Most of us here build the store rather than run the marketing for it, so SEO tends to arrive as a ticket with no acceptance criteria attached. This is the measurement half of that problem, written for whoever has to prove the work did something.
Rankings Are a Lagging Indicator
Rank tracking is the first thing everyone reaches for and the slowest thing to move. A position change reflects work you did weeks ago, it is noisy across locations and devices, and a single keyword tells you almost nothing about the pages that actually earn revenue.
Impressions in Search Console move first. When you fix a title, restructure a category page, or unblock a section of the site, impressions for that page shift within days, well before position does. If impressions stay flat after a change, the change did not register at all, and waiting longer will not fix that.
The Four Numbers Worth Tracking
Indexed page count against expected page count. If you have 800 products and Google has indexed 300, nothing else you do matters until that gap closes. It is usually a crawl or duplication problem rather than a content one.
Impressions by page type. Split product pages, category pages and content pages apart. They fail for different reasons, and an aggregate number hides which one is broken.
Click through rate at a fixed position. If a page holds position 4 and its CTR is half what position 4 normally returns, the problem is the title and description, not the ranking.
Revenue per organic session by landing page. This is the one that decides where the next sprint goes. A page with modest traffic and high purchase intent beats a high traffic page that only attracts researchers.
Why the First Six Months Look Like Failure
The uncomfortable part is that all four of these can be improving while the traffic graph stays flat. Indexation fills in first, then impressions, then positions, then clicks. Most stores need 6 to 12 months of consistent work before that chain finishes and organic traffic becomes meaningful.
That lag is why so many teams abandon the work and go back to paying $2 to $8 per click for the same visitors. It is also why the ones who stay end up with a channel competitors cannot simply buy their way into. For the full picture of what feeds that chain, from keyword intent through the technical foundations, this ecommerce SEO guide covers it end to end.
Measure the leading indicators and the six month wait becomes legible instead of scary. You can tell the difference between work that is not landing and work that has not surfaced yet, and those two need completely different responses.