Search engine optimization (SEO) can sometimes feel like the marshmallow test—a famous psychological experiment where children who could resist eating a marshmallow for a reward demonstrated better life outcomes. While paid ads aim to generate instant traffic and sales, SEO requires patience. You invest in content, technical improvements, and site speed today for returns that may not materialize for months.
Measuring ROI cuts through vanity SEO metrics like impressions or keyword rankings, and ties SEO directly to revenue. Done right, it provides the data you need to double down on what works, pivot from what doesn’t, and prove your patience is warranted. Here’s how to calculate your SEO spend, track revenue, and report ROI to earn stakeholder trust.
What is SEO ROI?
Search engine optimization return on investment—or SEO ROI—measures revenue generated from your SEO strategy compared to what you spend on those efforts. When measuring SEO ROI, you’re essentially asking: Is the money and effort I invest in my website generating more revenue than it costs me? That’s the return on investment (ROI).
Kyle Risley, senior SEO lead at Shopify, says vanity metrics like traffic or keyword rankings may look good on paper, but they only matter if they’re moving you toward your revenue goals. “For any sales-based business, every metric must be grounded in revenue. Sessions and rankings matter only because they influence those outcomes.”
Here’s how to calculate SEO ROI:
SEO ROI = [(SEO revenue − SEO cost) / SEO cost] × 100
Revenue, in this context, is sales attributed to organic search. Costs can include everything from agency or freelancer fees to tools, content creation, and even time spent on SEO.
A positive ROI means you made more than you spent; a negative ROI means you spent more than you made. An ROI close to zero means you’re essentially breaking even.
Note that ROI doesn’t account for the time it takes to recognize revenue from SEO. For that, measure your payback period instead.
How to calculate SEO ROI
Calculating the ROI of SEO isn’t complicated, but requires breaking the process into clear steps:
1. Calculate your SEO costs
The first step to measuring SEO ROI is to understand your spending. Businesses often underestimate their SEO budget by counting only the obvious costs, like outsourcing SEO to an agency retainer or a keyword research tool subscription. But that’s only half the picture.
Labor and internal resources are just as important as direct costs. If you spend 10 hours a week building collection pages or auditing product descriptions, that’s time you need to quantify.
Direct SEO costs include:
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SEO consultant or agency fees
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In-house salaries
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Content creation costs
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Technical work
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Link-building
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SEO software
For example, if you run a Shopify store selling handmade furniture, you might pay $1,500 per month to a freelance writer for optimized product descriptions, spend $300 on SEO tools, and dedicate 20 hours of your own time to site updates, which is worth another $1,200 when quantified as an hourly rate. Without full accounting of your total SEO investment of $3,000 per month, your actual ROI calculation would be misleading.
SEO costs usually range from $250 to $10,000 per month, with 63% of businesses spending between $500 and $5,000.
2. Calculate your revenue from SEO
Once you know your SEO costs, determine how much revenue your efforts generate.
“The number one metric is revenue or appointments booked, tied directly back to organic search as the traffic source,” Kyle says. “Metrics like sessions and rankings are important, but only because they influence those outcomes.”
Google Analytics 4 (GA4) integrates directly with Shopify, which tracks purchase events and attributes completed orders to their traffic source or marketing channels. That means if someone finds your store through a search engine and places an order, GA4 logs that revenue under the “organic search” category.
Here’s how to integrate GA4 with Shopify:
Step 1: Create a GA4 property. This is the container where Google stores all your website data.
Step 2: Set up a data stream. In GA4, add a data stream for your Shopify store. This is how GA4 receives information from your website. Select “Web” as the platform and enter your store’s URL.
Step 3: Get your GA4 Measurement ID. GA4 displays a code snippet for manual install, but all you need is the Measurement ID (which looks like “G-XXXXXXXXXX”).
Step 4: Add your GA4 Measurement ID to Shopify. In Shopify admin, go to Settings > Customer Events, choose Google Analytics, and paste in the ID. Shopify automatically places the tracking code on your site.
Once connected, GA4 logs each order as a “purchase” event and ties it back to the traffic source. For example, a sale from Google search appears under organic search, while one from a Facebook ad shows as paid social.
Some marketers stop here, and that’s fine if all you need is purchase revenue. But if you want to see earlier signs of success—like how often SEO visitors add items to cart or sign up for emails—you’ll need Google Tag Manager (GTM), a free tool from Google that lets you track these “micro-conversions.”
Set it up once by adding a GTM container snippet in Shopify’s Customer Events, then create tags in GTM that fire when visitors take actions, such as adding to cart or submitting a form. These tags send the data into GA4, where you can track how many of these micro-conversions come from organic search and how often they lead to purchases.
For instance, knowing that 20% of add-to-cart clicks eventually convert makes SEO forecasting easier.
GA4 gives you the dollar value, while GTM helps you connect the dots between actions and sales.
3. Calculate your SEO ROI
With calculations for both your SEO investment and the revenue generated, bring it all together with the SEO ROI formula:
SEO ROI = [(SEO revenue − SEO cost) / SEO cost] × 100
Suppose you spent $5,000 building out new collection pages, hiring a writer, and paying agency fees. Over the next six months, GA4 indicates that those pages generated $25,000 in revenue from organic search. Your ROI would be:
[(25,000 - 5,000) / 5,000] × 100 = 400%
This means that for every $1 you invested in SEO, you earn $4.
The power of SEO lies in its compounding nature: Unlike paid ads, which stop driving traffic the moment you pause spending, SEO is a long-term strategy that creates an asset. The more effort you put in early on, the bigger the results get later. That means the article you publish or the product collection page you build today could keep driving customers for years without additional spend.
“Over the long term, SEO is almost always going to have a more favorable ROI versus paid channels,” Kyle says. “Once it’s operating effectively, it will provide returns with minimal continued investment.”
How long does SEO take? You can typically expect to see positive returns within a year. The ROI may start slowly, but if you measure it correctly and stick with it, the payoff can be worth the wait.
SEO return on investment FAQ
How do you forecast SEO ROI?
Use this formula to forecast SEO ROI: SEO ROI = [(SEO revenue − SEO cost) / SEO cost] × 100. This gives you a ballpark revenue opportunity for ranking on a keyword cluster.
What is a good ROI for SEO?
Benchmarks vary, but many SEO agencies consider a three- to fivefold ROI over three years a healthy return. Ecommerce SEO often breaks even in about nine months, then compounds to fivefold ROI or more by year three.
How often should you measure SEO ROI?
Check progress quarterly at a minimum. SEO moves more slowly than paid ads, so monthly swings don’t always tell the whole story. Focus on long-term trends in organic revenue, not week-to-week fluctuations.
