Google Rankings to Revenue: How to Track SEO’s Impact on your profit

Tracking the financial return of SEO efforts isn’t always straightforward, but when done right, it proves how strong rankings translate into business revenue. 

To effectively measure SEO’s impact on your business, it’s essential to bridge the gap between organic improvements and tangible outcomes. By connecting performance metrics to revenue, you can track how increased visibility and higher rankings lead to conversions, sales, and ultimately, revenue growth. In this blog, we’ll explore how to track SEO’s real impact and transform organic gains into profitable results.

1. Optimising your site for better rankings: Laying the Foundation

• Keyword Research & Targeting

Identifying high-intent keywords that drive valuable traffic.

• Technical SEO & Site Health 

Ensuring a fast, user-friendly, and indexable website.

• On-Page & Content Optimisation 

Creating valuable, keyword-rich content in line with search volume 

• Link Building & Authority Growth 

Earning backlinks to boost domain authority.

Goal: Achieve higher rankings for target keywords and increase organic visibility.

2. Measuring Organic Traffic Growth

To measure the effectiveness of your SEO efforts, it’s crucial to monitor how your organic traffic grows over time. By using tools like Google Search Console, Google Analytics, and analysing user engagement metrics, you can gain deeper insights into the correlation between improved rankings and growth in revenue. 

Google Search Console (GSC)

Track impressions, clicks, and keyword performance.
Use Google Search Console to gain an understanding of your current position and track how your impressions and clicks change as you implement your SEO strategy. It’s important to take external factors into account when looking at this data, such as seasonality and changes in the SERP. For example, a new addition to Google’s search results pages are AI overviews, which have caused dramatic changes to the CTR of the sites ranking. Read more on that in our latest recent article, Navigating AI Overviews for Home & Garden Marketers. Make sure to compare your rankings and clicks to previous periods to benchmark your current standing. 

Google Analytics (GA4) 

Monitor organic traffic fluctuations over time.

GA4 is a vital part of measuring the success of your SEO strategy, and often gives us clues as to where we should focus our efforts. Google Analytics is one of the most accurate tools we can use to understand where our traffic is coming from, who we’re currently attracting to the website, and where the gaps are in our current strategy. We can use it to understand the journey our users take through the site, and where they might be hitting pain points.

In terms of SEO,the Acquisition area of GA4 is going to give us the best information when it comes to active volume levels on the site, giving us visibility of sessions, users & conversion events.That being said, it’s imperative to follow the user journey through the site as well, to ensure we’re making the experience as simple for the user as possible. 

User Engagement Metrics

Bounce rate, time on page, and pages per session

Some of the metrics we could look at when focusing on the user journey are bounce rate, CTR and conversions. The aim is to send more traffic to the site, but these efforts won’t reap results unless the landing page we send them to is valuable to them. There are a few mistakes we could make in this respect, such as sending users to a 404 or a redirect chain that takes too long to load. Monitoring things like bounce rate can highlight issues like this and help us fix pain points. 

Goal: Confirm that better rankings lead to an increase in high-quality traffic.

3. Tracking Conversions & Lead Generation

We’ve established that ranking well on high volume SERP’s will inevitably lead to an increase in traffic, but how do we determine whether our new strategy is actually adding value? 

Setting Up Goals in GA4: 

Tracking form submissions, downloads, sign-ups, and purchases.

We need to track conversions, whether that be a lead generation model, or purchases made on an ecommerce site. If these have increased at a similar rate to traffic to the site, we can safely assume that these can be credited to our SEO efforts.

Attribution Modelling: 

Identifying which pages/keywords drive conversions.
Understanding where our traffic is entering the site from is vital when trying to understand whether your SEO efforts are effective. If you have recently optimised a page of your site based on keyword research, and in turn this page starts to rank higher on Google, we can assume that traffic to this page would dramatically increase. Attribution modelling is one of the main selling points of GA4, allowing us to get more representative and accurate data so we know where conversions are coming from. With more accurate data we have a better window into the impact of our SEO efforts

Goal: Prove that SEO-generated traffic is turning into leads or sales.

4. Mapping Revenue to SEO Efforts

Once we have analysed where our traffic is coming from, and where on the site the users are landing, we can prove that the conversions from these user journeys can be attributed to SEO. The next step in this process is to prove that the ROI for your SEO efforts is higher than the cost. SEO costs money, whether that be by employing a specialist, outsourcing it to an agency or simply paying for the tools, there will be a cost. If your search engine optimisation efforts have been effective however, the gains should far outweigh these costs. 

Assigning Value to Conversions 

Calculating the average revenue per lead or sale.

One of the ways to find out the return on investment for your SEO efforts is to calculate the average revenue per lead or sale. Once we know this, we can estimate how much our revenue has increased based on the changes made.  For example, if SEO increases traffic from 10,000 to 15,000 visitors, leading to 100 extra sales at £500 each, that’s an additional £50,000 in revenue; showcasing a 900% ROI on a £5,000 SEO investment.

Multi-Touch Attribution

Understanding the role of SEO in the customer journey.

Users won’t always convert on the first visit to your site. Some purchases, particularly high-value ones, require extra thought. This is why helpful, valuable content is a large part of SEO, and why Google prioritises content that adds value to the user. A user may come and go from your site multiple times before finally converting. On the final visit to the site they may enter through a completely different method to when they discovered the brand, but it’s the valuable content and useful information that was provided to them on recent visits that inevitably resulted in the purchase.

Goal: Show how organic traffic contributes to actual revenue generation.

5. Refining SEO for Higher ROI

Analysing High-Converting Keywords 

Doubling down on the best performers.

Once we have an understanding of where our traffic is coming from, where they are entering the site, and the highest converting pages, we can make changes in the areas that matter most. We can focus on the pages that drive the highest number of conversions, enhancing the keyword strategy and adding additional content such as FAQ’s to enhance the value and equity of the pages.

Improving Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO) 

Enhancing pages to boost sales.
It’s also important to consider the overall UX of the site, ensuring a smooth customer journey from when they enter the site, to when the purchase is made. User experience can relate to many different factors, from ensuring customers don’t hit broken links, to enhancing site speed and even the website’s design altogether. To optimise your site to its full potential and continue to grow your revenue, CRO should be taken into consideration. 

Continuous Testing & Adaptation 

Keeping up with search trends and algorithm updates.

There are endless possibilities when it comes to SEO and how much you can use it to grow your business. What works for some won’t work for others, and with the ever changing landscape, it’s important to keep on top of your efforts and continue to adapt. Google updates can result in lost rankings and volatile SERP’s, and with the rise and fall of social media trends, there are an array of new opportunities we could be taking advantage of. Continuing to stay on top of your SEO strategy and optimise your site to gain the most valuable traffic is vital for growing your business, and in turn, your revenue. 

Goal: Maximise the revenue impact of SEO by fine-tuning strategy and execution.

Conclusion 

By tracking rankings, traffic, and conversions, businesses can demonstrate a clear link between SEO efforts and revenue growth. With the right tools and strategy, SEO stops being just an expense and becomes a measurable, revenue-driving asset for your business. 

Author: Megan Jones, SEO Executive