· 8 min read
Not necessarily deliberately. But the metrics they are showing you are almost certainly designed to look impressive rather than tell you what is actually happening. Here is how to tell the difference.
Every month, thousands of South African business owners open a PDF from their SEO agency. It has graphs. It has numbers. It has a lot of green arrows pointing upward. And somewhere in the back of their mind, a quiet voice says: but why isn’t the phone ringing more?
That voice is right. The report is not lying in the sense that the numbers are fabricated. It is lying in the sense that the numbers have been carefully chosen to show progress whether or not any real progress exists.
Here is a guide to what the metrics actually mean, which ones matter, and which ones exist purely to make an agency look like it is earning its retainer.
The metrics that do not mean what they say they mean.
Domain Authority (DA) / Domain Rating (DR)
Domain Authority is a score invented by Moz. Domain Rating is a score invented by Ahrefs. Neither is a Google metric. Google does not use DA or DR as a ranking factor. It never has.
These scores are useful as a rough competitive benchmark — if your site scores 15 and your competitor scores 55, that gap is meaningful context. But an agency reporting that your DA went from 12 to 14 this month as a primary success metric is showing you a number they can influence (by building low-quality links) that has no direct relationship to your actual search visibility or enquiry volume.
If your report leads with DA movement, that is a red flag.
Visibility percentage — the one agencies love most
Visibility is a Semrush metric that estimates how often your site appears in search results for the keywords being tracked. It sounds meaningful. Here is the problem: it only measures the keywords in the tracking campaign — and the agency controls which keywords go into the campaign.
How the trick works…Month one: agency sets up a new tracking campaign. Visibility starts at 0% because tracking just began.
Month three: visibility is now 48%. The agency reports a +48% visibility increase.
What actually happened: they started measuring. The site was probably already ranking for most of those terms before the campaign began. The “growth” is the act of starting to measure, not actual improvement.
We have a live example of this in our own client work. A Semrush position tracking report for one of our clients shows +48.03% visibility. That number is technically accurate. But the tracking campaign started partway through the engagement — the visibility figure reflects the campaign start date, not the full period of work. We document this on the Netking case study page because we think business owners deserve to understand what they are looking at.
Most agencies do not explain this. They show you the number and let you draw the wrong conclusion.
Total impressions
Impressions are how many times your site appeared in search results. An impression does not mean anyone clicked. It does not mean anyone saw your listing. It means Google returned your URL somewhere in its results — including page four, position 47, for a search term nobody is actually using.
Impressions going up is not inherently meaningful. Impressions going up for the right keywords, with clicks following, is meaningful. Always look at impressions and clicks together, and always ask what the click-through rate is.
Keyword rankings without volume context
Ranking number one for a keyword that gets 10 searches a month in South Africa is not an achievement. It is a distraction. Always ask the monthly search volume for any keyword being reported as a ranking win. If the answer is under 100 searches per month nationally, question whether it belongs in the report at all.
The metrics that actually matter.
Organic clicks from Google Search Console
This is the number of times a real person clicked on your search result and landed on your site. It comes directly from Google. It cannot be gamed by choosing which keywords to track. It is the most honest measure of whether your SEO is generating actual traffic.
Look at it over a rolling 16-month period. Is the trend going up? Are the keywords driving those clicks relevant to your business? That is the conversation worth having.
Non-branded vs branded traffic split
Branded traffic is people who searched for your company name. They already know you. Non-branded traffic is people who found you through product or service searches without knowing your name. That is new customer acquisition.
If 90% of your organic traffic is branded, your SEO is not working — your reputation is. Those are very different things. A healthy split for a business investing in SEO is 60-70% non-branded over time.
One of our long-term clients, runs at 68% non-branded. That means more than two thirds of their organic traffic is new people finding them through product searches. That is what good SEO actually delivers.
Conversion events in GA4
Are the people arriving from organic search actually doing anything? Filling in a contact form. Calling the phone number. Adding to cart. Visiting more than one page. If your GA4 is set up correctly, you can see exactly what organic traffic does when it arrives — not just that it arrived.
If your agency is not reporting on conversions, ask why. If they say your GA4 does not have conversion tracking set up, that is a problem they should have fixed in month one.
Average position for high-intent keywords
Not your average position across all keywords — that number is meaningless. Your position for the specific terms that drive your business. “Website audit South Africa.” “SEO consultant Cape Town.” “WooCommerce developer South Africa.” Are those moving? By how much? Over what timeframe?
The questions to ask your agency next month.
Before your next monthly report call, send these questions and see what comes back:
“Can you show me our organic click data directly from Google Search Console for the last 12 months?”
“What percentage of our organic traffic is non-branded?”
“How many organic conversion events did we record in GA4 this month?”
“What is our current position for [your most important keyword] and what was it six months ago?”
“When did you start the visibility tracking campaign and what was the baseline?”
If these questions get deflected, answered with more graphs, or met with defensiveness — you have your answer about the relationship.
What a good SEO report actually looks like.
Short. Plain language. Four numbers that matter: organic clicks this month vs last month vs same month last year, top performing pages, top performing keywords with volume context, and conversion events. Then: what moved, what did not, what we are doing about it.
No 47-slide decks. No DA graphs. No visibility percentages without explaining what the denominator is.
If you have never received a report that looks like that — and you would like to know what your site is actually doing — a nogravy Site Audit starts with an honest read of your current data. No agenda. Just the truth about where things stand.
The bottom line: A good SEO report makes your business clearer, not more confused. If you leave every monthly call feeling like you need a translator, that is not a complexity problem. That is a honesty problem.