Vanity Metrics: The SEO Trap That Costs You Sales

Vanity Metrics: The SEO Trap That Costs You Sales

You've possibly seen it in a report or on a call. Traffic is up. Impressions are up. Click-through rate has gone up a bit too. And yet, you're getting fewer calls, fewer emails, fewer sales.

If you've ever wondered how that's possible, you've already spotted the problem. Vanity metrics. These are the numbers that look good on paper but mean nothing in practice. Some agencies love them. They fill reports with them but they're not the reason you're paying for SEO, and they won't keep your business going with enquiries.

This post breaks down what vanity metrics are, why they exist, how they're used to hide poor

performance, and what to track instead.

What Are Vanity Metrics?

It's a term we started using when our second SEO agency was looking after our site. Vanity metrics are data points that give the illusion of progress, but don't actually reflect business

performance.

In SEO, these are the usual suspects:

- Impressions (how many people could have seen your listing)

- Generic traffic numbers (often not broken down by source or location)

- Keyword rankings for irrelevant terms

- Pages indexed

- Domain authority scores

- Bounce rates presented without context

They're not useless in isolation, but when they're used to paint a picture of success while leads are dropping, something's wrong.

Why They're Used

Agencies use vanity metrics because they're easy to inflate and hard for clients to challenge.

Here's how it plays out:

- They target broad, high volume keywords because they're easier to rank for.

- You get more impressions and a rise in traffic.

- They report this as success.

- You still get fewer enquiries, but they have graphs showing green arrows going up, so you feel like "something" is happening.

Meanwhile, you're paying monthly for activity that isn't leading to real world results.

The Risk to Your Business

The biggest risk with vanity metrics is complacency. If you think SEO is "working" because the traffic chart looks good, you might not question why the phone isn't ringing. You might let it run for six or twelve months before realising you've spent thousands and have nothing to show for it. In some cases, the wrong SEO strategy can actively harm your position. If poor content is published under your name or irrelevant traffic muddies your data, you can end up worse off than when you started.

Real Metrics That Actually Matter

If you're going to measure performance properly, focus on the numbers that connect directly to your business outcomes.

Here's what to look at instead:

- Number of qualified enquiries (actual emails or calls from people you want to work with)

- Search terms people are using to find you (in Google Search Console)

- Top landing pages that lead to those enquiries

- Average ranking for your relevant keywords, not just anything you happen to rank for

- Traffic by location (are you attracting the right regions?)

- Time on page and scroll depth (are people actually reading your content?)

- Conversions (even if it's just tracking form submissions or button clicks)

If these aren't in your monthly SEO report, or no one's explaining them clearly, that's a red flag.

What We Learned the Hard Way

When we hired an agency for one of our businesses, the traffic numbers looked good. Reports were full of graphs and positive stats but our enquiries dropped after a couple of weeks. The contact forms weren't being sent, the emails we're more spaced out. Potential clients were not interacting with our business the way they had done previously. We looked to the economy, the news, and social media, we asked suppliers had their numbers fallen. We primarily servcied hospitality and they had faced difficult times and spent less overall with us but this seemed different. We could see other projects being delivered by competitor, suppliers were not reporting any drop in their sales and nothing jumped out news or economy wise.

Looking at the website we were averaging around 100 visitors a day whic historically would be busy for us, we should be seeing 15+ ebquiries per week, more than we could deal with but we were getting 5 maximum. Some days none at all. We hadn't experienced this before. Even when we started out there were around 5-10 small enquiries a week.

I emailed the SEO agency and asked if they were seeing the same numbers?. I'd started to doubt the figures I was seeing on our own platform. They confirmed traffic was up and averaging 100 a day. I still didn't suspect that there was a problem with our SEO. Because we'd always done it in house we assumed that the professionals would be covering the keywords we were already rianking for. It was only when I looked at the bounce rates I realised something was very wrong. Visitors were not spending any time on our site. They were landing hitting a page or two and leaving. We had always had decent retention and low bounce rates as we were very niche. Anyone who found us was already interested in what we were offering.

I asked for a call with the agency and they finally had the time a week later. I had asked for the list of keywords they had been pushing, and I quickly realised there had been either a miscommunication or they were just pushing generic jeywords in a bid for higher traffic numbers.

The keywords were generic shopfitting terms and didn't align with anything we did. We'd actually ranked really quickly for these terms but with no focus on our target and long tail keywords we'd slipped off page one for the terms we previously ranked for.

We had people visiting the site looking for services we didn't offer and then quickly leaving.

I spent a few hours with our account manager at the agency and I tried to refocuss their attention quickly. Naively I believed this was all it would take to fix the lack of enquiry. I was very Wrong.

The agency had gone after high volume commercial keywords that didn't match the kind of clients we worked with. We ended up with more visits from people who were never going to buy from us, and fewer from the ones who would. It took months to undo the damage. When we went back to our own strategy, targeting longtail search terms and our focussed keywords that had real intent behind them and by re working our content that delivered informative and encouraging calls to action without being spammy, the leads came back.

How to Tell if You're Being Misled

Here are a few signs to look out for:

- You're ranking well for search terms you've never heard of

- The agency avoids discussing actual sales or lead numbers

- You get a report full of charts, but no real explanation of what they mean

- You ask what the goal is for next month, and the answer is "more traffic"

If any of these feel familiar, it's worth asking some direct questions.

SEO isn't simply about traffic. It's about being visible where it matters and to the potential clients that matter. If your website is being found by the right people and those people are getting in touch, then it's working. If not, no amount of upward graphs can change that.

Vanity metrics are talking points. Real SEO delivers engagement and enquiry.