For years, Search engine optimization (SEO) has been a bit of a notorious digital game of throwing everything against the wall to see what stuck. Even when web traffic was successfully increased to the targeted websites, it was difficult to nail down precisely what produced the truly highest quality results for clients. In other words, it was a challenge to connect exactly what SEO tactics most efficiently created new paying customers.

No single company is the same and no customer base is alike, so brands were not being evenly served by the one-size-fits-all SEO practices that were prevalent over the past decade. This meant that determining a return on investment (ROI) – you know, that thing every business on the planet obsesses over – often could not be calculated to a satisfying degree of accuracy. To this day, many business owners believe it is not possible to calculate ROI with SEO… But we are here to tell you that it is not only possible, but at this point in time it should be expected.

The good news is the 2010s are history. Simply put, the 2020s are ushering in a new era of SEO that can better measure ROI. With such advancements, businesses can now laser focus their investments in arenas that actually widens their clientele. In addition, companies can reinvest with precision in marketing campaigns that prove to bring the returns they were originally expected. This is something of a seismic shift in how SEO is offered and delivered. There is one word that sums up what savvy internet marketers can now offer clients both large and small: transparency. And as a business owner, you should expect nothing less.

SEO has changed significantly since Dymic was born almost a decade ago, but the most impressive and impactful update to this invaluable high-tech strategy is the rise of analytical platforms. Analytics allows us to aggregate, organize, and analyze this deluge of data from numerous sources in a way that provides usable metrics. These new digital tools inform and guide marketers and their clients in ways today that seemed impossible only a few years back.

Digital marketers today can sync Google Analytics, Facebook Insights, Google Adwords/PPC, review tracking, conversion tracking and more to thoroughly understand what works and how. By determining precisely the cost per conversion, and knowing what a company’s average customer spends, we can begin to determine whether or not a marketing campaign is producing ROI. Getting more granular, tracking techniques today can even show the name of the person or business who called, which can be traced to a sale by the business. When marketers utilize a solid analytics platform that feeds all of this valuable data into one place, they can also add marketing automation into the picture and integrate that with a client’s customer relationship management system (CRM). Once you really start to dial all of this in, the resulting transparency can be mind blowing.

All of these possibilities have really illuminated how truly effective and essential SEO is for a company’s overall health on the internet. A diversified SEO campaign, in particular, can be very profitable because of its power to produce and maintain organic rankings over long stretches of time. Many companies rely on pay per click (PPC) campaigns to generate leads, but this can prove to be quite expensive in the long run as rates increase due to rise in competition and as demand grows. Furthermore, people know that just about anyone can simply pay for an ad. When you compare PPC ads to a website being recommended organically by Google, it’s no surprise that buyers trust the naturally listed brands more and transitionally covert better… This distinction can make all the difference.

I think transparency is always a good thing between partners. And internet marketers and their clients are partners, working together for a common goal: to maximize profits and serve their respective clientele to the best of their ability. For too many years, marketers have been unable, or unwilling, to show their clients exactly what SEO tactics are working, how they are working, and at what level they are working. This fundamental lack of transparency has, unfortunately, negatively characterized much of the digital marketing community over the years. As such, this has led to a general sense of distrust among companies seeking help with their online businesses. Although many in the internet marketing sector largely earned this bad reputation, there is no reason it cannot be put to rest moving forward.

Search engine optimization has seen its fair share of ups and downs over the years, yet it has nonetheless proven itself time & time again to be of the most impactful marketing tools available to help businesses find and maintain online success. Fortunately, SEO has blossomed into an indispensably powerful process that does not merely guide web traffic in the right direction, but it also tells a detailed story of what customers want and need while navigating the internet. Through robust and widely integrated analytics platforms, digital marketers today can track consumers’ actions in ways never before thought possible. Clients can see for themselves what investments are worth their time and money, and what can and should be reinvested elsewhere. This new reality is a paradigm shift in agency/client relations. And this newfound clarity in SEO can only be a good thing for everyone, from here on out.