How to Make a Strategic SEO Investment for Your Company

An SEO investment is the budget, time, and expertise you put into search engine optimization (SEO) to earn visibility in Google’s results, AI Overviews, and AI assistants like ChatGPT that turns into leads and sales. To make one strategic, set goals, assess competitors and your current performance, prioritize changes that move revenue, staff the work, and measure against a baseline.

In this post, we’ll explore:

• Does your company need to invest in SEO?
• How to invest in SEO
• The ROI of an SEO investment

Keep reading for your one-stop guide to investing in SEO! And if you’d like to learn more about how to budget for SEO, check out our free SEO pricing guide!

Claim Your Copy

Does your company need to invest in SEO?

You might know how vital your website is to help users find you, and you might even understand the value of a prime spot in search engine results. But without a strategic plan to increase your search engine rankings, you stand a slim chance of appearing as high as you’d like.

However, SEO will help you change that.

SEO is an invaluable marketing strategy for every business, carrying benefits like:

• Appearing where users look for information, from Google’s results to AI answers
• Satisfying your audience with helpful, relevant answers to search queries
• Driving more customers to your website
• Generating long-term results
• Working hand-in-hand with other digital marketing strategies such as web design and content marketing

If you don’t already have an SEO strategy in place, consider adding one to your marketing budget. Any business that wants to reach customers online will benefit from investing in this foundational strategy.

However, as you plan your budget, remember SEO is ongoing and involves many areas of expertise. To see meaningful results from your investment, you’ll need the right team, or you can partner with an SEO company. You’ll also need to be willing to wait a few months to see your results.

Though the initial wait might be long, once you earn strong visibility in search results and AI answers, your initial investment will continue driving traffic and results for years to come.

How to invest in SEO

What if you’re considering investing in SEO but don’t know where to begin? Any company that wants to add SEO to their marketing strategy successfully should follow these steps:

1. Establish and analyze your existing marketing goals

SEO should play a strategic role in your larger digital marketing strategy to drive the most significant results. Before you establish your SEO plan or determine the best investment approach, consider your overall marketing goals.

Are you looking to increase website traffic? Build brand awareness? Show up in AI answers when buyers research your services? Drive more sales or generate more leads?

How aggressive of an SEO plan do you need? Will you invest in traditional or local SEO?

These answers will inform your SEO strategy and set the initial foundation to gauge how much SEO will cost.

2. Complete a competitive analysis

Another component that impacts your SEO investment is your competitive landscape. Consider your top competitors and how they perform in the search results.

To accurately determine this information, consider using an SEO tool or competitive analysis tool. You’ll find many free and paid options to suit your needs.

In this step, look at the volume of searches and keywords your competitors rank for. Understanding the search landscape for your industry will help you evaluate your return on investment (ROI) potential.

Competitors also compete for space in AI answers. OmniSEO®, WebFX’s AI search visibility platform, tracks citations and mentions for your brand and up to five competitors across platforms like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews. Use it to spot topics where AI answers cite a competitor but not you, since those gaps show where your investment has room to win visibility.

You’ll also see whether your audience searches for more informational or transactional keywords or an even mix of the two. Both types of searches are helpful to your marketing strategy, but understanding this mix upfront will guide the direction of your SEO investment.

For instance, top-of-funnel searches might focus on driving people to your website. To generate bottom-line results, you’ll need to align your SEO strategy with conversion rate optimization and tactics that keep your visitors on your site to nurture them down the sales funnel.

3. Evaluate your current SEO performance

Once you understand the existing SEO landscape you’ll be diving into, evaluate your site’s performance. Use an SEO tool like Google Search Console or Ahrefs to determine how well you’re ranking in the search results, then check whether AI Overviews and AI assistants mention your brand for the same queries.

Even if you’re ranking highly, you’ll still likely find areas for improvement. Knowing how to improve, though, is challenging due to the many factors involved in SEO. To see actionable areas where your site can improve, plug it into our free SEO checker.

4. Determine your SEO plan

Once you know your site’s SEO strengths and improvement areas, consider which changes will make the greatest impact. While the most strategic improvements vary for each business, some of the most foundational SEO investments include:

• Page speed optimization
• Link-building
• Improving your site architecture
• Optimizing existing content for SEO
• Creating new SEO content
• And more

Some sites might need a comprehensive SEO strategy that includes on-page, off-page, and technical SEO improvements. Others might choose to focus on one or two areas.

Keep your findings in mind as you move into the next step.

5. Evaluate your SEO resources

Now that you know which areas of SEO you need to prioritize, consider your internal resources. To launch a thorough SEO strategy, you’ll need experts in areas like:

• Website design and development
• Content strategy
• Copywriting and content creation
• Outreach
• Data analysis

If you don’t have the in-house knowledge needed to deploy your SEO strategy, you’ll need to decide whether to invest in hiring in-house experts or partnering with an SEO agency.

Both carry benefits, but if you don’t have the time or resources to recruit, train, and manage an SEO team, working with an SEO company takes the burden off your shoulders.

Not sure if you can spare the budget for either of these approaches? Learn DIY SEO! You’ll still need to invest time, and it might take a while to understand every tactic, but the beauty of SEO is that anyone can learn it if necessary.

6. Establish realistic expectations

Before you invest in SEO, ensure you’ve set realistic expectations. SEO carries a substantial ROI, but you’ll need to optimize your site continually and wait to see results.

Whether you outsource your SEO investments or learn the tactics in-house, remember this strategy isn’t one you can spend a couple of months doing, then move on to something else.

The long-term nature means you’ll need to continually work with your SEO company or dedicate a team member — or several — to your site’s optimization.

Before investing in SEO, ensure you’re in it for the long haul.

7. Measure your performance

Another critical aspect of setting realistic expectations is knowing how to attribute your results to SEO. If you invest in this strategy, you need a way to measure your results accurately.

Depending on your SEO goals, noteworthy key performance indicators (KPIs) to track include:

• Search rankings
• Search visibility
• AI visibility rate, or how often AI answers mention your brand
• Organic click-through-rate (CTR)
• Engagement rate
• Referral traffic from AI platforms like ChatGPT
• Organic traffic
• Conversion rate

Using analytics tools like Google Analytics 4 (GA4) to track these metrics will help you evaluate your SEO performance and attribute it to bottom-line results.

ROI of an SEO investment

Now that we’re talking about tracking the ROI of your SEO investments, what sort of SEO ROI can you expect?

Like most aspects of SEO, it depends. Your ROI might vary from another business’s based on factors like:

• Your pre-existing SEO performance
• The amount you chose to invest
• The competitiveness of your field in search
• The aggressiveness of your plan
• And more

However, when invested in strategically, SEO will generate substantial results for your business. To demonstrate the potential, let’s say you run an ecommerce website with an average order value (AOV) of $100.

Before investing in SEO, you see 15,000 monthly organic sessions on average, with a 5% conversion rate.

Your SEO investments help you land higher in the search results, so your monthly organic sessions increase 50% to 22,500.

Wondering if a 50% increase is realistic? Check out our case studies! Our SEO services have driven well over a 50% increase for many clients — up to a 3872% increase in organic sessions!

With 7500 more monthly sessions and the same 5% conversion rate, you’ll generate 375 more conversions every month. At an AOV of $100, that’s $37,500 more monthly revenue.

When you consider SEO pricing, which can cost an average of $1500 to $5000 per month, you can see how high the ROI can go, making SEO well worth it.

And this scenario doesn’t consider how SEO improvements contribute to conversion rate optimization, too!

How AI search changes the return on your SEO investment

AI search adds a second place an SEO investment pays off: the answers Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT, and Perplexity give before anyone clicks. In WebFX’s study of 2.37 million U.S. keywords, 25.8% of queries showed a Google AI Overview. That means an ROI model built only on rankings and organic clicks misses part of what your SEO budget buys.

AI referrals are still a small channel, but a fast-growing one with high intent. In WebFX’s analysis of 2.3 billion sessions, generative AI accounted for 0.18% of total website sessions in 2025. That traffic grew about 796% in two years, and its visitors converted about 1.2x higher than organic search visitors.

To account for AI search in your SEO ROI:

1. Set a baseline first. Pull clicks, queries, and click-through rates from the Search Console Performance report before your investment starts, so you can separate SEO gains from seasonal swings.
2. Give AI traffic its own channel. Create a custom channel group in GA4 for referrals from ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini, which standard reports bury under organic or referral traffic.
3. Track citations for priority prompts. List the questions buyers ask AI assistants about your services, and check each month whether the answers mention or cite your brand.
4. Connect AI visits to revenue. Tie lead and call tracking to your CRM so AI-sourced visits show up as leads and sales in your ROI model. RC Mowers tied its lead and call tracking to Salesforce and can now attribute leads and revenue to its AI search appearances.

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Our SEO experts will craft a custom strategy, prioritized by revenue impact across Google and AI search, that generates the results you need to grow your business. WebFX SEO plans start at $2,900 / month.

Ready to make your SEO investment and improve your business’s online presence? Call us at 888-601-5359 or request a free proposal online today!