SEO
How to Measure SEO ROI (Incl. 6 Challenges of Calculating It)
SEO ROI (return on investment) estimates the business value of all SEO activities in contrast to their cost. It’s one of the most common topics any SEO consultant or manager has to address when it comes to allocating marketing budgets and resources.
In its essence, calculating ROI is quite easy and straightforward. But in SEO, there are many caveats you should be aware of. Those ultimately make measuring and interpreting ROI one of the most complex and challenging problems you can face in SEO.
But we’ve got you covered and will share the ins and outs of measuring SEO ROI. In this article, we’ll go through these:
Let’s dive in.
The ROI formula for SEO is simple in essence:
SEO ROI = (value of organic conversions – cost of SEO investments)/cost of SEO investments
In other words, you need to divide the SEO profit by the associated SEO costs. Let’s expand on each variable because it can be quite tricky to get to some final numbers.
1. Calculate your SEO investments
Organic search is often viewed as a “free traffic” channel, but that’s devaluing the huge time investments that usually go into it. And those are not the only associated SEO costs.
SEO investments can usually be divided into four categories:
- In-house employees – It’s obvious to count in dedicated SEO and content creation staff, but you should also account for the required designer and developer resources.
- SEO freelancers and agencies – This is straightforward. And if you hire SEO freelancers or agencies, they can and, in many cases, should be the ones measuring SEO ROI.
- SEO tools – Count in all your subscriptions for dedicated SEO tools like Ahrefs. You can also partially include the costs of tools used by the broader marketing department if you also use them for SEO (e.g., Similarweb, BuzzSumo, HARO, PR software, etc.).
- Content distribution and link building – As we know, SEO doesn’t end with publishing content. Consider partially including costs of content promotion efforts. Also, if you buy links as one of your link building tactics, count that in. Google and many SEOs warn against buying links, but the reality of link building is often different.
Combine these costs over your desired period of time. Now, choosing the time period is one of the big challenges. We’ll expand on that later, but you can start with monthly comparisons for the sake of simplicity.
2. Calculate the value of your organic traffic conversions
You need proper conversion tracking in Google Analytics (or its alternatives) to get this number. Segment the traffic to “organic” and check the value of conversions that you want to account for in the ROI calculations:
The type of conversions and how you assign conversion values will differ from business to business.
It’s pretty straightforward for e-commerce businesses, as they send the value of sales conversions to GA.
But, for example, it may be more complex for lead generation businesses. For them, it can be helpful to assign dollar values to new marketing or sales-qualified leads.
3. Account for the value of assisted conversions
Historically, we often had to get used to working with the default “last non-direct click” attribution model in Universal Analytics.
It’s a flawed model in most cases because it assigns 100% of the conversion credit to a single marketing channel closest to the conversion event.
Here’s a good sports analogy for understanding this: It’s similar to you only praising players who score a goal. Goalkeepers and those responsible for defense won’t be too happy.
Your website likely drives organic traffic at all stages of the customer journey. Even one piece of content can target multiple steps in the marketing funnel:
For example, people may land on 10 of your articles from Google and then convert after clicking a search or retargeting ad. In that case, you’ll want to see that initial organic search contribution.
The shift to Google Analytics 4 (GA4) partially solves this problem via utilizing a data-driven attribution (DDA) model by default (more on that later).
The conversions and the values you see in all GA4 reports already account for the partial contributions of organic traffic to the overall website conversions. If you already use GA4, you don’t technically need to dive into the assisted conversions report.
Nevertheless, it’s always a good idea to check and analyze the conversion paths of your visitors and how each channel contributes to conversions.
For Universal Analytics, I already covered the process of analyzing assisted organic conversions.
In GA4, go to Advertising > Attribution > Conversion paths, select the conversion event you want to analyze, and check the impact of organic search throughout customer journeys:
You can also filter the organic traffic only to get the most relevant data, as seen in the table below:
The screenshots and data come from the official GA4 demo account, so the conversion paths are simplistic and won’t be like that in most cases. Also, feel free to play around with other attribution models to get some interesting insights there.
I can imagine this simplified process of calculating SEO ROI only raises more questions, so it’s time to dive deeper into all the nuances and caveats.
You should be aware of these challenges to calculate SEO ROI and all the other related metrics as best as you can. I’ll provide a few recommendations to apply in practice along the way.
1. Marketing attribution is inherently flawed
Marketing attribution is one of those topics that provoke many discussions. We have experts on completely opposite sides of the fence.
Some say it’s almost never worth the resources to try and solve it properly and that you should trust your gut instead. Others are convinced that proper attribution can be almost always reasonably achieved.
One thing is for sure. Attributing conversions to marketing channels is inherently flawed regardless of the attribution model used. Heuristic models like the last non-direct click will just be much more flawed than the new DDA.
Customer journeys and touchpoints are often much more complex than analytics software makes them look.
Here’s a great example of a specific buyer’s journey of a SparkToro customer. (SparkToro is the SaaS company of Rand Fishkin, who is one of those experts on the “better trust your gut” side of things.)
Let’s take a look:
As mentioned earlier, organic search traffic is a marketing channel that can span the whole customer journey from awareness to retention. Attribution is especially tricky here, so let’s discuss the implications further.
DDA is a solid solution for this that will likely shift many people closer to the “proper attribution is possible” camp. But it still doesn’t solve many other problems. It’s a black box that gets more accurate with increasing traffic and conversions.
Unless you have “higher” hundreds (or ideally thousands of conversions) a month, I’d still take those numbers with a huge grain of salt. And ultimately, no matter the attribution model, you still don’t see data from sessions where the tracking code wasn’t fired (e.g., ad blockers and quick bounces).
2. The connection between SEO and brand-building
Let’s say you browse through some YouTube videos and see someone talking about an interesting product. You Google that brand or product, head to the website, and make a purchase. Organic traffic gets 100% attribution for the conversion.
You can come up with many other scenarios where the only organic search interaction is through branded queries. SEO gets the credit when it shouldn’t.
On the other hand, you can have strong SEO with high search visibility on the SERPs throughout the whole funnel. It’s perfectly capable of converting many prospects from start to finish by itself.
But social media ads, display ads, and search ads get in the way and make a bigger contribution to the conversion just because they’re more prominent.
DDA in GA4 partly solves this problem, but it still can’t take into account the branding aspect of SEO. The brand awareness and salience you build by being seen in top-of-the-funnel content either through your own content production or by outreach aren’t things we can measure well.
Not being able to segment branded vs. non-branded organic traffic with conversion data makes all of this difficult to assess.
3. We can’t measure the retention impact of SEO
Ahrefs is a great example of this. We produce product-led content that’s constantly educating our (potential) customers about all the ways they can use our tools to solve their SEO and marketing problems.
As we neither use GA nor store cookies, I can’t back this up with data. But I’d estimate that 20-30% of organic traffic visits to our blog come from people who are already Ahrefs customers.
The retention impact of SEO, in this case, can be divided into two categories:
- As people learn to squeeze more out of our toolset, they start using the tool more and more, which leads to lowering churn rates.
- Content about tools and features included in higher-priced plans makes some people upgrade their monthly subscriptions.
In other words, SEO has the power to increase the customer lifetime value, as many pieces of content also overlap with the retention and nurturing stages of the marketing funnel.
But again, it is difficult or even impossible to take this impact into account when calculating the SEO ROI.
4. Huge time discrepancies between “investment” and “return” periods
The variables in calculating ROI are the investments and returns over certain time periods. But when we look at that on the whole website and business level, it’s impossible to tie specific investments to specific returns in SEO.
This is where the simplified principle of comparing the same monthly periods of “investments” and “returns” fails.
SEO can take a lot of time to provide returns on the investment. Yes, you can certainly have quick wins. But nothing is guaranteed.
A good alternative to choosing arbitrary time periods is to be more granular and start calculating ROI on the category, page, or keyword level. You can measure well the “return” of ranking with particular pages and can also know most of the “investments” that went into it.
We’d still omit technical SEO and other related costs and efforts that are usually applied to a broader scope of the website at once. But these partial costs are unlikely to shift a specific page from positive to negative ROI, so feel free to leave them out for simplicity’s sake—as long as you’re aware of them.
5. SEO testing has limited capabilities
One way to better understand the contribution of a marketing channel to overarching marketing objectives is to stop running campaigns on it for a while and see what happens.
For example, we ran such an experiment with PPC channels:
We’ll be reallocating our paid traffic budget (~$200k💰) for December away from the Google/Facebook—and into sponsoring the industry’s best creators and thought leaders.
— Ahrefs (@ahrefs) November 24, 2021
What you’d be looking for here is marketing incrementality—the lift the channel brings on top of a specific outcome that happens anyway.
Let’s say the outcome we want to monitor is conversions, so we’d be looking at how many conversions we’d still get if we halted specific marketing activities.
The problem with SEO is that you can’t just turn it off. Or well, you can. But no sane marketer will ever deploy noindex robots meta tag on the whole website.
Organic search is simply one of the most important channels for many businesses, and sabotaging your own SEO can have long-term detrimental effects.
This doesn’t mean that you can’t run SEO experiments and tests. You absolutely can. There’s been quite a lot of development and coverage about SEO testing in recent years.
But for the purpose of measuring incrementality and ROI, it is close to impossible for the vast majority of websites to come up with a good hypothesis and valid testing scenarios.
6. Forecasting future ROI
Last but not least, as SEOs, we’re often asked about the expected outcomes and ROI of certain SEO activities. This can get even more complicated, as SEO forecasting is a discipline on its own and can clash with all the aforementioned challenges as well.
Don’t try to beat around the bush. Instead, face the uncertainty head-on. Setting up SEO objectives and making sure we’re on the right track to achieving them is a crucial part of our job. Having good communication skills is another.
A good way to approach this is to consider the following factors when coming up with specific numbers:
- Past SEO performance of the page(s) or a website and its competitors
- Compounded traffic potential of the content in question
- Estimation of an average conversion rate (can be applied just to the bottom-of-the-funnel content for simplicity’s sake)
For SEO performance, a good start is to look up your website in Ahrefs’ Site Explorer, head over to the Performance chart in the Overview report, and add all your relevant competitors:
You can also check the traffic value (estimated monthly cost of traffic from all keywords a site is ranking for if paid via PPC):
And the number of organic pages:
This should give you an idea about the relationship between the content output and organic traffic in your niche. It still leaves out link building activities and technical SEO, but that will only complicate things here even more.
As for the traffic potential, paste all the keywords you plan to target with the new proposed content into Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer and take a look at the Traffic Potential (TP) column:
TP in Ahrefs shows how much organic traffic the #1 ranking page for your target keyword receives from all the keywords that it ranks for in your target country. You can either analyze this on a keyword-to-keyword basis or export the list to sum up the column values.
And lastly, we have the conversion. You should already have this data available for similar content in the tracking software, and you can also look up and/or survey other websites in your niche.
By the end of this, you can extrapolate and estimate the outcome of all the proposed SEO activities. Or you can go more “granular,” as that information will always be more accurate and easier to communicate.
Of course, stay away from any guarantees. But saying something along the lines of “I expect that [SEO activity] can increase traffic by X, which could bring Y conversions” can work when you set up the right expectations.
To be honest, I’m in the camp advocating that it’s not even necessary to calculate the ROI of your SEO and related content marketing efforts. This is especially true if you can prioritize content creation and other SEO tasks well.
Our CMO, Tim Soulo, wrote a great Twitter thread about the ROI of content marketing that’s highly relevant to this topic and also shows how we think about that in Ahrefs:
Let’s talk about the “ROI of Content Marketing.“
Far too often us marketers get challenged with this question by our boss (or our client):
– How do I know that my investment in content will guarantee a positive return? …& how can I *MEASURE* it?
[Read more..]— Tim Soulo 🇺🇦 (@timsoulo) March 23, 2021
So what’s the alternative? Choosing and tracking the most suitable SEO KPI that’s not based on conversions.
The best candidate for this KPI, in most cases, is search visibility. It’s the SEO version of one of the most important marketing KPIs, share of voice (SOV), which measures how visible your brand is in the market.
That’s important because there’s a strong relationship between SOV and market share. Generally speaking, the higher your SOV, the bigger your share of the pie.
For the most accurate tracking of search visibility, paste the keywords that matter to you into Ahrefs’ Rank Tracker. Note that these should be the main keywords that encompass what your target audience is searching for (don’t bother with long-tails).
From there, head to the Competitors Overview tab and check the Visibility column:
That’s it. As long as you see a long-term growth trend in the search visibility for your website, you should be confident that your SEO efforts are paying off.
I know this isn’t a possible alternative for many teams that are required to show “money metrics,” but it’s definitely worth tracking as one of your SEO KPIs.
Final thoughts
I could have taken the easy path here and just touched the surface without diving into all the challenges and caveats of calculating SEO ROI. But this is what stakeholders care about the most, so we should all be knowledgeable and confident in communicating these matters.
Many topics covered here can be in-depth standalone articles. If you’re interested in learning more about everything related to marketing analytics and attribution, I highly recommend you check out the blog of Avinash Kaushik.
Got questions or interesting insights regarding SEO ROI? Ping me on Twitter.
SEO
Is AI Going To E-E-A-T Your Experience For Breakfast? The LinkedIn Example
Are LinkedIn’s collaborative articles part of SEO strategies nowadays?
More to the point, should they be?
The search landscape has changed dramatically in recent years, blurring the lines between search engines and where searches occur.
Following the explosive adoption of AI in content marketing and the most recent Google HCU, core, and spam updates, we’re looking at a very different picture now in search versus 12 months ago.
User-generated and community-led content seems to be met with renewed favourability by the algorithm (theoretically, mirroring what people reward, too).
LinkedIn’s freshly launched “collaborative articles” seem to be a perfect sign of our times: content that combines authority (thanks to LinkedIn’s authority), AI-generated content, and user-generated content.
What could go wrong?
In this article, we’ll cover:
- What are “collaborative articles” on LinkedIn?
- Why am I discussing them in the context of SEO?
- The main issues with collaborative articles.
- How is Google treating them?
- How they can impact your organic performance.
What Are LinkedIn Collaborative Articles?
First launched in March 2023, LinkedIn says about collaborative articles:
“These articles begin as AI-powered conversation starters, developed with our editorial team, but they aren’t complete without insights from our members. A select group of experts have been invited to contribute their own ideas, examples and experiences within the articles.“
Essentially, each of these articles starts as a collection of AI-generated answers to FAQs/prompts around any given topic. Under each of these sections, community members can add their own perspectives, insights, and advice.
What’s in it for contributors? To earn, ultimately, a “Top Voice” badge on their profile.
The articles are indexable and are all placed under the same folder (https://www.linkedin.com/advice/).
They look like this:
On the left-hand side, there are always FAQs relevant to the topic answered by AI.
On the right-hand side is where the contributions by community members get posted. Users can react to each contribution in the same way as to any LinkedIn post on their feed.
How Easy Is It To Contribute And Earn A Badge For Your Insights?
Pretty easy.
I first got invited to contribute on September 19, 2023 – though I had already found a way to contribute a few weeks before this.
Screenshot from LinkedIn, November 2023My notifications included updates from connections who had contributed to an article.
By clicking on these, I was transferred to the article and was able to contribute to it, too (as well as additional articles, linked at the bottom).
I wanted to test how hard it was to earn a Top SEO Voice badge. Eight article contributions later (around three to four hours of my time), I had earned three.
Screenshots from LinkedIn, November 2023How? Apparently, simply by earning likes for my contributions.
A Mix Of Brilliance, Fuzzy Editorial Rules, And Weird Uncle Bob
Collaborative articles sound great in principle – a win-win for both sides.
- LinkedIn struck a bullseye: creating and scaling content (theoretically) oozing with E-E-A-T, with minimal investment.
- Users benefit from building their personal brand (and their company’s) for a fragment of the effort and cost this usually takes. The smartest ones complement their on-site content strategy with this off-site golden ticket.
What isn’t clear from LinkedIn’s Help Center is what this editorial mix of AI and human input looks like.
Things like:
- How much involvement do the editors have before the topic is put to the community?
- Are they only determining and refining the prompts?
- Are they editing the AI-generated responses?
- More importantly, what involvement (if any) do they have after they unleash the original AI-generated piece into the world?
- And more.
I think of this content like weird Uncle Bob, always joining the family gatherings with his usual, unoriginal conversation starters. Only, this time, he’s come bearing gifts.
Do you engage? Or do you proceed to consume as many canapés as possible, pretending you haven’t seen him yet?
Why Am I Talking About LinkedIn Articles And SEO?
When I first posted about LinkedIn’s articles, it was the end of September. Semrush showed clear evidence of their impact and potential in Search. (Disclosure: I work for Semrush.)
Only six months after their launch, LinkedIn articles were on a visible, consistent upward trend.
- They were already driving 792.5K organic visits a month. (This was a 75% jump in August.)
- They ranked for 811,700 keywords.
- Their pages were ranking in the top 10 for 78,000 of them.
- For 123,700 of them, they appeared in a SERP feature, such as People Also Ask and Featured Snippets.
- Almost 72% of the keywords had informational intent, followed by commercial keywords (22%).
Here’s a screenshot with some of the top keywords for which these pages ranked at the top:
Screenshot from Semrush US database, desktop, September 2023Now, take the page that held the Featured Snippet for competitive queries like “how to enter bios” (monthly search volume of 5,400 and keyword difficulty of 84, based on Semrush data).
It came in ahead of pages on Tom’s Hardware, Hewlett-Packard, or Reddit.
Screenshots from LinkedIn, November 2023See anything weird? Even at the time of writing this post, this collaborative article had precisely zero (0) contributions.
This means a page with 100% AI-generated content (and unclear interference of human editors) was rewarded with the Featured Snippet against highly authoritative and relevant domains and pages.
A Sea Of Opportunity Or A Storm Ready To Break Out?
Let’s consider these articles in the context of Google’s guidelines for creating helpful, reliable, people-first content and its Search Quality Rater Guidelines.
Of particular importance here, I believe, is the most recently added “E” in “E-E-A-T,” which takes experience into account, alongside expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness.
For so many of these articles to have been ranking so well must mean that they were meeting the guidelines and proving helpful and reliable for content consumers.
After all, they rely on “a select group of experts to contribute their own ideas, examples and experiences within the articles,” so they must be worthy of strong organic performances, right?
Possibly. (I’ve yet to see such an example, but I want to believe somewhere in the thousands of pages these do exist).
But, based on what I’ve seen, there are too many examples of poor-quality content to justify such big rewards in the search engine results pages (SERPs).
The common issues I’ve spotted:
1. Misinformation
I can’t tell how much vetting or editing there is going on behind the scenes, but the amount of misinformation in some collaborative articles is alarming. This goes for AI-generated content and community contributions alike.
I don’t really envy the task of fact-checking what LinkedIn describes as “thousands of collaborative articles on 2,500+ skills.” Still, if it’s quality and helpfulness we’re concerned with here, I’d start brewing my coffee a little stronger if I were LinkedIn.
At the moment, it feels a little too much like a free-for-all.
Here are some examples of topics like SEO or content marketing.
Screenshots from LinkedIn, November 20232. Thin Content
To a degree, some contributions seem to do nothing more than mirror the points made in the original AI-generated piece.
For example, are these contributions enough to warrant a high level of “experience” in these articles?
Screenshots from LinkedIn, November 2023The irony to think that some of these contributions may have also been generated by AI…
3. Missing Information
While many examples don’t provide new or unique perspectives, some articles simply don’t provide…any perspectives at all.
This piece about analytical reasoning ranked in the top 10 for 128 keywords when I first looked into it last September (down to 80 in October).
Screenshot from LinkedIn, November 2023It even held the Featured Snippet for competitive keywords like “inductive reasoning examples” for a while (5.4K monthly searches in the US), although it had no contributions on this subsection.
Most of its sections remain empty, so we’re talking about mainly AI-generated content.
Does this mean that Google really doesn’t care whether your content comes from humans or AI?
I’m not convinced.
How Have The Recent Google Updates Impacted This Content?
After August and October 2023 Google core updates (at the time of writing, the November 2023 Google core update is rolling out), the September 2023 helpful content update, and the October 2023 spam update, the performance of this section seems to be declining.
According to Semrush data:
Screenshot from Semrush, November 2023- Organic traffic to these pages was down to 453,000 (a 43% drop from September, bringing their performance close to August levels).
- They ranked for 465,100 keywords (down by 43% MoM).
- Keywords in the Top 10 dropped by 33% (51,900 vs 78,000 in September).
- Keywords in the top 10 accounted for 161,800 visits (vs 287,200 in September, down by 44% MoM).
The LinkedIn domain doesn’t seem to have been impacted negatively overall.
Screenshot from Semrush, November 2023Is this a sign that Google has already picked up the weaknesses in this content and has started balancing actual usefulness versus the overall domain authority that might have propelled it originally?
Will we see it declining further in the coming months? Or are there better things to come for this feature?
Should You Already Be On The Bandwagon If You’re In SEO?
I was on the side of caution before the Google algorithm updates of the past couple of months.
Now, I’d be even more hesitant to invest a substantial part of my resources towards baking this content into my strategy.
As with any other new, third-party feature (or platform – does anyone remember Threads?), it’s always a case of balancing being an early adopter with avoiding over-investment. At least while being unclear on the benefits.
Collaborative articles are a relatively fresh, experimental, external feature you have minimal control over as part of your SEO strategy.
Now, we also have signs from Google that this content may not be as “cool” as we initially thought.
This Is What I’d Do
That’s not to say it’s not worth trying some small-scale experiments.
Or, maybe, use it as part of promoting your own personal brand (but I’ve yet to see any data around the impact of the “Top Voice” badges on perceived value).
Treat this content as you would any other owned content.
- Follow Google’s guidelines.
- Add genuine value for your audience.
- Add your own unique perspective.
- Highlight gaps and misinformation.
Experience shows us that when tactics get abused, and the user experience suffers, Google eventually steps in (from guest blogging to parasite SEO, most recently).
It might make algorithmic tweaks when launching updates, launch a new system, or hand out manual actions – the point is that you don’t know how things will progress. Only LinkedIn and Google have control over that.
As things stand, I can easily see any of the below potential outcomes:
- This content becomes the AI equivalent of the content farms of the pre-Panda age, leading to Google clamping down on its search performance.
- LinkedIn’s editors stepping in more for quality control (provided LinkedIn deems the investment worthwhile).
- LinkedIn starts pushing its initiative much more to encourage participation and engagement. (This could be what makes the difference between a dead content farm and Reddit-like value.)
Anything could happen. I believe the next few months will give us a clearer picture.
What’s Next For AI And Its Role In SEO And Social Media?
When it comes to content creation, I think it’s safe to say that AI isn’t quite ready to E-E-A-T your experience for breakfast. Yet.
We can probably expect more of these kinds of movements from social media platforms and forums in the coming months, moving more toward mixing AI with human experience.
What do you think is next for LinkedIn’s collaborative articles? Let me know on LinkedIn!
More resources:
Featured Image: BestForBest/Shutterstock
SEO
What It Really Is & How to Build One
Building a personal brand is undeniably hard work, but it isn’t as tricky as you might think.
I spoke with two influencers—Wes Kao and Matt Diggity—for their best tips on establishing a name for yourself online.
A personal brand is how people perceive you and what you’re known for. It’s the skills, experience, and values that give you an edge over others.
Neuroscientist Andrew Huberman is one example. He helms and hosts the science/health podcast Huberman Lab, lectures at Stanford Medicine, and has earned media mentions from the likes of BBC, TIME, and more.
Andrew’s personal brand is built on his credibility and areas of expertise. Many of his posts attract thousands of likes and hundreds of comments on X and LinkedIn.
If we want to dig deeper, Maven and altMBA co-founder Wes Kao has a somewhat alternative take on the definition:
In my opinion, it’s better to reframe ‘personal branding’ into ‘personal credibility.’ Personal branding has a superficial undertone. It assumes you have your work, then you tack on an artificial layer of ‘branding’ to shape perceptions.
She suggests that personal credibility is about substance: Showing people what you do, how you think, and how you can contribute. Wes adds:
In this way, you build deeper connections with people who believe in your work—which means stronger relationships, more control, and more opportunities.
In this podcast interview snippet with Nick Bennett, SparkToro’s Amanda Natividad echoes Wes’ sentiment:
People generally don’t like the term [personal brand] because it sounds disingenuous and icky. Acknowledging the existence of your personal brand is admitting that you care what others think about you, and that you find ways to manage those expectations at scale.
Wild as it sounds, building a solid personal brand gives you more control over your life.
A strong following could:
- Expand your realm of influence, particularly in your area of expertise (i.e., be viewed as a subject matter expert).
- Boost your credibility, in turn allowing you to promote your company/product better.
- Build a loyal following independent of the company you’re working for (or if you own that company, create more positive sentiment towards it).
- Open doors to job, networking, and investment opportunities.
Chiangmai SEO conference founder Matt Diggity shares some excellent points in his Facebook post on the topic, too.
There’s no linear path to building your personal brand.
As a precursor to the below steps, let’s first talk about finding your “voice.”
Wes and Matt both emphasize the importance of staying true to yourself. That means not crafting an online persona of who you think you should be.
I try to write like how I sound in person. Talking and writing are different media, so you shouldn’t try to match the two in a literal sense, but you want to capture your overall spirit. For example, I have a hint of snark in my writing because that’s how I sound in person.
Matt echoes this sentiment:
How I talk on the internet is how I talk IRL. If I’m not having a f**king blast on my YouTube videos, I won’t do them. It has to be fun.
Keep this idea in mind as you go through the steps below.
Step 1: Position yourself
Think of yourself as a product: What are your strengths, obsessions, and areas of expertise?
If you’re well-versed in technical SEO or a seasoned entrepreneur, these might be your unique selling points.
From there, double down on something you would be excited to think, write, and talk about for years—because “it will likely take years to get to where you want to go,” says Wes.
As an (optional) next step, consider solidifying your position with a spiky POV—a term coined by Wes, and which she cautions should be used with care.
A spiky POV is not about a contrarian hot take for the sake of it. In 2023, social platforms are flooded with hot takes and generic advice. I think about respecting the intelligence of my audience and teaching them something they don’t already know. A true spiky POV is rooted in deep expertise, including recognizing the limitations and counterpoints of your idea. This builds your reputation as someone who is rigorous and worth the time to engage with.
Here’s a LinkedIn post by Wes that combines all of the above: a unique perspective backed by her personal experiences, with a takeaway for the audience too. In other words—a spiky, worthy POV.
Step 2: Start sharing publicly
You already knew this, but social media platforms are one of the best ways to get growth and build your name. It’s your chance to build your reputation in a public arena.
Wes, Amanda, and Matt each utilized a combination of online channels to promote their voice and content. It’s one of the first things you should do—because your content is really only as good as its reach.
This is the first thing I did to build a personal brand and authority in the SEO industry, and I still do it to this day…
Take an hour a week, go to SEO social media hangouts (SEO Facebook groups, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc) and go from top-to-bottom answering people’s questions.…
— Matt Diggity (@mattdiggityseo) September 27, 2023
This doesn’t mean cross-posting your content across more platforms than you can manage, of course.
Study where your target audience spends most of their time, then hone in on those platforms (ideally, stick to no more than 2-3).
In Matt’s case, his followers are primarily on Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube—and that’s where his SEO-led content thrives.
If creating whole posts from scratch seems daunting, start by commenting thoughtfully in relevant online communities. Obviously, do it with heart:
This is the first thing I did to build a personal brand and authority in the SEO industry, and I still do it to this day…
Take an hour a week, go to SEO social media hangouts (SEO Facebook groups, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc) and go from top-to-bottom answering people’s questions.…
— Matt Diggity (@mattdiggityseo) September 27, 2023
Here are some simple ways to start.
LinkedIn: Contribute to a collaborative article
You might have seen these articles floating around LinkedIn—perhaps even been invited to add your insights to them.
These blog posts are similar to Wikipedia pages: LinkedIn users build on each AI-generated article with their perspectives, and readers can choose to react to these additions or engage with the content.
Here’s an example of what a contribution looks like:
Reddit: Weigh in on discussions
- Go to a relevant subreddit, e.g. r/bigSEO
- Sort by “Top” and “This Week”
- Browse the questions or discussions and offer your two cents where relevant.
Ride on trending topics
Found an interesting insight on X or someplace else? Turn it into a poll, question, or post. (Be sure to also tag and credit the author!)
Bring it all together
If some of your responses or posts get traction, repurpose those answers into new content: a blog post, video, or series of social posts.
(PSST: Learn more about my process behind curating and repurposing content for Ahrefs’ X account.)
This segues into our next and final step:
Step 3: Double down on what works
By now, you should have an idea of which topics you’re most comfortable discussing at length—and what resonates most with your target audience.
You can further maximize your reach by doubling down on the things that have brought you success. Or, more specifically, by repurposing popular content in other formats and creating more content about similar things.
For instance, we turned this popular video on how to use ChatGPT for SEO into a Twitter thread and LinkedIn post—and later, a blog post.
Wes has also done this plenty with her “eaten the bear” analogy over the years. She first wrote about it in this 2019 blog post, rewrote it in 2023, and shares variations of the analogy on LinkedIn and X every few months.
Each time, these posts garner hundreds or thousands of likes
Too much backstory is one of the biggest killers of good stories.
Backstory scope creep is real. We’ve all been there: Long-winded, stream of conscious explanations—all in the name of “giving context.“
I’ve been guilty of it myself.
The solution?
Minimum viable backstory pic.twitter.com/XFe2wAJysg
— Wes Kao 🏛 (@wes_kao) October 3, 2023
Don’t let your success die there, though. You can find more content ideas that will resonate with your audience by doing some keyword research around your topic. Here’s how:
- Plug your target topic into Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer
- Go to the Matching terms report
For example, if we enter “chatgpt seo,” we see that people are searching for ChatGPT prompts for SEO and ChatGPT SEO extensions:
Given how our audience is interested in ChatGPT and SEO, these would be great topics to create content about—whether that be social media posts, videos, blog posts, or something else.
If you don’t have a paid account with us, you can plug your topic into our free keyword generator tool to view related phrases/questions.
Extra tips to build your personal brand
We mentioned some of these in some shape or form earlier, but they’re worth expanding on.
Maintain human connections
Who are you without the people who consume your content? Engage consistently with your followers and others’ content. Human connections are worth their weight in gold when you’re trying to get your personal brand off the ground.
Maintain consistency across your social media profiles
This means using the same profile picture across all platforms, and a standardized bio so others can quickly get a sense of who you are and what you often post about.
Jack Appleby is a great example. The creator/consultant is behind Future Social, an independent social strategy newsletter with 56,000+ subscribers.
Notice how he maintains consistency on X and LinkedIn:
Ahrefs’ Tim Soulo further explains the importance of your profile picture in personal branding here:
Your profile pic is your “personal branding” tool. (duh!)
My journey so far:
2009 – “I have no idea what I’m doing;“
2014 – I want to stand out & be memorable;
2018 – I want to look provocative;
2020 – I want to look professional.I can expand this into a thread if you want 😉 pic.twitter.com/W7FtZTcYGO
— Tim Soulo 🇺🇦 (@timsoulo) September 14, 2020
Be yourself
Remember how Wes and Matt shared the importance of staying true to yourself? We couldn’t emphasize that enough.
Final thoughts
These steps aren’t exhaustive, obviously. To truly stand out online, Wes suggests having a combination of these things: social proof, good design sense, strong writing, interesting insights, and a track record of contribution.
As she puts it:
All these things will make people think, ‘This person knows their craft.’
Have a thought about this blog post? Ping me on X.
SEO
SEO Salary Survey 2023 [Industry Research]
![SEO Salary Survey 2023 [Industry Research]](https://articles.entireweb.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/SEO-Salary-Survey-2023-Industry-Research.jpg "SEO Salary Survey 2023 [Industry Research]")
Editor’s note
Here are the top takeaways:
- The median annual salary for SEOs we polled was $49,211
- The highest annual salary we polled was $229,652
- To earn the higher salaries in SEO you need be a technical SEO expert—Heads of SEO, SEO Directors and SEO Leads all said that their main specialization was technical SEO
- Only 5.4% of respondents learned SEO through a course—most learned on the job (52.3%) or by themselves (42.3%)
- 36.9% described themselves as content specialists, 30.6% described themselves as technical specialists, 6.3% described themselves as specializing in link-building
- 49.5% of respondents worked in SEO agencies, 42.3% in-house and 8.2% were self-employed
- Most respondents (28.8%) worked in companies that had 11-50 people
- The average SEO experience of our respondents was 6.9 years
- Self-employed SEOs earned the most on average ($60,232k)—the median annual salary for in-house roles was slightly lower at $56,789, and agency SEOs had the lowest median annual salary at $44,169
There were also a few surprises:
- Few SEOs in our survey said that they specialized in link building compared to technical and content. This is despite the fact that links are still one of the most important Google ranking factors.
- The average level of experience between SEO Directors and Head of SEO is not that different—10.4 years for a SEO Director and 10.6 years for a Head of SEO—but the salary difference between the roles was ~$11,552—quite substantial.
Overview
| Role | Median annual salary ($USD) | Average experience (years) | Main specialization | Main work location |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Head of SEO | $92,988 | 10.6 | Technical SEO | Agency and in-house |
| SEO Director | $81,436 | 10.4 | Technical SEO | Agency and in-house |
| SEO Lead | $38,289 | 7.4 | Technical SEO | Agency |
| SEO Specialist | $49,229 | 5.8 | Content | In-house |
| SEO Account Manager | $43,850 | 4.2 | Content | Agency |
| SEO Consultant | $49,240 | 6 | All-rounder | Agency |
| SEO Executive | $31,956 | 3 | All-rounder | Agency |
| SEO Analyst | $56,393 | 5 | All-rounder | In-house |
Here’s how annual salaries broke down across our respondents:
According to the SEOs we polled, most of them learned SEO on the job or were self-taught.
Most of our respondents had a couple of years of experience under their belts. The amount of experience Head of SEOs had versus SEO Directors was not that different, at around 10 years.
- Across all respondents, the average experience was 6.9 years
- For Head of SEO, the average experience was 10.6 years
- For SEO Director, the average experience was 10.4 years
- For SEO Lead, the average experience was 7.4 years
- For SEO Account Manager, the average experience was 4.2 years
- For SEO Consultant, the average experience was 6 years
- For SEO Executive, the average experience was 3 years
- For SEO Analyst, the average experience was 5 years
Technical and Content were the two top skills that SEOs we surveyed specialized in.
The proportion of SEOs that said they specialized in links was much lower despite links being a major ranking factor.
Our survey showed an almost 50/50 split between the UK and Europe. 48.6% of respondents were from the UK—perhaps not surprising given that BrightonSEO is based in the UK.
Most of the respondents we spoke to worked in agencies or in-house. It does mean, however, that our salary data was mainly focused on these two employment types.
Across all respondents, the most common company size was 11-50. A large proportion of SEOs also worked for substantially larger companies that had over 1000 employees.
Here’s the full breakdown of each role.
Head of SEO salary
It’s probably not too much of a surprise that the Head of SEO role was our highest-paying SEO role surveyed. What’s more of a surprise was the variation in salary—our survey showed that a Head of SEO can earn anything from ~$25k to ~$229k.
Average experience
According to our survey, a Head of SEO has ~10.6 years of experience.
Type of company
46.7% of respondents worked for an agency, and 46.7% worked in-house. 6.7% were self-employed.
Education
66.7% of respondents said they were self-taught, 26.7% said they’d learned on the job, and 6.7% said that they had learned SEO from a course.
Specialization
40% said that they specialized in technical SEO, 33.3% in Content, and 13.3% said they were a generalist. The remaining 13.4% said they focused on people management.
This is surprising, as it implies that 73.3% of people in Head of SEO roles are actively providing SEO services for their clients rather than focusing on managing a team.
Company size
There were two company sizes that were most popular for Head of SEOs to work in. 40% of respondents said they worked in companies with 11-50 people, and 20% said they worked in companies with over 1001 people.
Location
40% of respondents were from the UK, 13.3% were from the Netherlands, and the remainder were from mainland Europe.
SEO Director salary
The salary variation wasn’t quite as extreme for SEO Directors, but salaries ranged from ~$42k to ~$121k—still quite a difference.
Average experience
SEO Directors in our survey had 10.4 years of experience on average.
Type of company
There was a 50/50 split between SEO Directors’ backgrounds, with 50% from agency and 50% from in-house
Education
62.5% of SEO Directors described themselves as self-taught, and 37.5% said that they learned SEO on the job.
Specialization
75% of them specialized in technical SEO, whilst 25% described themselves as generalists or Other.
Company size
According to our survey, SEO Directors typically work in medium to large companies. 25% said that they worked in companies that had over 1000 people, and 25% said they worked in companies that had 51-100 employees.
Location
Most SEO Directors we surveyed were from the UK (62.5%). The rest were equal splits between India, the U.S., and Germany (12.5%).
SEO Lead salary
SEO Leads typically have a lot of experience, but our survey shows that they only earn slightly more on average than SEO Specialists.
Average experience
SEO Leads in our survey had 7.4 years of experience on average.
Type of company
50% of SEO Leads came from an agency background, 41.7% came from in-house, and 8.3% were self-employed.
Education
69.2% learned on the job, 23.1% were self-taught, and 7.7% learned SEO through a course.
Specialization
30.8% of SEO Leads specialized in technical SEO, 23% specialized in content, and 23.1% specialized in links. 15.4% described themselves as generalists. The remaining 7.7% described themselves as specializing in SEO strategy.
Company size
46.2% worked in companies that had 1001+ people, and the remaining 53.8% worked in smaller companies.
Location
23.1% of SEO Leads came from the UK, with the remainder coming from the Netherlands, Italy, and Sweden (15.4% each) and 30.7% from other European countries.
SEO Specialist salary
SEO Specialists we surveyed had around 5-6 years of experience, but they typically got paid better than SEO Leads. Based on my experience, this may be due to in-house roles paying better than agency roles in the UK.
Average experience
SEO Specialists in our survey had an average of 5.8 years of experience.
Type of company
41.2% of SEO Specialists came from an agency background, while 58.8% said that they were from an in-house background.
Education
58.8% of SEO Specialists said that they had learned SEO on the job, 35.3% said that they were self-taught, and 5.9% said that they had learned SEO through a course.
Specialization
52.9% of SEO Specialists specialized in content, 29.4% focused on technical, 11.8% described themselves as all-rounders, and 5.9% described specialized in links.
Company size
41.2% of SEO Specialists said that they worked in companies that had 11-50 people. Only 17.6% of respondents said that they worked in companies that had 1001+ people. 23.6% said they worked in companies between 51-500 people. The remaining 17.6% worked in smaller companies with less than 10 people.
Location
23.5% of SEO Specialists said that they were from the UK, with the remainder from Europe.
SEO Account Manager salary
SEO Account Managers in our survey were one of the most consistent salary bands earning between ~$40k and ~$55k.
Average experience
SEO Account managers in our survey had 4.2 years of experience on average.
Type of company
85.7% of respondents worked for an agency, and 14.3% worked in-house.
Education
71.4% of respondents said they learned SEO on the job, and 28.6% said they were self-taught.
Specialization
42.9% said that they specialized in content, 28.6% described themselves as an all-rounder, 14.3% said they were technical SEO, and the remaining 14.2% said they specialized in links.
Company size
42.9% of respondents said they worked in companies with 11-50 people, and 28.6% said they worked in companies with over 1001 people. The remaining 28.6% was split equally between people who worked in companies with between 2-11 people or 51-100 people.
Location
85.7% of respondents were from the UK, and 14.3% of the remainder were from Europe.
SEO Consultant salary
SEO Consultants we surveyed earned up to ~$87k, which was lower than I was expecting—because our SEO pricing post suggested that SEO consultants charge between $100-150 per hour.
But as the data is UK-focused, the likely reason for this is the £85k VAT tax threshold.
Average experience
SEO Consultants in our survey had 6 years of experience on average.
Type of company
63.3% of respondents worked for an agency, and 36.7% worked in-house.
Education
45.5% of respondents said they were self-taught, 36.4% said they’d learned on the job, and 9.1% said that they had learned SEO from a course. The remaining 9% said they’d learned from other ways.
Specialization
27.3% said that they specialized in technical SEO, 27.3% in content, and 27.3% said they were a generalist. The remaining 18.1% said they focused on management and strategy.
Company size
SEO Consultants typically worked on their own or in smaller agencies according to our survey — 36.4% of respondents said they worked on their own, and 27.3% said they worked in companies with 51-100 people. The remaining 36.3% said they worked in companies with between 2-50 people.
Location
36.4% of respondents were from the UK, 27.3% were from the Netherlands, and the remaining 36.3% were from Europe.
SEO Executive salary
Average experience
SEO Executives in our survey had 3 years of experience on average.
Type of company
80% of respondents worked for an agency, and 20% worked in-house.
Education
80% of respondents said they were self-taught, and 20% said they’d learned SEO from a course.
Specialization
40% said that they specialized in technical SEO, 20% in Content, and 40% said they were a generalist.
Company size
80% of respondents said they worked in companies with 11-50 people, and 20% said they worked in companies with 1001 or more people.
Location
80% of respondents were from the UK, and 20% were from Belgium.
SEO Analyst salary
SEO Analysts typically had a few more years of experience than SEO Executives, but it looks like they earned roughly the same as them.
Average experience
SEO Analysts in our survey had 5 years of experience on average.
Type of company
33.3% of respondents worked for an agency, and 66.7% worked In-house.
Education
33.3% of respondents said they were self-taught, and 66.7% said they’d learned on the job.
Specialization
33.3% said that they specialized in technical SEO, 33.3% in Content, and 33.3% said they specialized in News SEO.
Company size
33.3% of respondents said they worked in companies with 101-200 people, and 66.7% said they worked in companies with over 201 people.
Location
SEO Analysts came from a range of locations 33% of respondents were from Portugal, 33.3% were from Brazil, and the remainder were from Serbia.
Sidenote.
We didn’t get many respondents for the SEO Analyst role—so take these results with a pinch of salt.
Final thoughts
SEO salaries aren’t often discussed in detail within the industry, so getting a snapshot of their current state from one of the biggest SEO conferences in the UK was insightful.
For our next salary survey, we’ll be opening it up to all SEOs. If you’d like to take part—you can enter here.
Got questions? Ping me on X (formerly known as Twitter)
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