Glossary /Measurement
Conversion Rate
The share of visitors who take the action a page exists to produce, and the only search metric that connects to revenue.
Conversion rate is completions divided by visits, for whatever action the page is for — an enquiry, a signup, a booking. It is the point at which search work becomes a business number rather than a marketing one, and it is the metric that decides whether a ranking was worth having.
It is also the check on keyword selection. A page ranking well for a term that converts at zero is evidence the term was chosen for its volume rather than its buyer, and no amount of further optimisation on that page will fix a targeting decision.
Measuring it properly needs the conversion defined before the traffic arrives, and needs the definition to survive analytics changes and consent rules. A conversion that is only counted for visitors who accepted cookies is a systematic undercount, not a rate.