Key Approaches to Turn SEO into a Measurable Revenue Generator

One of the biggest challenges SEO professionals face is measuring the ROI, which leads to budget risk. And in uncertain times like these, your company’s C-suite would want to hear new insights & achieve quick wins. So, you should be able to measure ROI in SEO and offer new solutions that can significantly impact the business.

In this article, we’ll address the problems with SEO as a marketing channel and the key approaches that will help you attribute your company’s revenue growth to your SEO efforts.

SEO as a Marketing Channel: The Downside

For most companies, SEO still seems to get little or no respect compared to other marketing channels – especially the paid search. There is a massive pot of money in PPC advertising, and it is easier for paid search teams to use various automation tools for optimizing & managing paid search campaigns. Also, the full transparency in measuring ROI down to search query level enables efficient budget decision making.

But when it comes to organic search (as most clicks on SERPs go to organic listings) proving its value has been a challenge. Since SEO lacks reliable automation tools for managing large-scale campaigns, it is hard to measure its ROI, leading to constrained budgets.

Problems with Calculating SEO ROI

Since Google took away its keyword-level analytics data in 2013, SEO professionals had discovered workarounds to calculate search engine optimization ROI. Below we have mentioned a few most significant ones.

Google Analytics Organic Search Channel YoY Comparison

One of the options that SEO professionals resorted to is comparing the organic traffic from the current year to the previous one in Google Analytics. However, the downside is you’ll have no idea whether the keywords driving the traffic are branded or generic. Thus, the revenue increase could come entirely from TV advertising, while the actual non-brand SEO performance is down.

Google Search Console YoY comparison

You can also make a year-on-year comparison in the GSC. However, no revenue implies no ROI; the keyword data only shows a subset of top 1,000 keywords (whereas the paid search term report might have 500,000 revenue-contributing keywords in the same time frame).

SEMrush & Other Third-Party Data

Subscribing to SEO platforms is often considered costly, and the data is not the most reliable either. But at the same time, it is too much work to separate brand & non-brand keyword data.

Counting Revenue from the Landing Pages

Another approach of calculating SEO ROI is counting revenue from the landing pages. In this approach, you need to create landing pages to:

• Address the search need
• Fill gaps in the site navigation
• Improve where you don’t already rank on the Google search engine in position #1-5
• Match the specific products

But the problem is creating 100,000 dynamic landing pages takes time.

How to Address these Problems?

The steps you can take to address these problems while measuring SEO ROI are:

Finding your Market Share Growth

Look for your market share growth. Say you already have a strong business brand with significant loyal customers, but what about the customers those are ready-to-buy the products/services you sell but are not looking for you?

So, look beyond your branded market share & tap into the new revenue opportunity that lies in your uncaptured category.

Predicting Traffic & Revenue Opportunity

About hundreds of thousands of specific organic search keyword opportunities are hidden in the plain sight in Google Ad Search term reports with sessions, sales, and revenue. And for most of these, Google Keyword Planner tells you about the zero search volume. Thus, predicting these traffic and revenue opportunities is much better than any other third-party tool.

Creating New Pages to Address Keyword Gaps

When you create new pages to address your keyword gaps, you provide a halo into your product categories.

Doing this will enable your brand:

• To pick up those customers who’re looking for specific products, but not your brand
• To become synonymous with your product categories

Leveraging Technology to Measure ROI

You’ll have to create new landing pages to address your keyword gaps. You can easily do this at scale by using the right SEO solutions available in the market. Signing up with a reputed SEO service provider will enable you:

• Create hundreds & thousands of new landing pages to match the exact product searches at scale
• Dynamically link thousands of new landing pages contextually
• Skip the delayed tech-team project queue
• Identify your under-performing pages & replace them with better keywords without any tech work
• Optimize new customer acquisition independently of your website architecture.

Here’s how it works:

Creating ‘Smart Pages’

Professionals will create “Smart Pages” that will organize your content in a way your potential customers expect to find it. Also, these pages will work within your existing website structure.

Creating ‘Smart Links’

Professional service providers will dynamically interlink your “Smart Pages” within the website. These are calculated & updated as per your platform’s proprietary algorithms. This will further enhance your website’s SEO performance through improved contextual interlinking of website topics.

Ending Note

These were some of the significant ways to turn your SEO efforts into a measurable revenue generator. The right SEO strategy can turn the table for your company, and you’ll make stable profits in the future.