Thanks Alex!

Thanks Nick! I’d say there’s a spectrum of ways to measure performance – they are all somewhat useful. The holy grail is conversions (ie, 11 visitors at 100% buying is better than 1% buying of 1000 visitors). But among the among more general metrics – yes, I think traffic growth is a much more transparent (and still easy to understand) way to measure SEO. Rank and traffic usually correlate, but as I argued in the article, “ranking on Google page 1” has just too many nuances to it to be super-useful (like bounce rate, relative traffic volume, personalization, etc) – sort of like a straw man argument – which is something buyers of SEO should be aware of and sellers of SEO should be willing and able to explain.