Matthew Widdop
Matty is a Digital SEO Executive at Intelligency, helping our clients to improve their digital performance. Matty is currently studying for his Level 3 Multi-Channel Marketer apprenticeship and has completed a Sport Journalism Degree at the University of Huddersfield.
SEO is a fundamental strategy that all online businesses need to be implementing in 2026 to remain competitive in the online landscape. With the emergence of AI and similar trends such as GEO (AI Optimisation) these practices are now becoming more critical than ever. With the emergence of AI content, any site implementing human written high quality, informative content on a fast site with a strong product will be sure to stand out from the pack.
However unlike with paid media, it is harder to calibrate a true return on investment for SEO. So much of the work goes on behind the scenes and it is a long term project. SEO can take 6 months to 12 months to see a noticeable rise in online traffic and conversion rates. While most users will often interact with multiple different marketing strategies (paid media, social media, organic) before choosing your product. This means it’s not always easy to exactly attribute which channel they initially came from.
In this article, we will discuss how best to determine how successful your SEO campaigns are with ROI models.
What is ROI?
ROI stands for return on investment and simply means how profitable your investment was by calculating the financial revenue of an investment versus the costs of it. For example if you spent £30,000 on an SEO campaign and generated £120,000 in revenue from organic search throughout the year then your ROI would be 300%. This means for every £1 you spent you generated £3.
How to Measure ROI for SEO
Branded vs Non Branded Traffic
One of the crucial aspects people overlook when measuring return on investment for organic search is branded vs non branded traffic. People often report on overall search performance, which makes sense in theory, but if people are searching directly for your brand in Google before clicking on it, this isn’t really your SEO campaigns having an impact even though it may be attributed this way.
On Google Search Console you can see which search terms people are using to find and click through onto your site. Make sure you read this report thoroughly going through branded traffic figures and making sure you factor them into your organic traffic figures when modelling them for ROI figures.
Track Organic Revenues and Conversions
To calculate ROI for your SEO campaigns your are going to need two free to use Google tools
- Google Analytics 4
- Google Search Console
In Google Analytics 4 you can track any type of conversion on your site such as an e-mail sign-up, form submit, product order and more. You can set up unique conversion types specific to your site that are then labelled as key events in GA4.
Google Search Console gives you all your data on organic traffic such as which landing pages and queries are generating traffic through Google search. Once you connect your GSC account to your GA4 account you will be able to access two new reports in GA4.
- Google Organic Search Queries
- Google Organic Search Traffic
These two reports will tell you which keywords users are typing in to find your pages and which landing pages are generating traffic organically. You can then use the Google Organic Search Traffic report to identify which organic landing pages are generating the most conversions/ revenue. You can then combine this data into a Google Looker Studio dashboard using their filters to allow
Creating a Google Looker Studio dashboard that tracks the customer journey from search queries to conversions allows the user to see exactly what people are searching for on Google and how it’s driving conversions. This means that you can calculate ROI for your SEO campaigns around specific URLs and make informed data decisions on what content to create going forward.
