An SEO report should show whether SEO brings the business more leads and sales, and what to do next. For global brands in the Middle East, the report also has to split results by country and by language. Arabic and English pages often move in different directions, and so do markets such as Saudi Arabia and the UAE. This guide lists the Middle East SEO KPIs to track every month, where to find each one, and how to turn them into a short monthly report.
The Three Levels of SEO KPIs
| Level | KPIs | Question it answers |
|---|---|---|
| Business results | Organic leads, sales, revenue and cost per lead | Is SEO paying back? |
| Visibility | Clicks, impressions, click-through rate and rankings | Are more people finding us in search? |
| Technical health | Indexed pages, Core Web Vitals, errors and backlinks | Can Google find, read and trust the website? |
Business results matter most, but they move slowly. Visibility and technical KPIs show progress earlier, especially in the first months, as our guide on how long SEO takes in the Middle East explains.
The Middle East SEO KPIs to Track Every Month
| KPI | What it shows | Where to find it |
|---|---|---|
| Organic leads and sales | The business value of SEO | Your analytics tool and CRM |
| Organic clicks | Visits from Google search | Search Console Performance report |
| Impressions | How often your pages appear in search, including early growth | Search Console Performance report |
| Click-through rate (CTR) | How well your titles and snippets attract clicks | Search Console Performance report |
| Rankings for priority keywords | Progress on the keywords that matter most | A rank tracker, or Search Console |
| Keywords in the top 3 and top 10 | How many keywords bring real traffic | A rank tracker |
| Branded and non-branded clicks | Growth beyond people who already know the brand | Search Console query filter |
| Indexed Arabic and English pages | Whether Google includes your pages in its index | Search Console page indexing report |
| Core Web Vitals | Page experience on mobile and desktop | Search Console Core Web Vitals report |
| New referring domains | Growth in backlinks from other websites | Search Console Links report, Ahrefs or Semrush |
Split Every KPI by Country and Language
A single total for the whole region can hide what happens in each market. Your Arabic pages might grow in Saudi Arabia while your English pages fall in the UAE, and a regional total would show no change. In Google Search Console:
- Filter by country to see each market separately.
- Filter by page, for example URLs that contain
/ar/, to separate the Arabic and English versions of your website. - Use the query filter with a regular expression to separate searches written in Arabic letters from searches in English.
- Compare devices, because a large share of searches in the region happen on phones.
Our guide to bilingual SEO explains how a clean URL structure makes this split possible.
Branded and Non-Branded Searches
Branded searches include your brand name, and they grow as more people get to know you. Non-branded searches show SEO reaching new customers who did not know your brand. Track both, and include every way people write your brand name in Arabic, as our guide on how to translate a brand name into Arabic explains.
AI Search in Your SEO Report
Search Console includes clicks and impressions from Google's AI Mode and AI Overviews in the Performance report, mixed with other search traffic. To see whether your pages appear as sources, search your main Arabic questions each month and record which pages Google cites. Our guide to the Arabic AI visibility audit explains how to check other AI tools as well. Our guide to AI Overviews and AI Mode in Arabic explains how these features work.
A Simple Monthly SEO Report Template
- Summary: the main result of the month, what changed and the next steps, in a few lines.
- Business results: organic leads and sales by country and language, compared with last month and last year.
- Visibility: clicks, impressions, CTR and rankings for the priority keywords.
- Work done: pages published, technical fixes and backlinks earned.
- Issues: technical problems, drops in traffic and their causes.
- Plan: the work for next month and the results it should affect.
Monthly and Quarterly Reviews
Use the monthly report to track progress and the work done. Every quarter, review the strategy itself: keyword targets, content priorities, countries and budget. For year-on-year comparisons, remember that Ramadan moves about 11 days earlier each year, so the same month can have very different search behaviour from one year to the next. Compare Ramadan with the previous Ramadan, as our Ramadan marketing guide explains.
SEO Reporting Mistakes to Avoid
- Reporting traffic without leads or sales.
- Showing one regional total with no split by country and language.
- Relying on average position alone, which hides big changes in individual keywords.
- Comparing months affected by Ramadan with normal months without explaining the difference.
- Receiving reports from a tool that only your agency can see. Our guide on how to choose an Arabic SEO agency explains why access matters.
- Including so many metrics that the report has no clear actions.
If the numbers show a problem you cannot explain, a Middle East SEO audit finds the cause, and our list of Middle East SEO mistakes covers common ones.
Conclusion
A good Middle East SEO report starts with leads and sales, splits every number by country and language, and ends with a clear plan. GOTOMENA plans, runs and reports Arabic and English SEO for global brands through our Arabic SEO services. To discuss your reporting, contact our team.