The Strategic Shift: Why Revenue Should Be Considered as a Secondary KPI for Your SEO Campaign

As a business or a brand owner who has decided to outsource your SEO campaign requirements to the right fit offshore agency, you must know the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that will serve as the yardstick for measuring campaign success.

There are certain factors that you must not overlook when choosing the perfect offshore digital marketing partner. The above link is a ready checklist to help you navigate safer waters!

You have considered Mavlers, a full-suite digital marketing agency with reputable and established expertise in running SEO campaigns for 7K+ global clients. However, you need to know the SEO benchmarks before you make a deal with us. 

You must have noticed that while revenue is undoubtedly crucial for any business, we do not prioritize it as a primary Key Performance Indicator (KPI) for measuring the success of SEO campaigns. Instead, we focus on traffic and rankings as the primary KPIs. 

The following sub-sections of today’s blog will elaborate on why this approach is justified and essential for long-term success.

• The complexity of revenue attribution
• The long-term nature of SEO
• Revenue as a secondary metric and KPI

By the end of this blog, you will be better positioned to understand why we consider traffic and rankings as a better and more reliable measure of long-term SEO success and consider revenue as a secondary SEO metric and KPI. 

And now, let’s see why there is never such a thing as a missed goal with us! 😉

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Understanding the complexity of revenue attribution

Revenue is influenced by a confluence of varied factors, many of which extend beyond the realm of SEO. Understanding these factors is key to appreciating why revenue is considered a secondary KPI rather than a primary one.

Multiple influencing factors

Revenue is not solely driven by SEO efforts. It is affected by various elements such as pricing strategies, promotional offers, customer buying stages, and broader market conditions. For example, a sudden drop in market demand due to economic factors can impact revenue, regardless of how well your SEO campaign is performing. Similarly, changes in pricing or promotional offers can lead to revenue fluctuations that are unrelated to SEO. This complexity makes it challenging to isolate SEO’s impact on revenue, making it an unreliable primary KPI.

Multi-touch attribution models

In today’s digital landscape, customers interact with multiple touchpoints before making a purchase. While SEO may play a crucial role in driving initial awareness or consideration, other channels like email marketing, paid ads, and direct sales efforts often contribute significantly to the final conversion. 

Multi-touch attribution models, which account for these various interactions, provide a more holistic view of the customer journey. However, they also complicate the direct attribution of revenue to SEO, further justifying why revenue should be a secondary KPI.

Also, SEO professionals have no magic wand from Ollivanders’ in Diagon Alley and SEO is indeed a long-term endeavor than a short one. 

The long-term nature of SEO

As discussed earlier, SEO is a long-term strategy that requires patience and consistent effort. Unlike paid advertising, which can yield immediate results, SEO builds over time as search engines recognize and reward a site’s relevance and authority. This long-term nature of SEO presents challenges when using revenue as a primary SEO benchmark. Here’s why!

Gradual results

SEO efforts typically take six months to a year to show significant improvements in traffic and rankings. The process involves optimizing content, building backlinks, and enhancing user experience—all of which take time to impact search engine rankings. Because of this gradual nature, there is often a delay between implementing SEO strategies and seeing their impact on revenue.

Time lag between efforts and results

There is often a significant time lag between the implementation of SEO strategies and their impact on revenue. Search engines take time to crawl, index, and rank new or optimized content, and users need time to discover and engage with the website. This lag makes it challenging to use revenue as a real-time measure of SEO success.

Building authority and trust

One of the core objectives of SEO is to establish a website as an authoritative and trustworthy source within its niche. This process involves creating consistent, high-quality content, earning backlinks from reputable sites, and engaging users. While these efforts contribute to improved rankings and traffic, they take time to translate into revenue. Therefore, focusing on authority and trust-building is more critical in the short to medium term than immediate revenue generation.

Considering revenue as a secondary SEO metric and KPI

While revenue is not a primary KPI in SEO, it is still an essential metric we consider as part of a broader performance analysis.

Holistic view of performance

By analyzing revenue alongside traffic and ranking data, we can get a clearer picture of how SEO contributes to overall business goals. This approach helps identify areas where SEO is performing well and where there might be opportunities for improvement.

For example, if traffic and rankings are increasing but revenue is stagnant, it might indicate issues with the website’s conversion process or pricing strategy.

Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)

At Mavlers, we also emphasize Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) to improve the likelihood of traffic converting into customers. CRO involves optimizing various elements of the website, such as user experience, landing pages, and call-to-actions, to increase the conversion rate and, consequently, revenue. 

By combining CRO with our SEO efforts, we ensure that the traffic we drive to the site will more likely result in revenue, even if it is not our primary KPI.

The road ahead

You might now want to read about What Tools And Tech Stack We Use At Mavlers To Run And Analyze SEO Campaigns.