Helen says: “My additional insight is that, to excel at SEO in 2025, we need to truly understand the actual genuine value of organic traffic.

That means understanding how much it costs as well as how much it makes us so that we can calculate a genuine return on investment.”

What is the difference between cost and value there? I think that's something that a lot of SEOs don't really give too much thought to – or perhaps they do nowadays.

“This is something that I've been spending a bit of time thinking about because, in a lot of other marketing channels, we focus a lot on how much a campaign costs.

Think of paid media. ‘How much is this advertising campaign costing us?’, ‘How much are we making out of it?’ Then we get a really good understanding of conversion metrics and how much it's genuinely costing us to get a new client, for example.

But with organic traffic, we almost miss half of that equation because we think about, ‘Well, we've got this many leads from this amount of traffic’, and we understand that kind of conversion, but we don't truly think about, ‘What did it cost us to get people to our website?’, ‘What did it cost us to have people on our website?’ (because there is a cost associated with that), and ‘How much does it cost us to have all of these pages that we keep creating on our website actually running?’

All of those things cost money and, as SEOs, we don't tend to think about that too much. We think of organic traffic as being free, and it's anything but free. I think, if we really want to start excelling in 2025 with our SEO – and beyond that – we need to think about the genuine cost of this traffic.

We are getting all the more scrutinised around what value organic traffic brings to a website, especially with the changes in different search engines being used more and having to track more of our traffic and our revenue. We need to understand how much it's costing to get this traffic to the website so that we can say, ‘We have made this business X amount of money’, rather than, ‘We've cost the business X amount of money’, through just bringing traffic to a website.”

It seemed that you were alluding to even the costs of serving a web page, so there are so many different minutiae that you can go into in terms of what the costs are.

What are the key costs that you tend to focus on and, if an SEO works in a large organisation, who can help the SEO with that particular task?

“I would say this is predominantly for large websites, so enterprise-size websites – or even smaller but more intricate websites like e-commerce-type sites that have got a lot of different things going on in the background.

You can start by looking at your own tooling costs. A lot of the tools that we SEOs like to use tend to scale up in price, depending on things like the size of the website, the volume of URLs that the tool's going to need to crawl, or the volume of log files that need to be stored. Have a look at your own tooling costs to start with and understand where the break points are, where it starts to get more expensive.

Then, also have a look at things like monitoring tools that other teams are using. I would highly, highly recommend finding the core developer or team of developers that is responsible for monitoring the costs of the website. There will be someone whose job is to do that. Speak to them about where the costs come in for this kind of website. Maybe ask them, ‘If I were to delete half the pages overnight, how much money would that save us as a business?’ or, ‘Where would those cost savings come in?’

They will probably be able to tell you all sorts of different things about the website that is costing money because of the size of it. Things like, every time a bot hits the website, it costs money. Think about things like how much it costs to store stuff – database costs. The larger your website, the bigger the database. There are costs associated with that. Or firewalls, the kind of security that stops your website from being open to DDoS attacks and things like that. Or even, if you are a large website and you're using something like GA4 360, those kinds of tools start to cost money based on the size of the volume of hits that that analytics program's actually monitoring. The bigger the website or the more traffic you get, the more expensive it is to run something like GA4 360.

There are a lot of hidden costs that we don't necessarily think about that go into the running of a website, the receiving of traffic onto that website, and the analysing and monitoring of that website. In organic traffic, we tend to send the bulk of traffic to a website (that generally tends to be organic traffic), and we also seem to be responsible for creating the most pages.

Then, if you think about internationalising websites, if you're doing any sort of automated translation of content, that gets expensive very quickly when you're using tokens and credits and things to translate content.

There's an awful lot that goes into the cost of a website that we don't really think about, but we're driving lots of that traffic and we're driving the creation of a lot of that content and those pages. So, organic as a channel is not free – and that's before we talk about things like our salaries and what it costs to actually have a team of people dedicated to organic growth.

I think we really need to stop talking about organic as being a free traffic source because it's anything but free. Actually, we're doing ourselves a bit of a disservice.”

The second pillar that you were referring to was value. Obviously, there's a cost to delivering the webpage, having the user on the webpage, and having different bots on the webpage as well. So, you may not necessarily deem it necessary to continue having that particular webpage.

You also mentioned the fact that sometimes it's worthwhile culling a significant chunk of your existing site, so how do you determine the value of a webpage and decide that it is definitively worthwhile retaining it?

“I talk about these kinds of costs, and they have to be taken into consideration around all of the other metrics that we look at when we're deciding how to structure a website or cull pages on a website. It's one of those metrics we should be looking at, but it's an important one.

When we're looking at how you put a value to a page, I think you need to gather all of these costs together and get an average cost of a page. How much does it cost to have a page live on your site, given the costs of bandwidth and servers and log file storage and firewalls and all these kinds of costs together? How much does it cost you to have a page live on your site?

At that point, you can put a monetary value against, every time we create a page for organic purposes, it's going to cost the business X amount of money on average – but also, whenever we cull some pages, we're going to save the business X amount of money. Then you can start to put value towards the projects where you're actually going to be saving the business money.

It really helps with buy-in because you can say, ‘If we do X project where we're looking to consolidate pages or cull pages, we think, on average, each month we'll be saving the business Y amount of money – and that's before we get into the value of the organic traffic and the conversion of that traffic that we could see as a result of this organic work.’

It's balancing a lot of different figures together, but getting a general sense of how much it costs to have a page: ‘We could be making X amount of money off the page, or we could save X amount of money if we got rid of it’, and really putting some proper financial figures to the work that we're doing.’”

It's really tough to actually know the full user journey nowadays. If you've got a lengthy buying cycle, a user could spend just 10 seconds on a web page before deciding that it's not for them at that moment in time, but remember your brand and then come back to you at some point in the future.

Is it possible to put some kind of measurable value on that timescale with the user, as a result of them deciding to purchase from you at some point in the future?

“You could look at weighting those pages. You could look at: is this a top-of-the-funnel page where we wouldn't expect someone to convert necessarily, but it's good for branding and awareness? Perhaps you weight that accordingly. So, it costs X amount to have this page live. It doesn't tend to make direct conversions because it's not at that point of the buying journey, but it is a contributing factor to conversions that happen later on, so we will give it its due credit there.

Then you have pages that are going to be direct converting pages because, by the time someone's come to your website, had a look at this brand page, gone away, compared tools or services, come back again, and decided that they want to make the purchase, they've landed on this converting page and gone through and made the purchase or generated the lead. That would suggest that that page is more important, but actually, it's being assisted by pages higher up the journey/higher up the funnel.

It's about giving each of those pages the credit they deserve, but there will be pages on a site where they're not really serving any purpose. We're really good, as SEOs, at identifying those pages. We do that all the time. We look at: this page is a really thin page. It doesn't get much useful traffic to it. That traffic doesn't tend to return or it’s not really matching the user intent.

We do know that those are pages that we probably could get rid of. We're just not used to putting a financial value against that.”

You also talk about organic traffic in all forms. Should SEOs focus on organic traffic from social media nowadays as well?

“I think so, but that's just because I think we need to start looking at organic traffic as more than just Google traffic. I know we've been saying for years that we don’t, but we kind of do focus on those more traditional search engines, and that tends to be what people think of when we talk about organic traffic.

For me, it's any traffic that results from people finding your brand or looking for the products or services that you offer – and that can be on all kinds of different platforms.

That can be in social media, it can be in TikTok, it can be on Reddit even. It can be through third-party search engines like TripAdvisor, for example. These are all people looking for things, searching for things, an algorithm happens, and it serves content. In my mind, that is organic traffic. If it's not being paid for, it's organic traffic, and it's something that we can directly help with because we've got those skills as SEOs.

So, yeah, I do think we need to broaden the definition of organic traffic.”

I love the term ‘organic discovery optimization’. You're giving your brands – perhaps even on those platforms or driving traffic to your website – an opportunity to be discovered. It could be from shares on a social platform, or it could be through more traditional search engines as well.

What about ROI? ROI can be calculated using so many different metrics. You've given us a great list of many metrics that can be used to calculate the cost of doing business on your own website but, when calculating ROI, do you also calculate the time and money spent on optimizing other platforms?

“I think we should. If it comes out of your campaign budget (either that's your team's resources or your team's tooling or something), then yes, we should be looking at how that has brought a return on investment for the business.

It might be for social media, for example. It's not directly your team that is involved in posting content on social media, but some content that your team has created for organic purposes, like traditional search engine optimization purposes, is actually doing really well on social media.

I do think you should look at what your team's contribution to this return on investment has been. It might not normally be credited to your team's work, but you have a share of the success of that organic post because it's your content, essentially, that drove the engagement.

I think we just need to stop siloing ourselves as much and look at ourselves within the wider context of the business. There will be things that we do as SEO professionals that directly impact development costs, development resources, or effectiveness, because we are doing things like making recommendations about Core Web Vitals, for example. That will directly help the development team with some of the KPIs and metrics that they're being tasked with.

The same is true with other marketing channels and the product teams. We actually have quite a far-reaching impact across the business because we touch so many different areas of the business. I do think we need to start looking at how we are influencing the success of those teams and start to take a little bit of ownership over that (and a little bit of credit where it's due).”

This seems like part of an SEO role moving forward, or is it something that needs to be done on a project-by-project basis?

Also, how does it fit into an SEO strategy? Is this something that changes the way that SEO strategies are done or simply changes the way that an SEO role is conducted?

“I think it's a whole mindset shift, honestly. I think we need to stop looking at SEO as being such a narrow field and start looking at it for what it is, which is the foundation of a website's traffic growth or a website's performance.

There's so much to the breadth and scope of what we do as SEOs and how we influence things. I think we need to take a bit of a step back and really account for all of that. That will then start to drive how we look at our strategies and how we look at our engagement with other teams within our businesses, because we'll stop thinking about our focus as just being Google, Perplexity AI, or ChatGPT. We'll stop looking at individual platforms and look at the wider impacts that we have, and our strategies need to reflect that.

We actually have a lot of influence on the success of other teams and their metrics. We can also make their lives considerably harder and have negative impacts, but all of that needs to be taken into consideration. We are not a marketing channel. We are not a division of the product team. We are not a part of engineering. We're all of those things, and our strategies need to reflect that.”

You mentioned Perplexity AI. Where does AI fit into this? Can AI help us? It sounds like quite a manual process, to look at a lot of the cost and value of what an SEO can deliver. Are there AI tools out there that can assist with this?

“There absolutely are going to be, yes. I honestly think the first port of call for anyone who's looking to dig into more about what it takes to run a website and how much that costs is to actually talk to the people who directly do that. It's your development team, and they are probably already utilising AI in the way that they monitor and optimize those kinds of costs.

You'll probably find that those tools are already being used within your business, you're just not aware of them.

But yes, absolutely, this could be a very manual task, especially when you're doing it at the scale of enterprise sites. It could be incredibly time-consuming, but it is also something that probably only needs to be done in full once. Then you can monitor it over time to understand more about how the work that you're doing is impacting on costs. For example, are you reducing costs because you're improving load speeds?

There could be ways that you could automate this kind of thing, but you really need to do the legwork at the beginning to understand exactly what goes into these costs. Then you can start to look at automating.”

If an SEO is struggling for time, what should they stop doing right now so they can spend more time doing what you suggest in 2025?

“Okay, so this is going to sound a bit controversial, but I would say stop focussing your SEO strategies around traffic growth because traffic doesn't pay the bills. It actually costs money, as we've just discussed.

Instead of looking at, ‘How can I improve and increase traffic?’ and, ‘How can I grow the volume of people that come to my website?’, look more at, ‘How am I getting the most value out of the people that I drive to the website?’

You could get rid of millions of visits over a month and not actually impact the revenue on some websites because there’s a lot of spam traffic or a lot of misdirected traffic where the intent doesn't match with the content that you have.

You could lose a load of organic traffic and not impact your revenue at all, and that's quite something because, if you’re always looking to grow your traffic, but you’re not making that traffic more valuable, then you’re not really benefitting the business in any way. So, stop focussing your time on organic growth and, instead, look at revenue growth.”

Helen Pollitt is the Director of SEO at Getty Images, and you can find her over at GettyImages.com.