The SEO industry has become extraordinarily good at improving its technical craft, making strides in crawl architecture, Core Web Vitals, content frameworks, entity optimization, and link acquisition at scale, to name a few.
What has lagged behind is its ability to connect that craft to the financial realities of the businesses it serves. SEO has trouble speaking the language that gets budgets approved and strategies prioritized.
Getting more funding and a better seat at the table requires a shift in how SEO teams define what they’re trying to achieve.
Let’s look at how SEO can become more commercially aware.
Why paid search gets more funding
Paid search often structures its goals around commercial inputs and outputs: Spend goes in, revenue comes out, and the difference between the two determines whether investment in the channel increases or decreases. Every campaign exists within a financial framework.
Even if paid search is expensive or inefficient, leadership can clearly see its goals and numbers and make resource decisions accordingly.
SEO teams often present rankings as an end in themselves rather than a means to an end. They report traffic figures without connecting them to transactions and highlight technical improvements that may be meaningful from an SEO perspective but translate poorly to financial goals.
When organic search doesn’t get enough funding, it’s often attributed to leadership not understanding SEO. A more honest explanation is that SEO hasn’t clearly made its commercial case. Leadership needs to see organic search measured in sales, margins, and channel ROI.
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What commercial awareness requires
SEO teams usually need to change the questions they ask before planning any work.
Instead of asking which topics have the highest search volume, ask which categories and product lines carry the highest margins, then evaluate the demand landscape within them.
Instead of asking where to create content, ask which existing pages would generate meaningful revenue if they ranked better, then work backward from there.
Instead of measuring success in organic sessions, measure it in organic profit, which requires knowing what the channel costs and what it returns.
Financial metrics for commercial awareness
These are the performance metrics I use when running organic search as an acquisition channel:
- Organic sales.
- Organic revenue.
- Organic profit.
- Average order value from organic traffic.
- Average margin per organic sale.
- Channel ROI.
These aren’t exotic or difficult to calculate. They simply require connecting analytics data to backend transactional data, which most…
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