SEO Must Solve Its Marketing Problem – Forrester
Nikhil Lai, Principal Analyst
Marketers spend hundreds of millions of dollars a year on paid search but only hundreds of thousands on SEO. Marketers know SEO isn’t thousands of times less valuable, but it can feel thousands of times harder to realize its value. In the words of one Redditor: “SEO is incredibly time consuming, often involves multiple people, involves difficult and in-depth technical skills, and even when done perfectly, you may not see tangible results for three to six months … Meanwhile you can do [paid search] and wham bam thank you ma’am, you can get many results in a short timeframe, [and it] only needs one person to get up and running. And you can prove 100% attribution to the marketing team.”
This sentiment is shared by countless marketers. It reflects SEO’s marketing problem.
SEO’s greatest challenges (and opportunities) come from:
Despite its challenges, SEO is critically important. Practically every buyer’s journey is influenced, blatantly or subtly, by organic search. Making a brand increasingly visible across ChatGPT and Perplexity is still SEO, but it demands new skills and tools. The market for SEO solutions is growing to meet marketers’ evolving needs.
SEO solutions resolve marketers’ problems with the channel by reducing SEO’s effort. They accelerate and simplify the SEO process and derisk cross-functional collaboration. They also help practitioners adapt to the rise of generative AI (genAI) and diversification of search beyond Google.
Our new Landscape report on SEO solutions clarifies the SEO market’s maturity, dynamics, notable vendors, top use cases, functionalities, and future. It features end-to-end platforms, point solutions, and agency tools. Some specialize in creating and auditing brands’ content while others focus on making brands’ sites increasingly intelligible to search engines. All try to keep pace with genAI and prove SEO’s value.
Stay tuned for our Forrester Wave™ on SEO solutions, which will publish in Q3 2025. As always, contact us to learn more.
Nashville & Digital
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