Is your SEO working? How to measure it with Search Console and GA4

You have been paying an agency, or spending your own evenings on SEO, for months. Someone sends you a report full of charts, or nobody sends anything at all. Either way, you cannot answer a simple question: is it working?

SEO can be measured reasonably well with two free Google tools, as long as you look at the right numbers and do not expect them to be perfect. Google Search Console tells you how your site appears in Google search. GA4 (Google Analytics 4) tells you what visitors do after they arrive. You need both.

What Search Console shows

The Performance report shows, for Google search only:

• Impressions: how often your pages appeared in results.
• Clicks: how often someone clicked through to your site.
• Click-through rate: clicks divided by impressions.
• Average position: where you appeared on average, across all those searches.

You can break these down by query, page, country, device and date, and compare two periods. Some rare searches are hidden for privacy, so the query list never adds up to the full total.

Two cautions. Average position is an average across every search you appear for, so it can drop when you start appearing for many new, longer searches, which is often good news. And searches for your own business name mostly reflect your reputation, not your SEO. Filter them out to see whether you are reaching new people.

What GA4 shows

GA4's acquisition reports show visits from organic search alongside your other channels, and what those visitors did next. The important part is setting up key events, which is GA4's name for the actions that matter to you: a contact form sent, a tap on your phone number, a click on a WhatsApp button, a completed order. Without these you see traffic but not results. You can also link Search Console to GA4 so both sets of data sit in one place.

A simple monthly routine

1. Compare like with like. Open Search Console and compare the last three months with the three months before. If your business is seasonal, around Eid or winter for example, compare with the same period last year instead.
2. Record a few numbers in a sheet: clicks and impressions from searches that do not include your business name, the number of pages getting clicks, enquiries or orders from organic search in GA4, and enquiries that customers say came from Google.
3. Note what moved and why. List the top pages and queries that rose or fell, and anything you changed that month: new pages, a redesign, a hosting move.
4. Ask new customers how they found you. Many customers in Bangladesh see your website, then call, or message you on WhatsApp or Facebook. Analytics cannot always connect those steps, so one question in the first conversation fills the gap.
5. Read the trend, not the day. Impressions usually move first, then clicks, then enquiries.

Readings that mislead

• Checking your ranking by searching on your own phone. Results depend on location and history, and your phone is not your customer's.
• Watching one keyword's position and ignoring everything else.
• Counting all traffic, including visits from countries you do not serve and obvious spam.
• Celebrating clicks while enquiries stay flat. If visitors arrive but do not contact you, the problem may be on the page rather than in SEO.
• Comparing a festival month with an ordinary month.

If numbers suddenly fall, that is a separate job; see diagnosing a Google traffic drop.

Yourself or with help

An owner or manager can read these reports and keep the monthly sheet. Setting up key events for phone and WhatsApp clicks, making sure GA4 is installed correctly, and building a clear dashboard usually need someone technical. I set these up as part of my SEO service.

Set your baseline today

Open Search Console's Performance report, set the date range to the last three months, compare it with the previous period, and add a query filter that excludes your business name. Write down the clicks and impressions. That is your baseline. If you want help reading it, send me a message.