There’s a myth in SEO that drives me crazy: that you need 8 tools, 3 dashboards and 2 hours per month to know if your website is working. It’s a lie. I measure landinowebs.com’s SEO in 30 minutes per month, with 3 free tools, and I know exactly if I’m doing well or badly. What I’m going to tell you here is what I really look at, not a list of “the 8 metrics that matter” pulled from a generic post.
If what you want is the long list of Core Web Vitals, average CTR per position, backlink ratio, etc., this isn’t your post. For that there are the Ahrefs and Semrush blogs, which explain it better than me. What I give you is what works when you have a real business and 30 minutes per month, not when you’re an SEO agency with a dashboard per client.
What I look at on any given Tuesday at 10am
On the first Tuesday of each month, at 10:00, I sit down with a coffee and open three tabs. This is what I do in order, with the real numbers I just looked at on my site.
Tab 1: Google Search Console (10 minutes)
This is the only SEO tool I really need. What I look at, in this order:
The first thing I open is the Performance report filtered to the last 28 days. I compare the total number of clicks with that of the previous month. If it’s gone up, good. If it’s dropped more than 15%, I worry. In the last month, my site had 1,247 clicks from Google, vs 1,089 the previous month: +14.5%. It’s not explosive growth, but it’s consistent, and that’s what matters in SEO.
Then I look at the top 3 queries for which my site appears on Google. Mine are (July 2026 data, excluding brand queries):
- “how much does a website cost in Spain” — average position 4.2 — 89 clicks
- “freelance web developer Valencia” — average position 6.1 — 54 clicks
- “how to measure SEO of a website” — average position 8.7 — 31 clicks
Of these 3 queries, the second and third are on an upward trend. The first is stuck at position 4 for 3 months, so in the next sprint I’m going to touch the “how much does a website cost” post to get to the top 3. This is what Google Search Console tells you and that no paid dashboard shows you better: what position you’re in for each search that matters to you.
Then I look at Coverage > Valid pages. My website has 38 submitted URLs and 36 indexed. The 2 that aren’t indexed are variants with a tracking parameter that I have blocked with robots.txt and canonical, so that’s correct. If you see valid pages dropping without explanation, there’s a technical problem you need to investigate (usually, a recent change broke something).
Finally, in GSC I look at Experience > Core Web Vitals. Here Google uses real data from Chrome users who visited your website, not simulations. My site is green for mobile and desktop, with 89% of visits above the LCP threshold. The remaining 11% are visits from very old devices or very bad connections, and I don’t worry about them.
Tab 2: PageSpeed Insights (5 minutes)
I run the homepage and the services page through PageSpeed Insights with the “mobile” option enabled. This is what I look at:
- Performance score: has to be above 90. If it drops below 85, there’s a new problem (a third-party script I added, an uncompressed image, a font that loads late). My homepage is at 96 mobile and 99 desktop.
- LCP (Largest Contentful Paint): how long it takes for the main content to appear. Target: below 2.5 seconds. Mine is at 1.1 s.
- CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift): how much the page “jumps” on load. Target: below 0.1. Mine is at 0.02.
- INP (Interaction to Next Paint): how long it takes to respond to a click. Target: below 200 ms. Mine is at 45 ms.
These 4 numbers are what really matter. Everything else that comes out of PageSpeed (TTFB, FCP, Speed Index, TBT) is secondary and I only worry about it if the previous 4 are bad.
Tab 3: Plausible Analytics (10 minutes)
I have Plausible set up on my website ($9/month, GDPR-friendly by default, no cookie banners). I don’t use Google Analytics because it’s a behemoth I don’t need and because, frankly, the metrics Plausible gives me are the ones I really use.
What I look at, in this order:
First, the organic traffic graph for the last 30 days. It has to have a slightly upward trend, without unexplained drops. Last month my site had 2,380 organic visits (vs 2,156 the previous month, +10%). That’s healthy growth.
Then I look at the top 5 pages viewed from organic traffic. If a page has gone up a lot, it’s a sign that Google is starting to value it: I put internal links from other pages to reinforce it. If a page has gone down, I check to see if there’s something obvious that broke (a 404 error, a URL change, a bad canonical).
Finally, I look at the traffic sources graph. This is what tells me where people are coming from. On my site, in July 2026, the sources are:
- Google organic: 68%
- Direct (people typing the URL): 22%
- Social media (LinkedIn, Reddit): 6%
- Referred from other sites: 3%
- ChatGPT and similar: 1%
The 1% from ChatGPT doesn’t seem like much, but it’s new. 6 months ago it was 0. And the referrals from LinkedIn and Reddit have gone up since I started publishing there. This tells me that the GEO strategy is starting to work, but slowly, as it should.
What I DON’T look at (and why)
Once a month, someone asks me “don’t you use Ahrefs?” or “Semrush for backlinks?”. The short answer is no. The long answer is: I tried both and they don’t give me what the 3 tools above give me. I’ll explain why with each one:
Ahrefs ($99/month) is brutal for backlink analysis and keyword research. But I don’t do monthly keyword research (I do it every 3 months when I plan the quarter’s content). And I check backlinks in Google Search Console, which is free and shows Google’s actual data, not an external crawler’s. Ahrefs adds real value if you do professional SEO with many clients. If you have a business and want to measure your website, it’s money you don’t need to spend.
Semrush ($130/month) I tried for 3 months. It does everything, but does too much. Each report has 14 tabs, 3 subgraphs, and a “competitive intelligence” dropdown. I need 4 numbers per month, not 47. And on top, the learning curve is 2 weeks. I don’t need it.
Google Analytics 4 I set up once out of curiosity. I removed it after 2 months. It’s a behemoth designed for companies with a marketing team that lives inside the dashboard. For a business that looks at 4 numbers per month, it’s killing flies with a cannon. And on top, with the new cookie legislation in the EU, GA4 forces you to show a banner that kills the experience. Plausible doesn’t need a banner.
Screaming Frog ($220/year) is the best technical audit tool that exists. I use it once a year, when I do the full annual audit of the website. I don’t use it monthly because my website doesn’t change that much. If your website changes daily (e-commerce, blog with many editors), then yes, you need it monthly.
What I do if the numbers go wrong
Once a month, after looking at the 3 tabs, I have 3 possible scenarios:
Scenario 1: everything is going well or going up. I don’t do anything. I continue with the plan: 1-2 posts per month, basic maintenance, updating some old post that needs it. Discipline in SEO is not “optimising all the time”, it’s “not touching what works and only changing what doesn’t”.
Scenario 2: two or more metrics are going badly. This is when you need to investigate. If organic clicks drop 20%, I check if Google has released a recent update (I usually find out via @JohnMu on Twitter, Search Engine Roundtable, or Ahrefs’ blog in Spanish). If it’s not an update, I check if I have a manual penalty in GSC > Manual actions. If there’s no penalty, I look at my queries: have I lost positions for any important ones? If yes, I go to the affected post and update it. If not, I look at the competition: is someone new ranking above me? If yes, I look at what they’re doing better (longer content, schema, more backlinks) and apply it to my post in a sprint.
Scenario 3: one metric is going very badly, the others fine. It’s probably something technical or a one-off change. If it’s Core Web Vitals, I look at which page has worsened and review recent changes. If it’s Plausible traffic, I check if it matches a drop in GSC (which confirms it’s SEO) or not (which suggests another source has dropped). In my case, when I started publishing more on LinkedIn, the LinkedIn referred traffic compensated for a seasonal organic drop. Things like that.
What the SEO that really matters to the business measures
There’s a very common mistake in SEO: optimising for the wrong metrics. For example, obsessing over average position when what matters is leads. Or looking at organic traffic when what matters is how much you get paid per visit. These are the 3 questions I do ask myself each month, and that no dashboard answers alone:
Question 1: How many leads has SEO brought me this month?
I calculate it by hand. I look in Plausible at forms submitted from the website (1 every 2-3 days on average), the calls that mention they come from the website (about 5-8 per month, I know because I ask them “how did you find me?”), and the WhatsApp messages from the website (3-5 per month). Total: about 15-20 qualified leads per month, of which 1 in 3 ends up contracting. At an average ticket of €800, that’s €4,000-5,000/month of SEO-attributable revenue. That’s what I really measure, and what justifies continuing to invest.
Question 2: How much does each SEO lead cost me?
If I look at the last 6 months and add up what I’ve invested in SEO (my time + the cost of a couple of tools + the €40 audit I did once), it comes out to about €200-300/month. At 15-20 leads per month, that’s €10-20 per lead. Compared to Google Ads (where a lead in my sector costs €30-80), SEO is 3-8 times cheaper. This is what makes SEO worth it over Ads for my business.
Question 3: How long does it take for a post to pay for itself?
Each post takes me about 3-4 hours of my time between research, writing, publishing, and internal linking. At an opportunity cost of €50/h, that’s €150-200 per post. When does it pay for itself? If a post attracts 1 client per month at an €800 ticket, that’s 4 months. If it attracts 0.5 clients per month, that’s 8 months. And most of my posts pay for themselves between 4 and 12 months. After that, it’s traffic and leads that come in without additional cost.
My technical setup so all this works (without breaking)
This is for those of you interested in the “how”: so my monthly metrics are reliable and don’t tell me “your traffic dropped 50% because of a technical change you made yourself”, I have a fixed setup.
My website is an Astro project with automatic deploy on Vercel. Every time I make a change, Vercel does a 30-second deploy and the website updates. Before deploying, I run a local build that validates Schema.org, broken internal links, sitemap, and performance. This ensures that every change that goes into production is validated.
To monitor in production I use Plausible (analytics) and Google Search Console (Google performance). The two are configured in 10 minutes the first time and then run on their own.
And one more thing: every post I publish I link from at least 2 old posts (internal link). This tells Google that the new post is important, and at the same time refreshes the old posts. It’s the most underrated SEO trick that exists.
Real case: the numbers from Los Pinochos
The Restaurante Los Pinochos, which I also measure, has a similar setup but with nuances. Their July 2026 numbers:
- Google Search Console: 1,892 clicks/month from Google (vs 1,456 6 months ago, +30% in 6 months).
- Average position: 4.1 (vs 8.2 6 months ago).
- Indexed pages: 12 of 12. 100%.
- Core Web Vitals: 95+ on mobile and desktop.
- Top queries: “rice dishes Valladolid” (position 2.3), “Valencian cuisine restaurant Valladolid” (position 3.1), “restaurant Simancas” (position 1.8).
- AI citability: “Los Pinochos” appears cited in ChatGPT for “Valencian cuisine restaurant Valladolid” (manually verified on July 20, 2026).
What I did to achieve this, in order: optimised Google Business listing, complete Schema.org, detailed llms.txt, 8 SEO posts on the restaurant’s blog, consistent NAP across 12 local directories, 15 new reviews in the last 3 months. No hacks. What works in 2026 is what always worked, but with two additions: llms.txt for AIs and structured data on each page.
If you want me to do the audit of your website
If you want me to measure your website with this same method and tell you what’s failing and what to do, write to me at landinowebs@gmail.com and I’ll give you a 30-60 minute audit for €40 with a written report: what’s good, what’s bad, what to do first, what can wait.
If we make the website for you, this is included in the first month of maintenance. You don’t have to pay for it separately.