SEO has been around for years and has often been a buzzword for businesses investing in digital marketing, but what makes SEO strategies worthwhile?

Many businesses invest in SEO to see Google rankings improve and watch traffic climb month on month, but still struggle to see a similar spike in sales or conversions from their audience, and this is what we call the SEO Revenue Gap.

SEO can be a fantastic branding and awareness tool to have in your business toolbox, but we also need to consider how SEO can push you further, becoming a reliable partner in revenue growth over time.

Therefore, if you want to increase your revenue, not just impressions, we need to rethink how we approach it.

What is the SEO Revenue Gap?

The SEO Revenue Gap is simple to understand, but more complex to overcome. It’s the difference between:

A – Visibility: People finding your website

B – Action: People becoming customers

Of course, businesses need to build visibility to drive those actions further along the user journey, but the problem arises when many businesses focus solely on their visibility goals.

Understanding the Visibility to Revenue Funnel

The visibility to the revenue funnel presents a framework to begin building your strategy around. As you can see, the widest opportunity sits at the top of the funnel, at the visibility stage. This is where you focus on your brand awareness with rankings and impressions across many platforms, such as:

Google organic listings
Review platforms
AI assistants / LLMs
Maps
AI Overviews and other SERP features

This is a great stage for building name recognition and trust with your audience, so that when they find a need for your services or products, your name is already in their mind.

With this in mind, however, it is crucial to remember that this is not where your strategy ends.

To move through the funnel to the engagement and revenue stages, you need to broaden your approach to move customers through their journey, building interest and engagement until they reach a decision or action stage, this is where we close the all-important revenue gap.

Keeping up with Keyword Types to Drive Revenue

If you want SEO to drive revenue, not just traffic, you need to match your keywords to where people sit in the funnel.

Not every search is equal. Some people are just looking for answers. Others are ready to buy.

Here’s how the four core keyword types map directly to the journey from visibility to revenue.

Informational keywords (Visibility stage): These are top-of-funnel searches where people are researching, learning, or trying to understand a problem. These types of keywords are a great place to start to build traffic, authority, and brand awareness for your business. However, they serve as a gathering point for your audience, ready to guide them further down the funnel.

For example:

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How does SEO increase revenue?

Navigational keywords (Engagement stage): At this stage, users are comparing options or returning to something they’ve already seen. Your job is to make it easy for them to stay, explore, and move forward. You’ll find that navigational keywords are a great way to measure your brand’s reach, understanding how many people turn to you when they have a problem to solve.

Examples include:

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HubSpot CRM pricing
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Commercial keywords (Enquiry stage): This is very similar to the action and revenue stage, as users making these searches are ready to take their first tangible steps towards making a decision. These users are actively researching solutions.

For example:

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Sheffield digital marketing cost
SEO cost UK

Transactional keywords (Opportunity / Revenue stage): These searchers should be the end goal of every SEO business strategy, representing the bottom of the funnel where users are ready to act. These keywords might have lower volume, but they carry the highest commercial intent. If you want SEO revenue, this is where the real impact happens.

Examples include:

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Sheffield SEO agency
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To build a well-rounded SEO strategy that builds revenue, not just awareness, you need to be targeting the full spectrum of keywords, connecting the dots between the funnel stages and building stronger leads in SEO.

Final Tips for Building SEO Revenue

Before we let you go, here are a few tips to consider when building an SEO strategy with revenue in mind.

• Understand your top-of-funnel traffic:

Investing time into understanding your starting point in informational searches is a solid way to understand your current strategic strengths and areas for improvement. Use tools like GA4 and Google Search Console to understand which keywords you are currently ranking for and gaining traffic through, and which pages they are driving traffic to. This will give you a broader picture of where in the visibility to revenue funnel your users are currently sitting.

• Keep the journey in mind:

Clear CTA features on every page are important to maintain the user journey. Although we would like them to be, user journeys are not always linear, and users may return to an informational or enquiry-centred page. This means you must always be prepared to capture that conversion on any page.

• Invest in commercial and transactional pages:

To ensure you are defending your branded and bottom-funnel search terms, invest in building strong pricing, product comparison, and location pages that meet the needs of your users, making that decision stage as simple and clear as possible.

If you are looking to invest in SEO for the first time, or you are looking to start seeing real results, why not book a free consultation with Dialled In? Our team of digital marketing experts is on hand to help you achieve your business goals for 2016.

Read more about SEO strategy to build your online visibility:

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