SEO
How To Track Customers & Revenue From SEO In Your CRM –
As an SEO pro, you’ve probably struggled to prove how your efforts impact bottom-line business metrics like customers & revenue.
It’s easy to install Google Analytics and see how many visitors you are getting from organic search, and if you set up Goal Tracking on form submissions, you can even measure the number of leads.
But it’s historically been much harder to get that same attribution data into your CRM and report on metrics like how many new sales opportunities were generated from SEO, how much pipeline, the number of new customers, etc.
Fortunately, we can offer a solution.
Continue reading to learn how you can attribute leads & customers to SEO in your company’s CRM and run reports to prove the value your SEO efforts are generating (and hopefully secure some more budget).
Why You Should Track SEO Efforts With A CRM
Imagine you do SEO for a project management software company.
To generate leads, you do SEO and use paid advertising through Google, Facebook, and similar platforms.
If you were just using Google Analytics to measure visitors and goals, your analytics data would look similar to this:
SEO | Facebook Ads | Google Ads | |
Spend | $5,000 | $5,000 | $5,000 |
Visitors | 200 | 500 | 400 |
Goals in Google Analytics (Leads) | 30 | 40 | 40 |
If this were your only source of insights – website visitors and leads – then your Facebook Ads and Google Ads would appear to outperform your SEO efforts.
With that data, you might spend most of your marketing budget on paid channels.
But what if you could see the complete picture of the number of customers and revenue generated? Your data might look similar to this:
SEO | Facebook Ads | Google Ads | |
Spend | $5,000 | $5,000 | $5,000 |
Visitors | 200 | 500 | 400 |
Leads | 30> | 40 | 40 |
Customers | 25 | 7 | 12 |
Revenue | $45,000 | $8,000 | $18,000 |
Looking at the numbers above, you can see that your SEO efforts are far outperforming your paid ads because:
- You acquired more customers from SEO (25) than Google Ads and Facebook Ads combined (19).
- The conversion rate from lead to a customer is greater for SEO (83%) than for Google Ads and Facebook Ads combined (17.5% for Facebook Ads and 30% for Google Ads).
- The average customer value is greater for SEO at $1,800 per customer than for Google Ads ($1,500) and for Facebook Ads ($1,142).
- The customer acquisition cost is lower for SEO at $200 than for Google Ads ($416) and for Facebook Ads ($714).
When you track the performance of your marketing campaigns based on the number of customers acquired and revenue generated, you will see the full picture of how they perform and be able to allocate your resources accordingly.
In this case, you’d be able to make a great business case for how important SEO is to the business and could potentially win more budget and resources to help grow.
How To Track Customers & Revenue From SEO With A CRM
Now that you understand the importance of tracking customers & revenue from SEO let’s look at how to do it.
It boils down to two steps: Ensuring you have the required data in your CRM and running the right reports.
1. Check The Data
Ensure you have attribution data on each of your leads & customers inside your CRM (i.e., the source channel, campaign, ad group, etc.).
Most CRM systems have custom fields that store contact information and sales opportunities, but do they also track how the customers discovered your business in the first place?
The easiest way to do this is by adding hidden fields to the lead generation forms on your website and then writing the attribution information into those fields.
That way, the data is captured alongside the lead’s name, email address, phone number, etc., and can be sent straight into your CRM.
Most popular form-building tools have the ability to add hidden fields to forms and make it easy to drag and drop them in.
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Once you’ve added the hidden fields to the forms, you can use tools like Attributer.io (Disclosure: I am the founder of Attributer) to figure out where each lead has come from and write the data into the hidden fields where it will be sent to your CRM with each form submission.
2. Run Reports With CRM Or Analytics Tools
Now that you have the correct attribution information for each customer in your CRM, you can use it to run reports.
The quickest and easiest way to do this is to use your CRM’s built-in reporting tools.
Depending on how advanced they are, you should be able to report on metrics like the number of leads from SEO, the number of sales opportunities, the number of customers, the amount of revenue generated, etc.
Alternatively, if you’re looking for more advanced analytics, you can export the data to a spreadsheet or connect your CRM to third-party analytics tools like Microsoft Power BI, Tableau, or Looker Studio (formerly Google Data Studio).
This would allow you to run more advanced reports that could answer questions like:
- How many leads do we get from our SEO efforts on our product pages?
- Which search engines are generating the most customers?
- Which individual blog posts are generating the most leads?
- How many customers do we get from our content hub pages?
Five Metrics SEO Professionals Should Track
Now that you understand how to get the attribution data into your CRM and run reports, here are some ideas for reports you should look at to help prove the value of your SEO efforts.
The Number Of Leads From SEO Vs. Other Channels
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The example graph above shows how many leads were generated via the different marketing channels.
As you can see, this report demonstrates the value SEO is providing in that it is generating more leads for the business than paid channels like Google Ads and Facebook Ads.
Number Of Customers From SEO Vs. Other Channels
The example graph above shows how many customers have been generated from the different marketing channels.
Not only does this show that SEO is driving the majority of customers for the business, but it can also be useful for calculating the conversion rate of leads to customers.
It’s quite common for leads from organic search to convert much better down the funnel than from sources like Facebook Ads, as these leads often have the problem your product/service solves and are actively looking to purchase.
Revenue From SEO By Landing Page Group
The example graph above shows the amount of revenue generated from customers who have come from your SEO efforts, broken down by the landing page group (i.e., the grouping of pages based on the subfolder in the URL.
This report allows you to see what types of content are generating customers & revenue from search engines and can help you identify what you need to create more.
Similarly, if you see a change in the amounts of customers & revenue coming from SEO, this report can help you identify what happened. Was it that the homepage saw a boost in rankings?
Or is it that the blog posts and webinars you’ve been diligently creating are starting to get traction?
Average Deal Size From SEO Vs. Other Channels
The example graph shows the average deal size of customers that came through SEO versus those from other channels.
This, combined with the number of customers that came from SEO and the conversion rates, can be useful in modeling potential budget increases.
You could create a spreadsheet model that shows the increase in the number of visitors you’d get from more budget, and then using the conversion rates and average deal size, model it through the funnel to show the revenue increase you would expect to get from these changes.
Being able to show expected growth in revenue is a lot more convincing than showing the expected change in visitors, particularly to financial controllers who think in dollars and cents rather than impressions, clicks, and visitors.
Time To Close From SEO Vs. Other Channels
The example graph shows the average time to close for customers that came through SEO versus customers from other channels.
This can be useful in several ways.
Firstly, it’s quite common that sales opportunities from SEO will close faster than those from channels like Facebook Ads because leads from SEO tend to be in purchase mode.
This can be a good data point to convince management of the value of SEO.
Similarly, if you are modeling out how potential budget increases in SEO will impact bottom-line numbers like customers and revenue, you can use this time to close metrics to understand when the changes you are advocating will start to have an impact on revenue.
This can help ensure your model doesn’t show revenue increases too early and can help prevent finance teams from retracting the budget if the numbers aren’t met.
Wrap Up
If you’ve probably struggled in the past to report on how your SEO efforts are impacting key business metrics like customers & revenue, then you’ve probably felt the pain of not being able to show the true value of SEO.
However, if you can start tracking the source of every one of your leads in your organization’s CRM, then not only would you be able to show exactly how many customers and how much revenue SEO is generating, but you’d then be able to accurately model out how budget increases or strategy changes will drive bottom-line growth.
And if you can show how much revenue you think these changes are going to make, then you’re much more likely to get that extra budget approved!
More resources:
Featured Image: 3rdtimeluckystudio/Shutterstock
SEO
Content Pruning: Why It Works, and How to Do It
Content pruning sounds pretty appealing: delete a ton of content and see your organic traffic improve. But pruning has risks (like deleting useful pages and useful backlinks), and benefits are not guaranteed: So how does pruning actually work? And when…
SEO
8 Free SEO Reporting Tools
There’s no shortage of SEO reporting tools to choose from—but what are the core tools you need to put together an SEO report?
In this article, I’ll share eight of my favorite SEO reporting tools to help you create a comprehensive SEO report for free.
Price: Free
Google Search Console, often called GSC, is one of the most widely used tools to track important SEO metrics from Google Search.
Most common reporting use case
GSC has a ton of data to dive into, but the main performance indicator SEOs look at first in GSC is Clicks on the main Overview dashboard.
As the data is from Google, SEOs consider it to be a good barometer for tracking organic search performance. As well as clicks data, you can also track the following from the Performance report:
- Total Impressions
- Average CTR
- Average Position
Tip
But for most SEO reporting, GSC clicks data is exported into a spreadsheet and turned into a chart to visualize year-over-year performance.
Favorite feature
One of my favorite reports in GSC is the Indexing report. It’s useful for SEO reporting because you can share the indexed to non-indexed pages ratio in your SEO report.
If the website has a lot of non-indexed pages, then it’s worth reviewing the pages to understand why they haven’t been indexed.
Price: Free
Google Looker Studio (GLS), previously known as Google Data Studio (GDS), is a free tool that helps visualize data in shareable dashboards.
Most common reporting use case
Dashboards are an important part of SEO reporting, and GLS allows you to get a total view of search performance from multiple sources through its integrations.
Out of the box, GLS allows you to connect to many different data sources.
Such as:
- Marketing products – Google Ads, Google Analytics, Display & Video 360, Search Ads 360
- Consumer products – Google Sheets, YouTube, and Google Search Console
- Databases – BigQuery, MySQL, and PostgreSQL
- Social media platforms – Facebook, Reddit, and Twitter
- Files – CSV file upload and Google Cloud Storage
Sidenote.
If you don’t have the time to create your own report manually, Ahrefs has three Google Looker Studio connectors that can help you create automated SEO reporting for any website in a few clicks
Here’s what a dashboard in GLS looks like:
With this type of dashboard, you share reports that are easy to understand with clients or other stakeholders.
Favorite feature
The ability to blend and filter data from different sources, like GA and GSC, means you can get a customized overview of your total search performance, tailored to your website.
Price: Free for 500 URLs
Screaming Frog is a website crawler that helps you audit your website.
Screaming Frog’s free version of its crawler is perfect if you want to run a quick audit on a bunch of URLs. The free version is limited to 500 URLs—making it ideal for crawling smaller websites.
Most common reporting use case
When it comes to reporting, the Reports menu in Screaming Frog SEO Spider has a wealth of information you can look over that covers all the technical aspects of your website, such as analyzing, redirects, canonicals, pagination, hreflang, structured data, and more.
Once you’ve crawled your site, it’s just a matter of downloading the reports you need and working out the main issues to summarize in your SEO report.
Favorite feature
Screaming Frog can pull in data from other tools, including Ahrefs, using APIs.
If you already had access to a few SEO tools’ APIs, you could pull data from all of them directly into Screaming Frog. This is useful if you want to combine crawl data with performance data or other 3rd party tools.
Even if you’ve never configured an API, connecting other tools to Screaming Frog is straightforward.
Price: Free
Ahrefs has a large selection of free SEO tools to help you at every stage of your SEO campaign, and many of these can be used to provide insights for your SEO reporting.
For example, you could use our:
Most common reporting use case
One of our most popular free SEO tools is Ahrefs Webmaster Tools (AWT), which you can use for your SEO reporting.
With AWT, you can:
- Monitor your SEO health over time by setting up scheduled SEO audits
- See the performance of your website
- Check all known backlinks for your website
Favorite feature
Of all the Ahrefs free tools, my favorite is AWT. Within it, site auditing is my favorite feature—once you’ve set it up, it’s a completely hands-free way to keep track of your website’s technical performance and monitor its health.
If you already have access to Google Search Console, it’s a no-brainer to set up a free AWT account and schedule a technical crawl of your website(s).
Price: Free
Ahrefs’ SEO Toolbar is a free Chrome and Firefox extension useful for diagnosing on-page technical issues and performing quick spot checks on your website’s pages.
Most common reporting use case
For SEO reporting, it’s useful to run an on-page check on your website’s top pages to ensure there aren’t any serious on-page issues.
With the free version, you get the following features:
- On-page SEO report
- Redirect tracer with HTTP Headers
- Outgoing links report with link highlighter and broken link checker
- SERP positions
- Country changer for SERP
The SEO toolbar is excellent for spot-checking issues with pages on your website. If you are not confident with inspecting the code, it can also give you valuable pointers on what elements you need to include on your pages to make them search-friendly.
If anything is wrong with the page, the toolbar highlights it, with red indicating a critical issue.
Favorite feature
The section I use the most frequently in the SEO toolbar is the Indexability tab. In this section, you can see whether the page can be crawled and indexed by Google.
Although you can do this by inspecting the code manually, using the toolbar is much faster.
Price: Free
Like GSC, Google Analytics is another tool you can use to track the performance of your website, tracking sessions and conversions and much more on your website.
Most common reporting use case
GA gives you a total view of website traffic from several different sources, such as direct, social, organic, paid traffic, and more.
Favorite feature
You can create and track up to 300 events and 30 conversions with GA4. Previously, with universal analytics, you could only track 20 conversions. This makes conversion and event tracking easier within GA4.
Price: Free
Google Slides is Google’s version of Microsoft PowerPoint. If you don’t have a dashboard set up to report on your SEO performance, the next best thing is to assemble a slide deck.
Many SEO agencies present their report through dashboard insights and PowerPoint presentations. However, if you don’t have access to PowerPoint, then Google Slides is an excellent (free) alternative.
Most common reporting use cases
The most common use of Google Slides is to create a monthly SEO report. If you don’t know what to include in a monthly report, use our SEO report template.
Favorite feature
One of my favorite features is the ability to share your presentation on a video chat directly from Google Slides. You can do this by clicking the camera icon in the top right.
This is useful if you are working with remote clients and makes sharing your reports easy.
Price: Free
Google Trends allows you to view a keyword’s popularity over time in any country. The data shown is the relative popularity ratio scaled from 0-100, not the direct volume of search queries.
Most common reporting use cases
Google Trends is useful for showing how the popularity of certain searches can increase or decrease over time. If you work with a website that often has trending products, services, or news, it can be useful to illustrate this visually in your SEO report.
Google Trends makes it easy to spot seasonal trends for product categories. For example, people want to buy BBQs when the weather is sunny.
Using Google Trends, we can see that peak demand for BBQs usually happens in June-July every year.
Using this data across the last five years, we could be fairly sure when the BBQ season would start and end.
Favorite feature
Comparing two or more search terms against each other over time is one of my favorite uses of Google Trends, as it can be used to tell its own story.
Embellishing your report with trends data allows you to gain further insights into market trends.
You can even dig into trends at a regional level if you need to.
Final thoughts
These free tools will help you put together the foundations for a well-rounded SEO report.
The tools you use for SEO reporting don’t always have to be expensive—even large companies use many of the free tools mentioned to create insights for their client’s SEO reports.
Got more questions? Ping me on X 🙂
SEO
Study Reveals Potential Disruption For Brands & SEO
A new study by Authoritas suggests that Google’s AI-powered Search Generative Experience (SGE), currently being tested with a limited group of users, could adversely impact brand visibility and organic search traffic.
These findings include:
- When an SGE box is expanded, the top organic result drops by over 1,200 pixels on average, significantly reducing visibility.
- 62% of SGE links come from domains outside the top 10 organic results.
- Ecommerce, electronics, and fashion-related searches saw the greatest disruption, though all verticals were somewhat impacted.
Adapting to generative search may require a shift in SEO strategies, focusing more on long-form content, expert insights, and multimedia formats.
As Google continues to invest in AI-powered search, the Authoritas study provides an early look at the potential challenges and opportunities ahead.
High Penetration Rate & Industry-Wide Effects
The study analyzed 2,900 brand and product-related keywords across 15 industry verticals and found that Google displays SGE results for 91.4% of all search queries.
The prevalence of SGE results indicates they impact a majority of websites across various industries.
The research analyzed the typical composition of SGE results. On average, each SGE element contained between 10-11 links sourced from an average of four different domains.
This indicates brands may need to earn multiple links and listings within these AI-curated results to maintain visibility and traffic.
The research also suggests that larger, well-established websites like Quora and Reddit will likely perform better in SGE results than smaller websites and lesser-known brands.
Shifting Dynamics In Organic Search Results
With SGE results occupying the entire first page, websites that currently hold the top positions may experience a significant decrease in traffic and click-through rates.
When a user clicks to expand the SGE element, the study found that, on average, the #1 ranked organic result drops a sizeable 1,255 pixels down the page.
Even if a website ranks number one in organic search, it may effectively be pushed down to the second page due to the prominence of SGE results.
New Competition From Unexpected Sources
The study revealed that SGE frequently surfaces links and content from websites that didn’t appear in the top organic rankings.
On average, only 20.1% of SGE links exactly matched a URL from the first page of Google search results.
An additional 17.9% of SGE links were from the same domains as page one results but linked to different pages. The remaining 62% of SGE links came from sources outside the top organic results.
Challenges For Brand Term Optimization & Local Search
The study reveals that SGE results for branded terms may include competitors’ websites alongside the brand’s own site, potentially leading to increased competition for brand visibility.
Laurence O’Toole, CEO and founder of Authoritas, states:
“Brands are not immune. These new types of generative results introduce more opportunities for third-party sites and even competitors to rank for your brand terms and related brand and product terms that you care about.”
Additionally, local businesses may face similar challenges, as SGE results could feature competing local brands even when users search for a specific brand in a regional context.
Methodology & Limitations
To arrive at these insights, Authoritas analyzed a robust dataset of 2,900 search keywords across a spectrum of query types, including specific brand names, brand + generic terms, brand + product names, generic terms, and specific product names. The keywords were distributed across 15 industry verticals.
The study utilized a consistent desktop browser viewport to quantify pixel-based changes in the search results. Authoritas also developed proprietary “alignment scores” to measure the degree of overlap between traditional organic search results and the new SGE links.
While acknowledging some limitations, such as the keyword set needing to be fully representative of each vertical and the still-evolving nature of SGE, Authoritas maintains that the insights hold value in preparing brands for the new realities of an AI-powered search ecosystem.
Why We Care
The findings of the Authoritas study have implications for businesses, marketers, and SEO professionals. As Google’s SGE becomes more prevalent, it could disrupt traditional organic search rankings and traffic patterns.
Brands that have invested heavily in SEO and have achieved top rankings for key terms may find their visibility and click-through rates diminished by the prominence of SGE results.
SGE introduces new competition from unexpected sources, as most SGE links come from domains outside the top 10 organic results. This means businesses may need to compete not only with their traditional rivals but also with a broader range of websites that gain visibility through SGE.
As Google is a primary source of traffic and leads for many businesses, any changes to its search results can impact visibility, brand awareness, and revenue.
How This Could Help You
While the rise of SGE presents challenges, it also offers opportunities.
Taking into account what we’ve learned from the Authoritas study, here are some actionable takeaways:
- As SGE favors in-depth, informative content, businesses may benefit from investing in comprehensive, well-researched articles and guides that provide value to users.
- Incorporating expert quotes, interviews, and authoritative sources within your content could increase the likelihood of being featured in SGE results.
- Enriching your content with images, videos, and other multimedia elements may help capture the attention of both users and the SGE algorithm.
- Building a strong brand presence across multiple channels, including social media, industry forums, and relevant websites, can increase your chances of appearing in SGE.
- Creating a trustworthy brand and managing your online reputation will be crucial, as SGE may feature competitors alongside your website.
Looking Ahead
While the long-term impact of SGE will depend on user adoption and the perceived usefulness of results, this study’s findings serve as a valuable starting point for businesses and SEO professionals.
By proactively addressing the challenges and opportunities SGE presents, you can increase your chances of success in the new search environment.
Featured Image: BestForBest/Shutterstock
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