AI & SEO-Driven Content Marketing: How To Calculate True ROI for B2B Companies in 2025 – Search Engine Journal
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This post was sponsored by Heeet. The opinions expressed in this article are the sponsor’s own.
How do you calculate the true cost of SEO content production?
Are you overspending or underspending on SEO compared to performance?
Can you connect SEO-driven awareness to pipeline and revenue?
How do you make SEO efforts more visible to your C-suite?
If you aren’t sure, that’s okay.
You may simply lack the tools to measure the actual impact of SEO on revenue.
So, let’s dive in and:
Yes, you can connect SEO to revenue.
SEO plays a large role in future conversions.
In fact, SEO helps prospects discover your brand, tool, or company.
SEO also helps provide easy-to-discover content with informational intent, which helps to nurture a prospective lead into a sale.
Your prospect’s journey:
The fact that informative content is found on SERPs is due to SEO.
But how is this tracked? How do you know which non-conversion pages are:
Luckily, your C-suite likely recognizes the need for SEO content.
They are prepared to invest in a strategy incorporating AI search.
However, you need tools that validate the investment and clearly showcase it for your higher-ups.
Gartner predicts that traditional search engine volume will drop 25% by 2026 and flow directly to AI chatbots and agents.
As AI continues to accelerate the evolution of SEO, it’s critical to ensure that high-performing pages:
That’s why you need to understand why certain content is picked up by AI tools and the cost of generating the content to calculate the true ROI of your SEO.
With the shift in consumer search behavior, your first step is to create, optimize, and measure the ROI of content sourced by leading AI tools.
That means appearing in AI Overviews and AI Answers that contain list-based content and product comparisons.
That’s the first step to determining whether your content or your competitor’s stands out.
Give these prompts a try:
The next step is optimizing existing content and adjusting your strategy so that you write copy that gives AI the answers it’s looking for.
With that said, following traditional SEO strategies and best practices championed by Google should help.
Just like traditional search, AI tools also favor:
These factors give your content more authority in your industry, just like the content outside your website that Google and LLMs look for to find answers from, such as videos on YouTube, reviews on G2, and conversations on Reddit forums.
Publishing enough quality content for all those channels to optimize for AI and be visible in traditional search is no small task. It requires substantial human resources, SEO tools, and time.
SEO is a long game, especially in B2B, where the path from first click to purchase can span weeks or months and involve multiple touchpoints.
And now, with AI influencing how content is discovered, the cost of doing SEO well has increased.
To accurately assess the cost of SEO-driven content in 2025, you need to go beyond production budgets and organic traffic. Here’s how:
Start by identifying all the resources that go into content creation and maintenance:
Track the performance of each piece of content using more than just rankings:
Content doesn’t just convert, it nurtures. Tie content assets to specific stages:
Even if content isn’t the final touchpoint, it plays a role. Traditional tools miss this.
No single metric will tell the full story. Instead:
Without full-funnel attribution, even the most engaged content may look like a cost center instead of a revenue driver.
That’s why accurate measurement, aligned with total investment and the full buyer journey, is critical to understanding the real ROI of your SEO content in 2025.
However, we know that:
This is where the calculation gets difficult.
Now that we’re here, you’re beginning to understand how tricky it is to tie ROI to AI Overview responses that nurture your prospects.
How do you accurately determine the cost?
Some people are creating their own attribution models to calculate ROI.
Most people are using tools that are built specifically for this new calculation.
The only way to accurately calculate cost in B2B SEO is to capture the engagement with content throughout the buyer journey, which conventional attribution models don’t credit.
Another substantial blind spot in SEO measurement occurs when companies focus exclusively on pre-acquisition activities, meaning everything that happens before a lead is added to your CRM.
Consider the typical journey enterprise clients take in an account-based marketing approach:
Can your marketing team track how each channel (direct, paid search, and organic) influenced the deal throughout the sales process?
Multitouch attribution tools allow marketers to finally link SEO content to tangible business outcomes by tracking what SEO-driven content leads interacted with before a sale.
After years of wrestling with these challenges, we built Heeet to fill the void: an end-to-end attribution solution that connects SEO efforts and interactions generated from content marketing to revenue by highlighting their impact throughout the sales cycle within Salesforce.
Our proprietary cookieless tracking solution collects more data, ensuring your decisions are based on complete, unbiased insights rather than partial or skewed information.
Traditional SEO measurement often relies on first-click or last-click attribution, which fails to capture SEO’s entire influence on revenue. Heeet places SEO on a level playing field by providing full-funnel attribution that tracks SEO’s impact at every customer journey stage.
We help marketers determine whether SEO-driven content is the first touchpoint, one of the many intermediary interactions along the lengthy B2B sales cycle, or the final conversion leading to a sale to pinpoint SEO’s cumulative influence on your pipeline.
Heeet actively tracks every touchpoint, ensuring that the actual impact of SEO is neither underestimated nor misrepresented.
Rather than neglecting SEO’s role when a prospect converts through another channel, Heeet delivers a complete view of how different personas in the buying committee interact with each piece of content and where they’re converting. This empowers businesses to make informed, data-driven SEO strategies and investment decisions.
Measuring ROI is non-negotiable and hinges on precise revenue tracking and a thorough understanding of costs. Heeet streamlines this process by directly integrating SEO costs into Salesforce, covering all production expenses such as software, human resources, design, and other strategic investments.
Businesses can accurately evaluate SEO profitability by linking these costs to SEO-driven revenue. Heeet delivers a straightforward, unified view of previously fragmented data within Salesforce, empowering marketing and finance teams to confidently assess SEO ROI with a single tool.
SEO is more than ranking on Google; it’s about driving impactful engagement with quality content referenced in the multiple search tools buyers use. Heeet tracks which content prospects engage with and ties it directly to revenue outcomes, providing marketing and sales teams with critical insights that propel them forward. With our Google Search Console integration, we’re helping marketers draw more data into Salesforce to get the unified view of their content’s performance in a single place and connect search intents with business outcomes (leads, converted leads, revenue,…). This enables marketers to align ranking position with search intent and revenue, enhancing content strategy and tracking performance over time.
For B2B marketers pairing their SEO content with a paid strategy, our latest Google Ads update allows users to see the exact search query that prospects typed before clicking on a search result. This allows SEO experts and copywriters to gain the intel they need to reduce their cost per lead by creating content they know their audience is searching for.
Ready to enhance your marketing ROI tracking and connect every marketing activity to revenue?
From SEO to events, paid ads, social organic, AI referrals, webinars, and social ads, Heeet helps you uncover the real performance of your marketing efforts and turn revenue data into actionable insights.
Image Credits
Featured Image: Image by Shutterstock. Used with permission.
In-Post Image: Images by Heeet. Used with permission.
Romain Blanc is a Salesforce ecosystem expert and data specialist with 20+ years of experience. He has helped global brands …
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