The short answer: rankings and traffic are inputs; enquiries are the output. Measuring whether local SEO works means counting calls, form fills and bookings, attributing each to its source, and comparing against a recorded baseline. The setup takes a day and changes every marketing decision you make afterwards. If your current agency cannot tell you how many enquiries their work produced last month, this article is the questionnaire they are hoping you never read.
Why rankings are not the metric
Rankings vary by searcher location (especially in Maps), fluctuate with algorithm weather, and can improve on terms nobody commercial ever searches. Traffic can rise while enquiries fall — wrong visitors, broken forms, slow pages. The only question that survives contact with a P&L is: how many enquiries did this channel produce, at what quality, versus before?
The four enquiry channels to instrument
Phone calls: at minimum, tap-to-call click events; properly, call tracking with a pool of local numbers that preserves your real number everywhere it is published. Forms: submission events (not page views of a thank-you URL someone can reach directly), carrying the source data with the lead. Bookings: completion events from your booking tool, the highest-signal conversion most local businesses have. Walk-ins and “how did you hear about us”: imperfect, still worth capturing at reception — some channels only show up here.
Attribution without a PhD
You need three layers, all standard and free. UTM discipline: tag every link you control — Business Profile website link, booking links, directory profiles, email signatures — so “organic” stops being a bucket hiding five different channels. Analytics events: calls, forms and bookings fired as conversion events in GA4, with consent handled properly. Lead-level source capture: the campaign, search term and landing page stored with each enquiry in whatever CRM or inbox you use, so quality — not just quantity — can be judged per channel. High-value sectors should judge channels on instructed clients and completed treatments, not raw lead count.
Baseline or it did not happen
Record the starting point before work begins: enquiries per month by channel, rankings on the terms that matter, map visibility (on a grid, not a single number), traffic to money pages. Every later claim of progress is measured against this. An agency that starts work without recording a baseline has ensured its results can never be checked — assume that was the point.
Questions that expose weak reporting
How many enquiries came from organic search last month, and how do you know? Which pages produced them? What changed this month, specifically, and where is that logged? What did not work? A provider with real measurement answers from data in minutes. A provider selling activity answers with impressions, “visibility scores” and a request to trust the process.
What good looks like monthly
One page a business owner reads in five minutes: enquiries by channel against baseline and last month; what was changed (the log); what moved and honest commentary on what did not; and next month’s planned work. Everything deeper — grids, crawls, term-level movement — available underneath for whoever wants it. That is the standard we publish to our own clients, and there is no technical reason any competent provider cannot match it.
Next step: if this raised questions about your own visibility, there are three honest ways to answer them. The free snapshot gives you three verified findings from your own site. The Website Revenue Audit (£295) gives you the full evidenced picture. And if you would rather not do the fixing yourself, the Repair Sprint (£795) implements the fixes for you. Or simply ask us directly.