"There's a particular kind of meeting that happens in ecommerce boardrooms. An agency slides a deck across the table, clears their throat, and announces that your Domain Authority is up four points. Everyone nods. Nobody mentions that revenue is flat."
Sound familiar?
I’m not saying your SEO agency is pulling the wool over your eyes. Some of them are brilliant. But the digital marketing world has a long tradition of measuring things that feel important, look impressive in a report, and have absolutely no bearing on whether anyone actually buys anything from you.
If you're running a Shopify store somewhere between €1m and €10m in turnover (revenue in US business speak), you've probably got better things to do than admire a graph that goes up and to the right while your sales figures don’t follow.
Here are nine metrics you can stop losing sleep over.
- Overall keyword rankings. Ah, the classic. You're number one in the UK for “how to make a leather wallet" Great! Now how many wallets did that sell? Rankings shift constantly, they vary by location, device, and browsing history, and they differ considerably across the UK, Germany, France, and other markets you might be selling into. A top ranking keyword nobody buys from is just a trophy gathering dust. What matters is showing up for the searches where people are ready to spend - commercial intent keywords.
- Domain Authority or Domain Rating. These are scores invented by third-party tools like Moz and Ahrefs, not by Google. They can be manipulated, they don't reflect how your site performs across different European markets, and no customer has ever typed "I only buy from DA60-plus websites" into a search bar.
- Bounce rate on its own. Here’s a fun one. If a customer lands on a product page, thinks "that's exactly what I wanted," and buys it straight away, Google Analytics registers that as a bounce. Without pairing bounce rate with conversion data, you're drawing conclusions from half a story. On its own, it tells you very little about how well your store is actually performing.
- Total number of backlinks. More is not more. Five thousand links from low-quality directories will do you far less good than fifty relevant links from trade publications, industry blogs, and trusted suppliers. It's about who is linking to you, not how many. Quality over quantity as they say.
- Pages per session. People clicking through six pages before finding what they came for isn't a sign of engagement. It's a sign that your navigation needs a serious review. On Shopify, a clean and straightforward path from browsing to checkout is a good thing. A customer who finds what they want and checks out in three clicks is the dream, not the disappointment.
- Impressions in search. Appearing in search results thousands of times a month sounds encouraging. But if people aren't clicking through, and those who do aren't buying, then impressions are just a number that looks nice in a report. They are the SEO equivalent of a shop window that everyone walks past. Since the advent of AI in recent years, we’ve also noticed an insane amount of bot traffic in analytics and polluting Shopify reports. Mostly from China, Singapore, and US.
- Average time on site. Ten minutes on your site sounds great until you realise they spent nine of those minutes trying to find the returns policy. A customer who checks out in forty-five seconds has done you a far greater service than someone who wandered around your collections like they were in IKEA on a Sunday afternoon and stopping for meatballs after.
- Number of indexed pages. This is the quiet troublemaker of the group. Shopify stores in particular can accumulate hundreds of duplicate or low-value pages generated by filters, tags, and out-of-stock products, all sitting in Google's index and diluting the authority of the pages that actually matter. It's worth keeping a closer eye on this than most people do.
- Page speed scores. Tools like Google PageSpeed Insights will hand you a low score out of 100 and leave you feeling like you've just failed your driving test. The good news is that if you're on a modern Shopify theme, you're already in decent shape. Shopify handles image optimisation and delivery automatically, and the platform has invested heavily in performance over the years. A score of 72 on mobile is not a crisis. Chasing a perfect 100 by stripping your site back to something that looks like it was built in 2003 is not a strategy. If your store loads quickly on a phone and people are buying, you can put the stopwatch away.
Right, so what should you actually care about?
The SEO numbers that matter are Organic revenue and Organic conversion rate to name a couple. How you're ranking for the searches that matter in your strongest markets. How many of those organic visitors are new customers rather than the same loyal few. And how quickly someone can get from landing on your site to completing a purchase, because if that journey has too many steps, no amount of SEO will save you.
If it doesn't have a clear line to revenue, it belongs in the appendix. Nine metrics on this list can be quietly retired from your monthly review, and nobody will miss them. What's left is a much shorter, much more honest picture of whether your SEO is actually earning its keep.
Oglesby Media helps Shopify stores focus on the SEO work that actually grows their ecommerce business. Get in touch.
