Why proving technical SEO ROI is so difficult

Six months ago, there was a core update that would’ve tanked your website. But it didn’t.

It didn’t because your team fixed your canonicals, redirection issues, duplication issues, and JavaScript rendering eight months earlier. It was the kind of drudge work a technical engineer or developer got stuck with because the ticket was last on their list.

And you don’t have any proof of it, not really. Other than the experience that comes from years in SEO and recognizing that your site had all the hallmarks of sites hit by the update.

It could’ve cut your traffic in half. It didn’t.

There’s no parallel internet timeline where you didn’t do the work, so there’s no way to confirm it. There’s no record.

This is why technical SEO ROI resists proof. It’s an inference problem with no control group, and we keep pretending it’s a reporting problem we can tool our way out of.

The internet doesn’t stop

We are in two open systems when we work in digital, at least: the internet and the market. Three, if you count the maturity and expectations of internet users. Four, if you count our own website infrastructure. More than that, really, but we don’t have time to list them all. 

The long and short of it is this: the sea we swim in is always shifting, moving, growing, and shrinking. There’s no way to pin down a single, solid “before” state, and there’s no clean way to project all of those influences into “what would’ve happened if I didn’t do anything?” We try to do it with things like Bayesian forecasting, but that’s still an educated guess.

Technical work might have an immediate impact on visibility today. Make the same change six months later, and it might not. That could solely be because Google decided to shift its crawl budget or change how it reads websites. 

Cause and effect come unstuck in time. Google recrawls and reindexes on its own schedule, so any effect lands far from the change and is washed out across a recrawl cycle, defeating the before-and-after pairing every clean test needs.

Just like SEO as a whole, there’s a lot we can’t control. Trying to track all of the changes across the web that might influence our website would result in many gray hairs and sleepless nights.

Technical SEO adds another layer because we rarely ship in isolation. It’s never just “here’s this single change to the website.” It’s “here are about 30 fixes from five different teams going out on a Thursday, so if things collapse, we have people on Friday who can triage.” (Please don’t ship on Fridays.)

Much of the technical work is also done to keep our heads above water: managing technical debt, or doing the work needed to stay on top of updated regulations and new releases of codebases or frameworks. Enhancements and improvements are tough. 

Technical work is a lot more like insurance or public health. You only realize how important it was when it stops working….