12 Ways to Prove the Value of SEO + Costs, Mistakes, & Tools

Proving the value of SEO requires time and the right tools to pull off. The good news is that it works, but only with the best strategies in place. Learn about the benefits of SEO, top tools to use to measure campaigns, mistakes to avoid, and SEO agency costs. 

Explaining the value of SEO to stakeholders is tough, especially when they expect immediate, tangible results.

Thankfully, SEO is quantifiable. We’ll share the proof you need (real case studies and stats included) to convince anyone it’s worth investing in. And how to measure it yourself (or with the help of SEO services).

Value of SEO: Why it’s difficult to prove

The value of SEO is known for being intangible and elusive, making it challenging to prove its impact. It also doesn’t help that it can take many months to see search engine rankings, clicks, and conversions.

But what makes it more challenging is stakeholders who lack an understanding of how digital marketing and search algorithms work. In this case, education is key.

So let’s explore the factors that make it difficult to prove SEO’s value.

Long-term results

Unlike pay-per-click (PPC) and other paid advertising efforts — which generate more immediate results — SEO results don’t manifest overnight. SEO strategies take months or possibly years to deliver outcomes. Because of this, it’s difficult to establish a direct cause-and-effect correlation between SEO actions and outcomes.

However, if impressive growth is seen over a long period, you can infer that SEO factored into that growth.

External influences

Search engine algorithm changes, competitor actions, and shifts in consumer behavior are some of the largest factors that SEO specialists encounter. Because of these variables, it can be challenging to isolate the effects of an SEO strategy.

Qualitative before quantitative

Determining the impact of SEO becomes more complex due to its qualitative nature and benefits. Improvements in brand visibility, user experience, and content relevance aren’t as quantifiable as traditional metrics like click-through rates or conversion rates. Then again, traditional marketing methods weren’t always trackable either, and we still use them.

SEO strategies are ongoing experiments

The dynamic and often secretive nature of Google and Bing algorithms makes SEO strategies feel like best practices and educated guesses rather than concrete and predictable formulas. So, it’s hard to predict outcomes and prove the value of SEO efforts.

The importance of SEO: 12 key points

If placing value on SEO is so difficult, why are we still having this conversation? Why is SEO so important?

Despite being hard to determine ROI for, SEO has many benefits, even if you can’t always see them on paper.

Here are some of the benefits of SEO:

1. Increased website traffic: Creating high-quality content rich with relevant keywords can improve website rankings on search engine results pages (SERPs), allowing businesses to attract more organic (unpaid) traffic.
2. Enhanced user experience: SEO involves optimizing a website for online visitors. SEO marketing efforts include improving site load speed and mobile-friendliness while providing valuable, authentic content.
3. Higher conversion rates: Highly targeted SEO strategies typically lead to higher conversion rates. This is because a website attracts relevant searchers and potential customers that lead to increased sales and leads.
4. Brand credibility and trustworthiness: Websites that rank higher (or on page one) of search results are usually perceived as the most credible and trustworthy resources. SEO helps build trust, brand awareness, and authority in your specific industry.
5. Cost-effectiveness: SEO is far more cost-effective than PPC advertising, especially long-term. Paid advertising can require higher budgets that frequently change depending on a keyword’s cost-per-click (CPC). The cost of SEO is much lower depending on the scope of the project.
6. Competitive advantage: Ranking higher than competitors after using more local tactics can give you a competitive edge in your target market, especially if other businesses in your industry don’t have an SEO strategy.
7. Long-term strategy: A well-executed SEO strategy offers long-lasting traffic when implemented correctly. Because SEO is so impactful, 88% of marketers plan to allocate additional funds to SEO marketing each year.
8. Local engagement and traffic: For local businesses, local SEO strategies can drive foot traffic to brick-and-mortar businesses. To do this, optimize for geo-specific organic searches and listings using tools like Semrush and Ahrefs.
9. Data-driven insights: Analytics tools (Google Analytics or Google Search Console) can provide valuable insights through data, helping businesses understand audiences, consumer behaviors, competitors, and market trends.
10. Global reach: SEO can expand a company’s reach beyond its local boundaries. As a result, businesses can tap into unique markets and attract new international audiences.
11. Improved social media presence: Strong SEO strategies correlate with an engaging social media presence. High-ranking content is often more shareable on social platforms depending on the topic.
12. Sustainable online presence: Paid ads are short-lived, making it difficult to maintain brand visibility and online presence. SEO doesn’t stop the moment you stop paying. Content can continue ranking even if you’re not actively managing your website (which is important). Updating your content regularly keeps it fresh so search engines continue to rank it.

Average costs of SEO

SEO pricing depends on the project’s scope, how aggressive you’d like your strategy to be, the competitiveness of the industry, and how much you’re willing to invest overall.

On average, SEO pricing can vary from $3,000 to $10,000 a month. For local SEO, plan to spend between $500 and $1,000 per month. If you’re looking for a one-time SEO project, you’ll likely spend a bit more — anywhere from $5,000 to $30,000 a month.

If you decide to work with an SEO agency, make sure it’s transparent about its rates and strategies.

12 ways to measure the importance of SEO in digital marketing

Here are valuable insights from well-known SEO experts to shed light on ways to measure SEO’s importance.

1. Optimize for different content formats

Jason Barnard, the founder of Kalicube, says SEO specialists and marketers should “create content in a format that meets the needs and expectations of Google’s and answers the question asked.” In his eyes, different formats like comparison tables or video tutorials prove more effective, depending on the context and the user’s intent.

2. Focus on customer happiness

Moz, a leader in SEO software, advises SEO specialists to optimize for conversions by prioritizing customer happiness. Create an exceptional user experience by meeting the customer’s online requests and solving their pain points. This can improve conversion rates and foster a loyal customer base.

3. Go beyond traditional ranking

“It’s no longer enough to rank for the top 10,” says Lead SEO at iLoveSEO, Brian Harnish. SEOs should aim for more advanced goals like appearing in Google’s featured snippet spots since they’re prime spots for generating significant organic traffic. For example, structure your page and add schema markup if you’re trying to figure out how to rank in People Also Ask.

4. Fully grasp the competitive landscape

Ryan Jones, SEO Group Director at Razorfish, highlights that, “A good SEO professional understands the searcher and the competitive landscape.” Find gaps in competitors’ strategies and capitalize on them to gain a competitive advantage.

5. Incorporate link building strategies

Brian Dean from Backlinko maintains that “link building is still the backbone of SEO,” which makes sense given it greatly contributes to a website’s domain authority and ranking.

Link building, at its core, involves creating positive relationships with other website owners with the hopes of acquiring high-quality, relevant backlinks. Don’t strive for a large quantity of backlinks. Instead, pursue backlinks from reputable sites.

6. Adapt to unique SEO variables

Chuck Price, Founder of Measurable SEO, reminds us that “SEO doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Every situation offers a unique set of variables.” No two businesses are the same. You’ll need to be more flexible while recognizing that pages and keywords require varying strategies and timeframes to rank.

For example, the regular Google algorithm updates always change the requirements for a well-ranking site. Or, down the road, user experience and website design studies could change how we layout our web pages. No marketing tactics are indefinite.

7. Prep for unforeseen SEO challenges

“One unfortunate part about the world of SEO is that sometimes things go wrong,” says Eric Enge, General Manager at Perficient Digital.

If things can go awry in SEO even when we least expect it, Enge suggests preparing for any instance, whether they result from Google algorithm updates or other outside factors. The point is to be adaptable by altering your strategy accordingly.

8. Focus on long-tail keyword research strategies

Aleh Barysevich, Founder of SEO PowerSuite, points out that, “If you don’t have a long-tail SEO strategy, you’re missing out.” A good strategy incorporating long-tail keywords can lead to better conversions and a more streamlined path to first-page rankings. This is because long-tail keywords have more specific and detailed search intent.

9. Contribute consistent effort

While pondering the value of SEO, you might also be wondering how much effort SEO takes. Viola Eva, Founder of Flow SEO maintains that “It will take strategic, consistent, and sufficient efforts to rank well.” In shorter terms, there are no SEO shortcuts. True organic success requires continuous, long-term, and sustainable efforts.

10. Strive for continuous improvement

Never stop improving your content marketing. Julie Joyce, owner of Link Fish Media, says, “Almost anything can be improved in some way.” She’s right — whether it’s updating old content, enhancing user experience, staying ahead of competitors, or acquiring new backlinks, improvements should never cease as long as your business is operational.

11. Target your users first

Rachel Costello, Technical SEO Consultant at Builtvisible, stresses that “user-centric performance optimization is the future” of SEO. When it comes to future-proofing SEO efforts, understanding how users interact with and experience content is key to overall success. This isn’t just opinion, it’s fact, as Google prioritizes authentic content that engages users and meets their needs.

12. Understanding search intent

Simon Ensor, Managing Director at Yellowball, advises to “Focus on searcher intent. This should underpin all of your activities — research, creation and distribution.” Search intent helps marketers to understand what users’ search queries aim to achieve and how your content helps them.

Examples showing the importance of SEO in digital marketing

Just starting out with your SEO campaign and lack hard numbers to show stakeholders?

We know it’s hard to determine the value of anything without proof, so we’ve brought together three HawkSEM case studies to demonstrate the very real benefits of SEO.

“SEO is a core competency here at HawkSEM,” says Rambod Yadegar, President of HawkSEM. “We take a performance-driven and ROI approach to SEO for clients. We learn their business, target audience, and buyer persona.  From there, we create a custom SEO program (manually, we do not use a software or tool to run seo programs), monitor and track them closely to ensure a positive ROI.”

Each case study presents the clients’ unique goals, but all use aspects of SEO to increase online growth and generate revenue.

Easly: Building a scalable SEO strategy

HawkSEM’s Easly case study vividly demonstrates how essential SEO is in driving business success.

Easly, a financing solutions provider, sought to enhance its digital presence in search rankings, grow organic traffic, and capture more qualified leads.

HawkSEM optimized Easly website by improving technical SEO elements, and building a strong keyword portfolio relevant to Easly’s services.

This targeted approach led to increased:

• Page speed increased 3.5x
• Page referrals increased by 2,500%
• Featured snippets, captured over 40 new placements
• Keywords in Canada — 325 keywords
• Domain Authority increased by 150%

Using SEO efforts, Easly’s increase in organic traffic led to higher customer engagement and conversion rates.

MileIQ: Expanding global reach

The MileIQ case study from HawkSEM is another convincing example of how SEO can impact online growth and customer reach for businesses.

MileIQ is a mileage-tracking app that wanted to expand its digital footprint and reach its target audience. To address these difficulties, HawkSEM optimized its website content, enhanced the user experience, and refined its keyword targeting to more closely match user search intent.

The results showed a 125% increase YOY in organic site traffic with nearly 4,000 new first-page keywords. MileIQ’s organic sessions also increased by 207%.
HawkSEM’s SEO strategy for MileIQ demonstrates how an effective, well-executed SEO strategy helps achieve digital marketing goals and reach desired audiences more effectively.

Swimsuits Direct: Increasing revenue

This case study for HawkSEM client, Swimsuits Direct shows SEO’s long-term benefits when properly implemented.

Swimsuits Direct wished to provide women with various swimsuit brands and styles suitable for any body type. Its goal was to increase revenue and reach more digital shoppers. HawkSEM used a combination of SEO and PPC tactics to achieve its overall goals, even in the off-season.

Together, HawkSEM and Swimsuits Direct devised detailed customer personas, performance objectives, and unique selling points, then created an SEO plan.

After optimizing its site, Swimsuits Direct witnessed an almost 110% increase in revenue YOY, exceeding its original goal.

23 mistakes that decrease the value of SEO

The last thing any marketer wants to do is ruin a perfectly good SEO strategy and possible website growth. But it can happen, even if unknowingly.

If you’re a small business or startup, here’s a brief list of SEO mistakes that can heavily impact your ability to generate search traffic and revenue:

1. Having duplicate content
2. Engaging in keyword stuffing
3. Not optimizing for YouTube SEO
4. Neglecting internal and external linking
5. Ignoring crawlability issues and indexing issues
6. Not using analytics tools
7. Targeting high competition and high search volume keywords
8. Not investing in link building
9. Leaving outdated content on your site
10. Not optimizing for mobile SEO
11. Not removing broken links
12. Being too dependent on AI-generated content (ChatGPT, Jasper, ContentShake, etc.)
13. Ignoring local SEO
14. Having poor website navigation and structure
15. Not paying attention to page speed
16. Skipping out on alt text for images
17. Website redesign traffic loss
18. Inconsistent business listings across the web
19. Not engaging with customer reviews
20. Having a poor UX design and experience
21. Not using social media
22. Failing to optimize for voice search
23. Ignoring Google My Business optimizations

Thankfully, many of these mistakes are easily avoidable, so you won’t see intense decreases in SEO efforts.

If you’d like to avoid these mistakes altogether, contact us to explore your options.

8 of the best tools to show SEO value

There are countless analytics and tracking tools that make quantifying the value of SEO easier. Many of these tools are either free or incredibly affordable, depending on your business needs.

Here are some of the best tools for showing SEO value.

1. ConversionIQ (CIQ): This is HawkSEM’s proprietary tool that helps our teams target the correct audience, create important touchpoints in each stage of the funnel, and gather valuable insights. The tool allows us to help businesses generate more qualified leads.
2. Semrush: This is one of the most dynamic all-in-one toolkits in the marketing industry. It comes with many SEO tools that make tracking progress a breeze. This is an ideal tool for small to medium-sized businesses and has the largest backlink and keyword databases in the industry.
3. Ahrefs: Similar to Semrush, Ahrefs is another top SEO toolkit that helps users track progress. It also provides a range of tools from competitive analysis and link building to PPC. It also allows users to integrate with other important platforms like Google.
4. Moz: Offers a wide set of tools for site auditing, keyword research, link building, and more. Moz is also highly renowned for its creation of the domain authority metric, which many businesses use to measure their website’s credibility. It also offers the MozBar extension, which helps you examine webpage metadata.
5. Screaming Frog: A desktop program marketers rely on to conduct on-site SEO evaluations. It can crawl links, images, CSS, scripts, and applications and provide users insights into how to improve their technical SEO.
6. Hubspot Website Grader: This tool gives marketers a free website assessment. Scan a single URL to see the website’s current performance. After evaluating your website, Hubspot Website Grader gives you actionable tips on how to enhance your online performance.
7. Google Analytics and Google Search Console: These Google tools are absolutely essential for any new or veteran marketing professional. Google Analytics tracks your post-click data (who clicks on what) while Google Search Console tracks pre-click data (search queries). Google tools are easy to integrate with other SEO tools on the market.
8. BuzzSumo: One of the best tools for generating topic ideas and seeing what types of content are currently trending. With this tool, you can better understand how content is performing and how competitors are leveraging their own content.

Measuring the value of SEO services vs DIY

Finding the right SEO strategy takes time and research. To reach your goals, consider hiring managed SEO services (useful for large brands needing enterprise SEO services) or doing SEO yourself. Both will have varying marketing costs, depending on the budget and scope.

No one option is better but there are some advantages and disadvantages of both:

Hiring an SEO agency

SEO agencies have reputations for being more specialized and knowledgeable. They offer a deeper understanding of the values of search engine optimization, algorithms, and trends because they’re truly experts in their crafts.

They can take this expertise and mold it to any client’s business needs in an al-a-carte manner.

Because they have more manpower, they also tend to generate leads for customers more quickly, making them a preferred option for hire.

For example, our SEO agency, HawkSEM, helped Happy Ears Hearing grow organic traffic by 396%, while increasing conversions by 44%.

Depending on the need, you can even hire for specific areas of SEO (i.e. link building agency, paid advertising agency, or social media agency).

However, some SEO agencies have a poor habit of acquiring too many clients. This spreads their employees too thin and can result in poor-quality work. SEO agencies can also be out of the price range for small businesses or startups.

Implementing DIY SEO

DIY SEO, on the other hand, tends to be more cost-effective than hiring an agency. You also have full control, visibility, and flexibility when crafting a unique SEO strategy.

One of the major disadvantages is the massive learning curve of mastering SEO. Knowing the ins and outs of SEO can take time and significant time testing tactics. This can slow down a business.

Doing it yourself means you’re likely doing it on your own or with a very small team. If this is the case, you may not acquire the same SEO results as an SEO agency with years of experience and a team of 50.

The takeaway

SEO, although challenging and always evolving, is a pivotal aspect of any digital marketing strategy. Marketers, businesses, and brands continue to recognize its long-term value even with its variables and elusive tendencies.

We’ve shown you how quantifiable a well-crafted SEO strategy can be. With patience and hard study, and constant willingness to improve, you can master all areas of it and see your business soar.

Prefer to work with an SEO agency instead? Request a free consultation with HawkSEM experts to get started.