connected to revenue. Prompt volume does not correlate with account engagement, buying committee coverage, or pipeline velocity. It is essentially traffic measurement for a new era: easy to count, easy to report, and ultimately useless for proving business impact.

This is precisely why enterprise SEO professionals must stop reporting vanity metrics and start focusing on outcomes adjacent to revenue. The questions should shift from “Were we visible?” or “Did traffic grow?” to “Did we reach the right accounts?”, “Did we move buying committees closer to a decision?”, and “Did we expand our pipeline coverage?” These are the only metrics that will capture the attention of CMOs, Directors, and Managing Directors, and they are the only ones that position SEO as a strategic function.

I recall a conversation with an Adobe VP who would cut through discussions about declining organic traffic with one pointed question: “Did this traffic matter?” It was a powerful reminder that volume alone is meaningless. If you cannot demonstrate that the traffic was connected to revenue outcomes, you have not answered the question that leadership truly cares about.

Improving measurement begins with acknowledging that clicks are not the fundamental unit of value in enterprise; customer journeys are. The goal is not to capture random visibility, but to demonstrate how SEO contributes to moving target accounts from a state of unawareness, to active engagement, and finally into the sales pipeline.

This requires moving beyond traditional SEO dashboards and keyword reports. It demands collaboration with cross-functional teams to track signals across the entire customer lifecycle. In B2B, success does not come from SEO operating in a vacuum. It requires owned, paid, and earned channels working in harmony rather than in separate silos. Large language models are indifferent to internal company politics; they aggregate whatever information is available. If your brand signals are inconsistent across different channels, generative systems will not reconcile them, they will highlight the disconnect.

Content remains important, but not for the reasons most practitioners emphasize. It is not about publishing a high volume of articles, chasing specific keywords, or building what is often called topical authority. These are, at best, useful heuristics for content ideation, but they are inadequate for performance reporting. What truly matters is brand mental availability: ensuring your organization is top-of-mind for buyers when they finally enter the small percentage actively ready to purchase. The key measurement question shifts from “Did this content get traffic?” to “Did it help keep us top of mind with the right accounts until they were ready to buy?”

Most current SEO reports are essentially theater. They package traffic, rankings, and impressions into neat presentations filled with metrics that executives know do not prove revenue impact. To maintain relevance, SEO practitioners must reframe their measurement around the language of the sales pipeline: demand creation, account coverage, and journey velocity. This does not mean abandoning technical SEO or content creation. It means building a case that positions both as essential levers for shaping customer journeys, supported by metrics that leadership genuinely values.

Forecasting models也必须 evolve. The traditional approach, multiplying traffic by a conversion rate, is obsolete. It was always a crude simplification, even in ecommerce, where it ignored factors like seasonality, merchandising, pricing, and competition. In enterprise B2B, it was pure fantasy. Forecasting based on visits assumes that people convert independently, instantly, and predictably. This has never reflected how buying committees make decisions, and it certainly does not today.

However, forecasting still serves a vital purpose. Its goal is not just to predict outcomes, but to secure resources and executive support by providing a degree of certainty. Vice Presidents, Senior VPs, CMOs, and CEOs want assurance that investments in SEO are not gambles, but planned contributions to pipeline maturity. This is why practitioners cannot simply abandon forecasting when the old model fails; we must evolve it.

The new forecasting model must be built around customer journeys, not individual website sessions. This means shifting the inputs from traffic volume to account-specific signals:

• Reach: The percentage of Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) accounts demonstrating qualified engagement across owned, paid, and earned channels.
• Coverage: The number of relevant roles or contacts engaged within each target account.
• Velocity: The speed at which accounts progress through key stages of the buyer’s journey.

If Reach increases by 10%, Coverage adds a new role per account, and Velocity shortens by two weeks, what is the projected impact on the number of qualified accounts and pipeline coverage? This is the language that resonates with senior leadership.

The necessary tools to facilitate this shift are available today. Platforms like Adobe Real-Time CDP unify known and unknown data into comprehensive account-level profiles. Customer Journey Analytics connects engagement signals to revenue outcomes across various channels. Data enrichment layers from providers such as Bombora or 6sense can tie anonymous intent signals back to specific accounts. These technologies make it possible to model customer journeys in a way that traditional SEO dashboards never could.

This represents the future of SEO forecasting. It is not about multiplying traffic by a conversion rate, but about projecting how improvements in journey health drive account progression and pipeline growth. This approach is more complex and less tidy, but it is fundamentally more strategic. It is the only path for SEO to earn lasting credibility in the boardroom.

The mandate is clear: stop reporting on traffic and general activity. Start reporting on reach, coverage, and velocity. Forecast pipeline maturity with a level of certainty that justifies budget allocation. Communicate what you accomplished in terms that matter, how it progressed target accounts and strengthened the pipeline, and explain how your future plans will compound these results. This is the only answer that leadership will consistently fund.

(Source: Search Engine Land)