The most important KPIs for a small business website - Zephyra Studio

A small business needs five to seven indicators, and everything else mostly consumes attention. The practical list is: the number of qualified enquiries, cost per enquiry, the rate at which enquiries become customers, average job value, non-branded organic traffic, site conversion rate, and how quickly enquiries are answered. The first is business, the rest show where business is being lost. The numbers often tracked but unhelpful are total page views, position for a single keyword, follower counts, and time on site without context. This article covers what to track, how to calculate it and how a decision comes out of it, with no software required.

Seven indicators that help

These are chosen by one criterion: each of them changes a decision you make. If a number changes no decision, it does not belong on the list.

• Qualified enquiries per month, counting only those matching your field and area
• Cost per enquiry, total marketing cost divided by enquiries, including the cost of your time if you measure it
• The rate at which enquiries become customers, because an enquiry is not work until it is work
• Average job value, because twenty small jobs are not the same as five large ones
• Site conversion rate, the ratio of enquiries to sessions, as an indicator of page quality
• Non-branded organic traffic, because it shows growth, while visits from your own name show only recognition
• Response time to an enquiry, because most lost work is lost there rather than on price

How it is calculated and where the data comes from

The data comes from three places. Analytics gives visits and channels, Search Console gives queries and positions, and your own record of enquiries and jobs gives qualified enquiries and value. Search tells you none of the business numbers, because it does not know which enquiry became work.

Cost per enquiry comes from dividing the total marketing investment by the number of enquiries in that period. If the cost does not include the time spent answering and preparing quotes, the figure looks better than it is.

Site conversion rate is the ratio of enquiries to sessions, not to users. Using users makes two visits by the same person look like one visitor, which overstates the result.

Keep the data in one place, usually a table with a row per month. The table is not sophisticated, but it is enough, and it is far better than the situation where no number is recorded at all.

Indicators that consume attention

Total page views keep rising even when nothing is sold, because they grow from curiosity and from people clicking in circles. As a standalone figure it changes no decision.

Position for a single keyword varies by location, device and time, so one number does not describe the situation. What matters is the total of impressions and clicks across a group of queries, because that shows whether a page gets any room at all.

Follower counts say nothing about business unless you track how many enquiries come from there. The same applies to time on site: on a page with a price list, a short time can be a sign that the person found what they were looking for quickly.

These numbers should not be deleted, but they should not be in the monthly review either. They explain a decision rather than cause one.

How numbers become a decision

The most useful approach is working backwards. If the goal is ten jobs a month and every second enquiry becomes work, about twenty enquiries are needed. If a hundred sessions produce two enquiries, then about a thousand sessions a month are needed, roughly thirty a day.

That arithmetic shows the weakest link. If traffic exists but enquiries do not, the problem is the site or the offer. If enquiries exist but jobs do not, the problem is price, response or enquiry quality. Without that calculation, investment usually goes into whatever is already working.

A monthly review ends with a decision about one change, not five. The most common mistake is changing the site, the offer and the campaign at the same time, which leaves no way of knowing what produced the result.

Write the decision down, with the date and the expectation. Without that, next month is spent reading the same numbers again while nothing changes.

How to set this up without tools

Set-up takes one afternoon and requires no software purchase. This is the shortest route to a state where the numbers are tracked without extra work.

• One table with a row for each month and columns for the seven indicators
• A field in the form, or a question in conversation, recording where the enquiry came from
• Consistent tags on campaigns, following one pattern, so channels can be compared over time
• Separating enquiries from your own name from the rest, because one is recognition and the other is growth
• A record of enquiries with date, outcome and job value, at least in the same table
• Twenty minutes a month, always in the same order, with a short review each quarter

How to set a target rather than only watch the numbers

Indicators without a target become a report that gets read with no consequence. The target is set for enquiries and jobs, because those can be compared with last month, while visit counts move for reasons outside your control.

The target should be demanding but reachable in steps. If last month brought five enquiries, a target of twenty is a wish rather than a plan, and tracking is abandoned after the first month. A third more, with a check on what changes to deliver it, is more realistic.

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Key takeaways

• Seven indicators are enough: enquiries, cost per enquiry, close rate, job value, site conversion, non-branded traffic and response time.
• Page views, position for one keyword and follower counts change no decision, so they do not belong in the monthly review.
• Working backwards exposes the weakest link, from the target number of jobs down to the sessions required.
• Only like periods and like traffic are compared, otherwise the calendar gets read as a result.
• A monthly review ends with one decision, written down with a date and an expectation.

Conclusion

Indicators are not there to know more but to decide better. If you track only visits, every decision is a guess, while tracking jobs and cost per enquiry means deciding on the basis of what actually came back. On sites where enquiry tracking is not set up yet, the first step is measuring conversions, and for estimating whether an investment pays off our ROI calculator works with conservative assumptions and promises no result that cannot be measured.