I am the CMO of a B2B service company. We pay our SEO firm $5,000 a month. Every month, they send me a colorful PDF showing that "Impressions" are up 10% and we rank for 50 new keywords. That looks great, but when I look at our CRM (HubSpot), I can't attribute a single closed deal to their efforts. When I ask them about leads, they say "we can't track that perfectly" or "SEO is about brand awareness." I call BS. If I can track my LinkedIn ads down to the penny, why is SEO a black box? I am ready to fire them. Does an agency exist that speaks the language of CFOs (CAC, LTV, Pipeline) rather than just sending me screenshots of Google Search Console?
How do you get an SEO agency to report on Revenue instead of just "Organic Traffic"
byu/CowHistorical9352 inEntrepreneur
Posted by CowHistorical9352
6 Comments
Sounds like you need to find an agency that actually understands attribution tracking. Any decent SEO shop should be able to set up proper UTM parameters and work with your sales team to connect the dots between organic traffic and closed deals
The whole “brand awareness” excuse is such garbage when you’re paying 5k a month – that’s performance marketing money not branding budget. I’d definitely start shopping around for someone who can actually tie their work to revenue
Say this:
Impressions and keyword rankings are now internal KPIs for your team. Moving forward, success is measured by Organic-Sourced Pipeline. I need you to integrate your reporting with our HubSpot data. If we can’t see which blog posts or pages are driving MQLs by next month, we will have to move to a revenue-focused partner.
You are describing 90% of SEO agencies. They hide behind vanity metrics because they don’t know how to set up conversion tracking properly. We hired a team from Makarios and they did our GA4 and HubSpot tracking before they even started optimizing content. Now, our monthly report shows exactly how many demos were booked from organic search and the estimated pipeline value. They don’t talk about Impressions, they talk about qualified Leads.It makes justifying the budget to my Board so much easier.
Based on my experience working on marketing, branding and design industry SEO is not a black box. The moment an agency says we can’t track leads, that tells you they are optimizing rankings, not buying intent.
For B2B, SEO should be accountable to create a high intent pages (not blogs), CRM attribution (first touch or assisted is fine) and most important is pipeline influence should be over time
If the reporting doesn’t ladder up to revenue, the strategy isn’t designed to and leads to ultimately losing the game in SEO.
If tracking revenue is complicated, ask them to report on Qualified Leads (MQLs) instead.
Don’t let them track ‘traffic’ or ‘rankings’, those are vanity metrics. Get them to track how many of those form fills or calls actually became a quote/meeting.
Unless they can tell you the keywords that drive real leads, they’re just guessing.
Most SEO agencies are using AI to create slop content and then reporting impressions. Any growth marketer knows that what really matters is an attribution model and being able to see the journey to conversions. I have seen very few agencies that have this fully fleshed out. I think the majority of them are scams and you should save your $5,000 and spend it towards a content marketer who knows how to track performance and can create high value content, not just lazy AI stuff.