How to Speak Leadership’s Language

As an SEO professional, metrics like rankings, traffic, and clicks are meaningful to you, but to a leadership team trained on market share and return on investment, they’re noise.

That’s not a bias against SEO. It’s just what happens when you report in a language leadership wasn’t trained to read.

When your KPIs are metrics you don’t recognize or don’t know how to report on, leadership starts to doubt the numbers you do give them. Below are the SEO equivalents that let you speak their language with confidence.

Market share is the percentage of total category revenue or demand that goes to your business instead of competitors.

Most leadership teams prioritize it in performance reports because it’s the metric they use to judge whether a marketing channel, campaign, or strategy is winning or losing.

If your market share is climbing while competitors’ is shrinking, that signals growth and that what you’re doing is working.

If your revenue or traffic is growing but your share stays flat or slips, the market could be growing faster than you are, and competitors are capturing more of that growth than you are.

SEO doesn’t have a native way to track market share (which is exactly why “rankings” and “traffic” don’t land the same way in a leadership meeting).

Research by James Hankins, spanning 30 case studies across 12 categories and seven countries, found that share of search accounts for roughly 83% of a brand’s market share (a pattern surfaced in earlier research from Les Binet).

In short, when your Share of Voice moves, your market share tends to follow.

Reporting on Share of Voice reframes the question from “are we ranking” to “how much of the market are we actually winning?”

This is a market share question, asked in market share terms.

You can track Share of Voice directly in Ahrefs’ Rank Tracker, so there’s no manual calculation involved, and it’s a number you can drop straight into a leadership report as-is.

AI Share of Voice, tracked in Ahrefs’ Brand Radar, applies the same logic to AI search — how often your brand shows up in answers from ChatGPT, Gemini, and AI Overviews, relative to competitors.

Ideally, you want to see Share of Voice sitting above your market share. The wider that lead, the more market share tends to follow, and that’s how you’ll grow your share over time to get ahead of the competition.

One caveat worth flagging is that growing Share of Voice is not a “just spend more” rule for everyone.

Smaller brands typically need to overspend just to hold their ground, while larger brands can sustain a lower share of voice than market share and still be fine.