Mastering SEO Success: The Art of Revenue Attribution and Winning Keyword Strategies
Keyword attribution identifies which keywords played the most significant role in driving a specific user action on a website—whether making a purchase, subscribing to a newsletter, or downloading content. Understanding these connections is critical for determining what’s working in your SEO (search engine optimization) strategy and what isn’t, ultimately fueling meaningful growth for your business.
While 49% of marketers identify organic search as the marketing channel with the best ROI, accurately attributing results is a universally recognized challenge in digital marketing.
At Optidge, we’re always looking for ways to tackle the complexities of digital marketing head-on, and this past fall, our founder and CEO, Danny Gavin, took the stage at the State of Search Conference to share how we’re redefining keyword attribution and proving the true value of SEO.
Drawing from years of hands-on experience and countless client successes, Danny highlighted our team’s innovative strategies that transform the challenges of keyword attribution into opportunities to drive real, measurable impact.
Ready to dive deeper into our approach? Keep reading to uncover actionable insights and proven tactics that will change the way you think about keyword attribution.
The Problem with Tracking SEO Success
For businesses of all sizes—whether a family-owned company or a global conglomerate, clients often question the true value of their SEO investment and if it’s driving tangible revenue.
While an increase in traffic may seem promising, it doesn’t always translate into meaningful business outcomes like leads, sales, or conversions. Danny’s podcast, The Digital Marketing Mentor, recently explored this challenge in depth in a case study about AI Generated Content and SEO.
Highlighting SEO’s unique contribution is further complicated by the impact of other marketing channels, such as paid search or paid social media, which can deliver more directly measurable results.
A particularly common challenge arises with clients who heavily invest in PPC; they may claim that most of their revenue stems from branded traffic influenced by advertising efforts, leading to the question: how do we know that non-branded SEO efforts deliver measurable ROI?

Adding to the complexity, GA4 (Google Analytics 4), Google’s latest analytics platform, is designed to provide insights into user behavior across a client’s websites and apps, tracking organic traffic, user engagement, conversions, and revenue. But, since 2011 Google Analytics has fallen short in providing organic search query data directly tied to revenue, making it difficult to attribute financial outcomes to specific keywords or queries.
To bridge this gap, integrating tools like Google Search Console helps to offer a more complete picture. While GA4 provides a landing page, revenue, and conversion data, the Search Console offers detailed query and page-level insights. Combining the two enables a clearer understanding of how organic traffic contributes to business outcomes and helps to demonstrate SEO’s value more effectively.
So, how do you combine these data points to satisfy the client and demonstrate SEO’s value?
Powering Results: The Ultimate Data Collection Process
At Optidge, we have developed a solution.
Our strategic approach begins with the data collection process, which is meticulous and innovative, designed to uncover actionable insights from a client’s SEO performance.
Using the Search Analytics for Sheets plugin, detailed query, and page data are exported from the Google Search Console and complemented with landing page and revenue data pulled from GA4 acquisition reports. URL parameters are removed, and duplicate pages are consolidated to ensure a clean and accurate analysis, creating a streamlined dataset.
Search queries are then categorized as either branded or non-branded, allowing a deeper understanding of how different types of searches contribute to traffic, engagement, and revenue.
Our structured process pinpoints the impact of specific keywords on business outcomes, allowing for more strategic SEO decisions later on.
Streamlined Data Clean-Up and Powerful Analysis
Once the information has been collected, Optidge’s approach to data analysis involves precision and strategy. It’s designed to extract meaningful insights from complex datasets.
It begins with creating pivot tables to analyze branded versus non-branded clicks for each page, clearly showing how different query types drive traffic. Next, the revenue split between branded and non-branded queries is estimated by aligning it with the click percentages of branded vs. non-branded traffic to each page.

To dive deeper, estimated keyword-level revenue is calculated by attributing a share of page revenue based on each keyword’s click contribution. Throughout the process, we use VLOOKUPs and advanced pivot table techniques in Excel or Google Sheets to combine all the data, creating a unified view that connects keyword performance directly to business outcomes.
Actionable Insights and Strategic SEO reporting
Once we have all of the data, we start our analysis by isolating non-branded traffic to highlight revenue generated from optimized content, showcasing tSEO’s direct impact on business growth. A detailed keyword analysis identifies the most valuable terms driving traffic and conversions page-by-page, enabling further targeted optimizations. To connect SEO efforts to financial outcomes, we calculate the estimated ROI by attributing non-branded revenue to specific optimizations and comparing it against SEO investments.
For e-commerce websites, we delve deeper by comparing the performance of blog posts and product pages to determine which content types generate the highest engagement and revenue. Seasonal trends and data ranges are also analyzed to provide context, ensuring strategies align with user behavior and market fluctuations.
By combining these techniques, Optidge delivers a comprehensive view of SEO effectiveness. It uncovers opportunities for improvement while reflecting both short-term achievements and long-term trends. Our reporting demonstrates value and guides strategic decisions that fuel business growth.
Optidge: Moving Forward with Data-Driven Insights
Danny’s 2024 State of Search presentation emphasized the importance of a data-driven approach to SEO.
The key takeaways are as follows:
- SEO professionals must connect organic traffic to revenue to prove effectiveness.
- Google Analytics 4 presents challenges but is essential for data analysis.
- Using plugins for Google Sheets can enhance data extraction from the Search Console.
- Understanding branded vs. non-branded traffic is crucial for revenue estimation.
- Educated guesses are necessary in the absence of complete data.
- Optimizing product pages based on keyword performance can drive revenue.
- Regularly reviewing data helps in making informed marketing decisions.
- AI’s influence on data accuracy is a growing concern for marketers.
- Seasonality affects e-commerce performance and should be considered in strategies.
- Effective communication of SEO results to clients is vital for agency success.
At Optidge, we prioritize creating reports demonstrating measurable results and unveiling new growth opportunities.
If you’re ready to elevate your SEO strategy and harness the power of data-driven insights, contact Optidge today. For more tips and in-depth discussions on SEO best practices, subscribe to our podcast, The Digital Marketing Mentor. Let us help you turn your SEO challenges into success stories.