Prove your worth

Lucia says: “Prove the value of your e-commerce SEO.”

How do you prove the value of it?

“In this world, where acquisition remains a challenge and marketing budgets are tight, we want to show that SEO is bringing in the people you want.

Retailers are looking well beyond the campaign level. They want to understand their whole sales portfolio and how it's growing over time. Therefore, you want to show that, rather than just stopping at the level of the activity where there's some engagement, a sale is being made.

If you can carry on to show what products are sold and how retention goes, you can align yourself to these retailers' goals.”

Does that mean we have to focus as far down the funnel as possible?

“Absolutely. Retailers are ultimately looking at things that are going to bring in the cash flow. They want to understand what's bringing in cost-effective acquisition and how their retention is working over time, to make sure they're getting the money in.

Then, they also want to check that their project margins are working and they've got enough stock, so they can do the selling and get the profit margin they need.

If you can show the people you bring in with your SEO, and track them all the way downstream, you can show the SEO contribution, separate that, and compare it to advertising spend or other promotions that are going on.”

Does this reduce the motivation for targeting top-of-funnel terms?

“In a way, yes. However, in the longer term, it shows that you can follow it all the way through, so you know where you want to go. What it demonstrates (which is probably harder to see), is that you're not just stopping at the activity point.

Within Shopify, for every single order made, you can attach a UTM code to that. If you can attach the UTM codes, you can see where these orders are coming from and, on a campaign level or on a cohort level, you can see how that SEO performed.”

Now that we're all competing for marketing budget, is SEO competing more directly with paid advertising?

“Paid can prove what it's doing. If you do paid advertising, you get a set of stats stating the results from it. In the SEO world, it's always been a bit harder to get that kind of attribution all the way downstream. By providing a method for doing this, you can get more of a comparison and show the impact of your SEO on the overall portfolio.

You can show the number of new customers brought in, and how they behaved over time. That's really good evidence against paid campaigns, which can be a bit closer to the end, while SEO starts one or two stages back.”

The consumer jumps between different platforms a lot now, so can you still track organic successfully?

“I think we can. No method is perfect, but you can choose the first or the last UTM code before an order is placed.

If you decide on a proxy and you stick with it, you can get a level of clarity. We all know that lots of different forms of advertising eventually pay off, but you can definitely attribute sales to a certain endpoint, which is worthwhile.”

Is it still worth having a standard perceived attribution model for a consumer?

“Attribution is important, but I don't think it's the end goal. Attribution is a way of trying to work in a world of uncertainty, to say what the impact of something is.

At the end of the day, from a retailer's point of view, they're interested in what products are being sold, who's buying them, and whether they are buying once or a repeated number of times.

You can focus down to know that the budget is being allocated and a certain number of the people you attract will spend again, so you can then target those people and know that's a successful campaign. For me, that's a lot more powerful and actionable than focusing on attribution, which is just one measure.

There's a bit too much focus on attracting new customers all the time. For a lot of established retail businesses, it tends to be the same customers that buy again and again.

You can see the customers that buy the most often, and then you can see how their behaviour is changing over time. That's hugely powerful, and we all know that it costs less to market to our existing customers. If you can get the right people in and get them engaged early on, there's huge value in that for retailers.

If you run a successful SEO campaign, you can identify who's bringing in the repeat customers, so you will know SEO's contribution to bringing these customers that spend repeatedly. The more successful an SEO campaign is, the more engagement sits behind it.”

Is there a limitation in the way that these activities are currently being done by SEOs?

“If you put the endpoint as a sale being made, you’re missing the future behaviour of these customers. For everybody that buys once, a certain number of people who you've attracted are going to buy again and again, and turn out to be very valuable customers. If you stop measuring at the point when that sale is initially made, you lose this rich data and this history.

In the SEO world, this is very valuable because it shows the value of the people you brought in and their lifetime contribution. That's where the limitation is today. Although engagement and activity are exciting, if you can show that SEO-driven sales have led to a specific future impact on the portfolio – people buying once, twice, or ten times – that's going to work really well.

You know these people are coming in, and the retailer can then work on schemes to incentivise people again.

It's the lifetime value of a customer that counts. If a customer comes back ten times to purchase from you in the future, that sale value should be counted towards the marketing channel that made the referral, and the product that brought them in.

You can also attach which products these people are attracted to. If you managed to attract people to purchase a certain product mix through SEO, then you can see how that combination works for the first sale. The retailer might have a lot of stock of an item they're trying to shift or there might be a good margin on it, and you can show that the SEO has affected that particular set of people you wanted to target or that particular product you wanted to shift.”

How focused are retailers on being able to give credit to different marketing channels?

“In a way, retailers are a bit stuck. They've got paid advertising, they've got SEO advertising, and they've got a blend that they have to decide in their portfolio. They've also got budgets put against acquisition activity, retention activity, and the debate between internal and external marketing.

A lot of things are going on within this retail space that they're trying to balance. The more evidence you can give them to show something that's happened and where to focus their efforts, the happier they are. It's about trying to get this framework and the right blend for an individual.”

Is this something that needs to be done at the beginning of a client relationship or is it an ongoing conversation?

“It’s a bit of both. You need to plant the seed early on. There are often siloes with retailers. They put the marketing data in one place, and then all the orders, customers, and actions sit in another place. It's quite hard to see the same picture all together, and see that influence going across. If you can find a way of doing it, that's hugely valuable.

The more packs that sit there and the more different information that gets measured, the harder it is to get this unified view of the portfolio. The more you can work together, and not have a completely separate divide in activity, the easier it is.

Certainly, at the operational level of the business – when they want to review the high-level performance and set the strategy rather than looking at day-to-day – you can get to the answer behind some of these questions, and think about how to frame it and understand it.”

How is the average SEO reporting to a retailer at the moment and how can that be improved?

“It’s very much focused around engagement activity right now. There are a lot of stats, which are all very important. Obviously, you need to get people visiting the website or social media channels, and you need to get them engaged and active.

We generally rely on the attribution to say where a sale happened, but that point is where it stops. Then the business goes away and looks at the products they were trying to sell. They look at the stock, they look at their margins, and they look at people buying once or buying again.

Trying to get those two together is the real issue, and that is quite a shift.”

If it’s all about focussing on the retailer’s goals, what are the typical goals that a retailer sets?

“They might have bestsellers that sell very well, and the bottom 20% of their products that sit as very slow sellers. They might have a goal to get rid of a lot of their low-performing stock so they can put more budget into the best-selling items and make sure they are always in stock.

Therefore, they might want to run a campaign where they can get rid of some of these underperformers and reduce the stock that they're holding. One way to do that is through their SEO. If they can get their SEO working on all these products that they're trying to move, and advertise a sale or promotion, it all links together.

It can be a seasonal thing as well. They might have a set of goals they want to achieve for Black Friday, so they can look at that and work their way backwards.”

For one-off sales, what can SEOs do to try and surface a page relatively quickly to make that page more prominent?

“A lot of it is about communication. Retailers need to get into the habit of knowing what items they want to shift and looking into it more often. If they've got the data, they can tell you which items are moving slowly.

You could be having these regular conversations and, month by month, decide on a product category that you want to focus on. It's more of an ongoing conversation and sharing what they want to do in the business with their SEO team. Then, SEO can help advise on it as well.

You need to think about how you can work together rather than just getting a sales target, and then being asked to go away and deliver it.

It could be automated. If the retailer has a database that lists upcoming items, SEOs can look at that and automatically surface those pages as early as possible.

It's also about forecasting as well. If the retailer can estimate, look at their stock levels, and look at their current sales, then they can also estimate what is coming up and what is going to be more difficult to get rid of.

The more information they've got about what they want to do, the easier it is to pass information on. Once you've set up a strategy for the people you want to focus on, and your methodology, then it's much easier to get that communication across.

I advocate for Excel spreadsheets. You might even do it on a piece of paper to start with. If you've got some kind of dashboard solution, you might be able to create customised reports – or you can use an external package that you buy for your sales and stock.”

Does AI come into this?

“AI is coming into it but, although AI is here to stay, I'm looking at the basics. This kind of fundamental question won't be solved by AI. It's more about the business understanding what they want, the SEO being able to provide that information, and working together. A lot of it is communication and getting it across.

AI is very good for very specific things. We talked about forecasting the stock of sales items, and AI is brilliant for a very specific task like that. It's still in our heads though – the blue sky thinking about how to make it work together and what we need. Then, you can then do the automation afterwards.”

If an SEO is struggling for time, what should they stop doing right now so they can spend more time doing what you suggest in 2025?

“SEOs spend a lot of time on manual reports. There are a lot of manual reports that sit there, and ad hoc things are being created. Every single client is looking for something very different. The amount of time you spend generating all these extra reports makes it hard to get to something more strategic.

Spend some time putting together a proper deck, get all the information in one place, and automate it. It's not going to save time in the short term but, six or nine months down the line, you’ll have an optimised, customised set of reports that gives you the information you need.

I have my own solution. I take all the sales data from platforms like Shopify and WooCommerce, put it into a dashboard, clean it, and then apply filters to get to the information fairly quickly. We're developing that all the time, which is one solution. There's also the Power BI dashboard, Tableau, and a lot of different solutions as well.”

Lucia Dello is Founder and Director at Dello Insights, and you can find her over at DelloInsights.com.