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How Organic Search Marketing (SEO) Fits Into the Marketing Funnel, and How Triple Whale Helps Identify SEO’s Impact

How Organic Search Marketing (SEO) Fits Into the Marketing Funnel, and How Triple Whale Helps Identify SEO’s Impact

Search engine optimization (SEO) is an organic marketing channel that amplifies your brand’s visibility online. SEO involves a range of tactics, from keyword research and content creation to technical optimizations and link building to ensure your site is accessible and optimized for search engines. 

As with any marketing channel, access to clear results and analytics is essential for refining and improving your SEO marketing efforts. Unfortunately, measuring the specific ROI of your organic marketing efforts can be difficult without the right tools, especially with how unreliable Google Analytics has become over the past few months. After a migration to GA4 that felt forced and sometimes needless changing of metrics like the recent shift from conversions to ‘key events’, people are more frequently looking for a GA4 alternative.

Let’s take a closer look at SEO’s role in the marketing funnel and how to measure the results of your organic marketing efforts to optimize your brand’s reach. 

What Is the Marketing Funnel?

The marketing funnel outlines various stages of the customer buying journey, ranking them based on readiness to buy. From a customer’s initial discovery of a brand to making the decision to purchase from that brand, understanding where your customers are in the funnel and how your marketing channels impact your customer’s journey is crucial to supporting consumer engagement and increasing lifetime customer value. 

How Does Organic Search Marketing Fit Into the Marketing Funnel?

Where does SEO fit in this funnel? SEO can have an impact on every stage of the marketing funnel, but its primary role is in top of funnel acquisition in a non-branded capacity. In other words, it helps build brand awareness, spreading your products and services to reach new customers and gain wider visibility. For example, when your potential customers search for information regarding their problems or needs (not necessarily your brand name), SEO is what helps your brand rank at the top of their search engine results.  

white text/graphic on dark blue background: graphic of a search bar featuring text: "is my SEO good?"

Measuring the Success of Organic Search Marketing

Measuring the results of any marketing channel is crucial for tracking progress, understanding where to refine and improve, and making performance-driven decisions for your brand. This is especially true if you’re running multiple SEO campaigns across your sales funnel and want to know which campaigns drive the most revenue and which aren’t as effective. 

Because SEO primarily excels at top of funnel acquisition and brand awareness, it’s difficult to measure a tangible return on investment. It may take months after initially discovering your brand for a new customer to decide to purchase your product or sign up for your service. It’s much easier to track your middle and bottom of funnel marketing efforts. 

Limitations of Free Analytical Tools

Free tools like Google Analytics 4 (GA4) and Google Search Console provide basic insights into website performance and search visibility. However, these tools have significant gaps in tracking the complete customer journey and attributing revenue to specific SEO activities. For example, GA4’s focus on user privacy and data aggregation limits its ability to track individual user paths through a funnel, making it difficult to determine the precise contribution of SEO to sales. As we move further into a cookieless future, Google Analytics and Search Console will be less and less helpful as tools to understand the real value of the organic search channel. 

The Need for Advanced Attribution Models

Free tools often provide simplistic models that fail to capture the complex interactions of multiple marketing efforts over various channels. Effective measurement of SEO requires advanced attribution models that can allocate revenue to specific touchpoints accurately, like Triple Whale

white graphics on dark blue background: search icon/magnifying glass in repeating pattern with triple whale logo in the middle

How To Integrate Triple Whale with Your SEO Efforts 

Triple Whale is a multi-touch attribution tool that fills these gaps by offering sophisticated attribution capabilities that allow for a more nuanced understanding of how each SEO effort contributes to revenue. 

It displays metrics like bounce rate, add to cart %, session duration, pages per session, conversion rate, and a handful of other metrics significantly more easily than GA4 and other free analytics tools. Plus, in one easy dashboard view with native integrations and automated reports you can keep everyone on your team in the loop, from the founders and media buyers to the marketing managers.

Integrating Triple Whale with Existing SEO Strategies

1. Audit Current SEO Performance

Begin by conducting a thorough audit of your current SEO efforts. This includes analyzing keyword rankings, content effectiveness, backlink quality, and existing traffic metrics. Use Triple Whale to establish baseline metrics for current SEO activities.

2. Set Up Triple Whale Tracking

Implement Triple Whale’s tracking tools to monitor specific SEO-driven interactions. This might involve tagging certain pages, setting up event tracking for downloads or sign-ups, and configuring goals that align with key SEO objectives.

3. Identify High-Performance Areas

Use Triple Whale’s analytics to pinpoint which aspects of your SEO strategy are performing well. This could be certain keywords that drive a lot of traffic, content pieces that have exceptional engagement, or specific SEO tactics that lead to conversions.

4. Optimize Based on Data

With clear data on what works, focus on optimizing these high-performing areas. Adjust your content strategy to produce more content similar to what has been successful, refine your keyword strategy around high-conversion terms, and strengthen your backlink profile where it shows the most impact.

5. Continuous Monitoring and Adjustment

SEO is an ongoing process. Regularly review the data provided by Triple Whale to continually refine and adjust your strategy. Look for trends or shifts in performance that might indicate new opportunities or areas for improvement.

Integrating Triple Whale with New SEO Strategies

1. Define SEO Goals

Clearly define what you aim to achieve with your new SEO strategy. This could include goals such as increasing organic traffic by a certain percentage, improving the ranking of specific keywords, or boosting conversion rates from organic search traffic.

2. Configure Triple Whale for New Metrics

Set up Triple Whale to track these new goals from the outset. This involves configuring the analytics to monitor the performance of new keywords, content types, and SEO tactics that you plan to implement.

3. Implement and Track

As you roll out new SEO elements—be it on-page optimizations, new content, or link-building campaigns—use Triple Whale to track their performance from day one. This helps in quickly understanding the impact of new strategies and making fast pivots when necessary.

4. Analyze and Refine

Use the data coming in to analyze how different components of your new SEO strategy are contributing to your goals. Triple Whale’s detailed analytics can help you understand user behavior and conversion pathways, allowing you to fine-tune your efforts based on actual performance.

5. Scale Successful Tactics

Once you identify what’s working, scale these tactics. Increase the scope of successful keywords, invest more in types of content that are performing well, and replicate successful SEO practices across different parts of your site or in other campaigns.

white logos on dark blue background featuring GR0 agency logo, Triple Whale logo, and search icon (magnifying glass)

How GR0 Partners with Triple Whale To Optimize and Enhance SEO Efforts for Maximum Results

Building on this data-driven foundation, GR0 uses Triple Whale to enhance its SEO services. By leveraging the robust analytics and tracking capabilities of Triple Whale, GR0 can accurately assess the performance of various SEO tactics employed across different campaigns and identify key opportunities and challenges within the SEO landscape.

With this data, GR0’s marketing experts are able to implement targeted interventions that are tailored to drive substantial improvements in organic search performance. This includes optimizing keyword strategies and content based on insights gathered from Triple Whale while also refining technical SEO elements and link-building initiatives to enhance overall site authority and search visibility.

By closely monitoring the effectiveness of these strategies through Triple Whale’s analytics, GR0 ensures that each SEO campaign is aligned with their client’s business objectives and adaptable to the ever-evolving dynamics of search algorithms and market trends. 

Optimize Your Brand’s Organic Search Marketing and Meet Your Customer at Every Stage of the Buying Journey with Triple Whale

Multi-touch attribution tools like Triple Whale break through the limitations of traditional SEO metrics, directly linking organic search efforts to revenue generation. Through a strategic partnership with SEO leaders like GR0, Triple Whale empowers marketers to enhance their organic search initiatives, optimizing every stage of the marketing funnel for maximum impact and profitability. 

Want to discover how Triple Whale can help you unlock the power of data?

Book a free demo today!  

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