How to Speak Leadership’s Language

As an SEO professional, metrics like rankings, traffic, and clicks are meaningful to you, but to a leadership team trained on market share and return on investment, they’re noise.

That’s not a bias against SEO. It’s just what happens when you report in a language leadership wasn’t trained to read.

When your KPIs are metrics you don’t recognize or don’t know how to report on, leadership starts to doubt the numbers you do give them. Below are the SEO equivalents that let you speak their language with confidence.

Market share is the percentage of total category revenue or demand that goes to your business instead of competitors.

Most leadership teams prioritize it in performance reports because it’s the metric they use to judge whether a marketing channel, campaign, or strategy is winning or losing.

If your market share is climbing while competitors’ is shrinking, that signals growth and that what you’re doing is working.

If your revenue or traffic is growing but your share stays flat or slips, the market could be growing faster than you are, and competitors are capturing more of that growth than you are.

SEO doesn’t have a native way to track market share (which is exactly why “rankings” and “traffic” don’t land the same way in a leadership meeting).

Research by James Hankins, spanning 30 case studies across 12 categories and seven countries, found that share of search accounts for roughly 83% of a brand’s market share (a pattern surfaced in earlier research from Les Binet).

In short, when your Share of Voice moves, your market share tends to follow.

Reporting on Share of Voice reframes the question from “are we ranking” to “how much of the market are we actually winning?”

This is a market share question, asked in market share terms.

You can track Share of Voice directly in Ahrefs’ Rank Tracker, so there’s no manual calculation involved, and it’s a number you can drop straight into a leadership report as-is.

AI Share of Voice, tracked in Ahrefs’ Brand Radar, applies the same logic to AI search — how often your brand shows up in answers from ChatGPT, Gemini, and AI Overviews, relative to competitors.

Ideally, you want to see Share of Voice sitting above your market share. The wider that lead, the more market share tends to follow, and that’s how you’ll grow your share over time to get ahead of the competition.

One caveat worth flagging is that growing Share of Voice is not a “just spend more” rule for everyone.

Smaller brands typically need to overspend just to hold their ground, while larger brands can sustain a lower share of voice than market share and still be fine.

Revenue growth rate is the percentage change in revenue over a given period, and most organizations already track it at the company level.

The problem is attributing it to a specific channel, which is genuinely hard in SEO. Organic attribution was never clean, and AI-driven search is making it messier, since a chunk of that influence never shows up as a trackable click at all.

Therefore, if you’re not already tracking organic revenue growth, try measuring growth in Organic Traffic Value instead.

It’s the practical middle ground. It’s not revenue, but it’s a dollar figure that represents how much your organic traffic would cost if you used paid ads to generate it.

It’s calculated directly in Ahrefs Site Explorer from your keyword rankings and CPC data.

Track its trend over time using the Performance graph in Site Explorer, and you’ve got a decent stand-in for revenue growth rate that leadership can work with. Just search your site, no analytics setup required.

Market penetration asks whether you are capturing more of the market over time, or just growing in absolute terms.

SEO reporting usually botches this distinction. Traffic goes up and to the right, and it looks like growth.

But that doesn’t answer the question leadership’s actually asking: are you winning share, or did the market just get bigger?

Those are two separate checks.

To check whether the market is growing, pull up your category or topic in Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer and track how search volume and traffic potential trend over time.

Don’t just judge it off a single keyword though. One term’s search volume is a sample point, not the market.

Build out a keyword cluster by grouping relevant matching terms, questions people are asking, and terms you (or competitors) already rank for alongside it.

Add these to your list, then look at the aggregate volume and traffic potential across the whole cluster over time, not any single row in isolation.

That aggregate trend is what tells you whether total demand for the category is trending up, flat, or down.

Ahrefs’ search demand lifecycle framework is worth a look here too. It breaks demand into phases (growing, peaking, plateauing, declining), so you’re not just checking direction; you’re checking where the category actually sits in its life cycle.

That phase changes how you should read your own numbers.

Growing share in a declining category, for example, is still a win worth calling out to leadership. You’re capturing more of a shrinking pie, even if the topline traffic number is flat or falling.

But, if your traffic and revenue are growing as a natural consequence of the market growing, there’s a hidden risk you may be unaware of. You might be capturing less of the new market opportunity than competitors, and in this case, you’re actually running behind.

This is where it helps to track metrics like Share of Traffic Value (SoTV).

Ahrefs calculates SoTV in Site Explorer, with no analytics setup required. Just enter your competitors:

Then analyze each brand’s performance. The graph will look like this:

This is a stacked share chart where all sites always add to 100%, so one site’s gain is another’s loss, even if absolute traffic never changed.

Read it as relative position, not absolute performance: mayoclinic.org has grown share since 2020, while healthline.com, webmd.com and medicalnewstoday.com have shrunk. When presenting this to your stakeholders, be clear that it shows who’s winning ground, not whether any site’s actual traffic value is rising or falling.

This is exactly the kind of story a raw traffic chart can’t tell you.

Deeper insights about your market position and penetration, relative to the opportunity in your industry, are more meaningful conversations to have with leadership than simply showing rankings or traffic increasing.

Leadership may track metrics like customer lifetime value (CLV) and retention because acquiring a customer is one thing, but keeping them, and knowing they were worth acquiring, is another.

SEO doesn’t have a clean number for either.

What it can offer instead is a set of signals showing whether organic-sourced customers behave differently from customers from other channels. It’s often a better starting point than forcing a CLV figure out of imperfect attribution.

In this case, you’re comparing engagement, not acquisition. In GA4, segment sessions by channel and look at time on site, pages per session, and bounce rate for organic versus paid, social, and direct.

You can also use Ahrefs’ Web Analytics for a privacy-friendly alternative to GA4.

If organic visitors consistently stick around longer or browse more pages, that indicates they’re a better-qualified audience.

In Web Analytics, you can also track visitors from AI platforms as a separate segment and report on this separately to curious stakeholders.

For ecommerce, you can go a step further by comparing average order value and repeat purchase rate by acquisition channel. You’ll need to set up your analytics platform to track revenue and sales to capture these insights.

If organic customers spend more per order, or come back to buy again more often, that’s a compelling retention story that speaks in the same terms as CLV, without needing a detailed attribution model to prove it.

In any of the above situations, you’ll need to be upfront about the limits.

None of this is causal proof, and it’s not a substitute for a properly attributed CLV number if your organization can build one. But when clean attribution isn’t realistic, these comparisons give leadership something concrete to look at to better understand SEO’s impact, rather than nothing.

Brand demand is the number of people actively seeking your brand by name, rather than discovering it through a category search. For example, it’s the difference between someone talking or thinking about “Asana” instead of “project management software.”

Leadership tracks it as a core marketing metric because it’s demand you didn’t have to fight competitors for. It’s also a tangible way to measure marketing activities that build brand awareness.

It’s rarely built in search, though. Instead, it’s built through social, word-of-mouth, ads, press, and product experience. People discover a brand elsewhere, then Google it.

The clearest way to track that is with branded search volume, which measures how many people search your brand name (and close variants) each month. Pull this directly from Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer by searching your brand name.

You can also build a list of branded variants for a more holistic picture:

It also works for local businesses. This plumbing business, for instance, earns 900+ branded searches every month.

Tracked over time, it’s a decent proxy for whether your other marketing efforts are actively improving brand demand or not.

A PR push, a rebrand, a big social moment — if it’s landing, more people search your brand name afterward. That’s validation you can hand back to marketing leaders, even when SEO didn’t drive the campaign.

That first post-discovery search is where the decision actually gets made.

Someone’s heard your name, seen your ad, or gotten a recommendation, and now they’re checking you out before they commit. If they like what they see on their first search for your brand, you capture demand. If they don’t, you lose it, often to a competitor riding on your brand’s coattails.

A few ways branded search goes badly:

Every one of these is fixable with SEO and reputation management.

Every metric in this piece is a correlation or a leading indicator, not a guarantee. Say that out loud every time you present them. The fastest way to lose credibility with a leadership team is to overstate what a metric proves.

Used honestly, though, these translations between MBA metrics and SEO metrics let you stop defending SEO as a marketing activity and start reporting it as a business one.

Pick one metric from this list and map it against your own data this week. It’s a small exercise, and it’ll change how your next leadership update lands.