For Software as a Service (SaaS) companies, Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is an essential channel for driving cost-effective customer acquisition and boosting Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR). Unlike paid channels that require ongoing spending to sustain traffic, SEO provides compounding benefits over time, making it a scalable and sustainable growth strategy.

Key metrics for measuring SEO Return on Investment (ROI) include:

  • Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC): The expense involved in acquiring a customer through SEO efforts.
  • Lifetime Value (LTV): The revenue generated throughout the customer’s lifespan.
  • LTV to CAC Ratio: Aiming for a 3:1 ratio is ideal, ensuring both profitability and scalability.
  • New to Brand (NTB): Interactions from new customers are crucial top-of-funnel metrics, helping to understand user purchase and discovery paths.

What is SEO ROI?

SEO ROI assesses the financial return generated by your SEO initiatives in relation to the costs incurred. It measures how effectively your SEO strategy contributes to business revenue and whether it represents a worthwhile investment.

Why is measuring SEO ROI important?

Understanding SEO’s return on investment is crucial for informed business decision-making. It allows companies to determine whether to scale, maintain, or adjust their SEO strategies based on performance outcomes.

Measuring SEO ROI serves as a valuable tool for performance benchmarking, enabling marketing teams to evaluate its effectiveness against other channels like PPC, email, or social media campaigns.

Demonstrating the value of SEO also plays a key role in resource justification. Businesses can secure additional budget or resources to expand their SEO efforts by presenting tangible results. Analysing ROI goes beyond justifying resources—it helps uncover areas for improvement and identifies opportunities to optimise content, refine targeting, or enhance technical infrastructure for even greater impact.

What SEO investment involves

SEO is not a quick-fix solution; it’s a long-term investment that demands patience and consistent effort. While initial signs of success may emerge within a few weeks, significant business impact typically takes months to develop. This delay is due to the time required for search engines to recognise and reward content and site structure enhancements.

There are times when addressing a significant issue can greatly enhance overall performance, such as fixing serious JavaScript and rendering problems. However, most of the time, SEO is about making small, incremental improvements. A successful SEO strategy involves several interconnected efforts, including:

On-Page SEO:

  • Conducting keyword research and optimisation.
  • Producing high-quality, targeted content.
  • Improving user experience (UX) through effective layout and design.

Off-Page SEO:

  • Building links to boost brand authority and validate the entity (reputation and prize scoring).
  • Establishing partnerships for backlinks and referral traffic.

Technical SEO:

  • Ensuring a fast, mobile-friendly website.
  • Optimising crawlability and indexability for search engines.
  • Fixing broken links, redirects, and technical issues.

Holistic Strategy:

  • Integrating SEO with broader marketing initiatives like content marketing, demand generation, and paid campaigns.
  • Aligning SEO objectives with business goals such as customer acquisition and revenue growth.

Common misconceptions about SEO

A common misconception is that SEO is simply about targeting a few keywords and expecting quick results. In reality, achieving success in SEO requires:

  • Conducting in-depth market and competitor analysis.
  • Well-researched and carefully implemented strategies that align with the overall business strategy, target audience, and product.
  • Performing regular content updates and technical maintenance.

The compound benefits of SEO

Unlike paid channels like PPC, where traffic ceases immediately once spending stops, SEO accumulates benefits over time.

As your content climbs the rankings and gains visibility, the return on your initial investment increases, often making it one of the most cost-effective strategies for long-term growth.

Investing in SEO goes beyond just achieving rankings, however. Instead, think of it as you building a sustainable revenue engine that aligns with your broader SaaS business objectives.

Measuring SEO ROI

Assessing SEO ROI is crucial for evaluating the effectiveness of your efforts, refining your strategy, and justifying further investments. For SaaS companies, where CAC and revenue growth are vital, understanding ROI ensures that SEO contributes to sustainable and profitable growth.

There are two core types of SEO, and they differ in terms of their objectives and how you measure them:

Brand SEO Enhance brand awareness and engagement. Measure ROI through cost-per-click (CPC) benchmarks and audience reach metrics.
Performance SEO Drive conversions, such as signups or leads. Focus on ROI metrics like cost per signup, CAC, and LTV.

Both forms of SEO enable each other, and you can rarely activate one without the other.

Using ROI data to optimise SEO

Measuring ROI ensures that your SEO efforts are data-driven, impactful, and aligned with your business growth objectives. By continuously monitoring and optimising, you can transform SEO into a dependable engine for customer acquisition and revenue growth.

Below are some practices you should be doing regularly to ensure your SEO efforts are delivering value:

  • Review ROI on a monthly basis to decide whether to increase or decrease investments.
  • Strive for consistent ROI performance to stay competitive in search rankings.
  • Utilise insights from high-performing areas while addressing those that are underperforming.

Use data to forecast your SEO growth (and adjust if needed)

Tracking your SEO ROI goes beyond examining past performance. It also serves as a valuable tool for planning future growth.

By leveraging data for forecasting, you can spot opportunities, prioritise your actions, and argue for further investment in your SEO strategy. Forecasting allows you to make well-informed decisions about scaling your efforts and enhancing your ROI.

Steps to forecast SEO growth

#1 Analyse existing data

  • Examine how your current SEO initiatives are performing, focusing on metrics like traffic, signups, and revenue.
  • Look for patterns and trends over time to help predict future performance.

#2 Estimate potential outcomes for new content

  • Utilise tools such as Google Analytics, Ahrefs, or SEMrush to gauge the traffic potential of new or updated pages.
  • Combine this with historical data on conversion rates to estimate:
    • Signups or leads per page.
    • Revenue generated per signup (using Average Revenue Per Account, ARPA).

#3 Build a page-by-page revenue forecast

  • For each potential new page:
    • Calculate the expected traffic if it ranks in the top positions.
    • Estimate the conversion rate to leads or signups.
    • Determine the number of paying customers that could result from these leads.
    • Multiply this by your ARPA to estimate potential revenue.

#4 Prioritise based on ROI potential

  • Rank your opportunities by their potential revenue and cost-effectiveness.
  • Consider the investments needed to achieve results, such as:
  • Content creation costs.
  • Brand reputation & value in the context of the space.
  • Technical SEO optimizations.
  • Focus your resources on pages or strategies that offer the highest ROI potential.

#5 Using forecasts to secure buy-in

Forecasting guides your internal decisions and strengthens your case for additional investment. By presenting clear, data-driven predictions, you can:

  • Justify an increase in your SEO budget.
  • Gain support from stakeholders and executives.
  • Emphasise the long-term value of SEO compared to other channels like PPC.

Data-driven forecasting shifts SEO from a reactive approach to a proactive strategy. By anticipating outcomes and effectively allocating resources, you can ensure your SEO investment continually drives growth and positions your SaaS business for long-term success.