SEO Isn't Free. It's Just Non-Paid. Attribution Still Screws Us.
Attribution killed SEO long before AI got its hands dirty.
Thanks to this week's sponsor: AirOps.comIf I hear ‘SEO is free traffic’ one more time, I’m throwing a chair.
As an industry, we need to set the record straight: free and non-paid aren’t the same.
Free means you get something without investing meaningful time, money, or effort.
SEO? That’s not free.
Paid efforts drive non-paid performance; this includes your time, tools, and strategy. All in the attempt to capture demand through organic channels.
This might seem obvious, but we keep letting it slide. That ends here.
Because the real issue isn’t effort, it’s attribution.
No attribution = no credit.
No credit = no budget.
This week’s #SEOForLunch is sponsored by AirOps.
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Learn more about Content Refresh for SEO and AEO with Kevin Indig on June 5th.
The problem: SEO gets screwed by default
Most marketing teams aren’t evil. They’re just lazy when it comes to measurement.
They track what’s easy, not what’s necessarily accurate. And in a dashboard-driven, budget-tight economy, easy wins every time.
Paid channels get the royal treatment:
UTMs? Always.
Attribution? Favored in nearly every model.
Reporting? Real-time.
Results? Overstated.
Meanwhile, SEO lives in the gray area:
People discover the brand through organic, but convert later via email or PPC.
SEO builds trust, authority, and familiarity—the elusive “halo effect” everyone loves to reference but no one knows how to quantify.
Unless someone converts directly from a landing page, SEO gets wiped from the customer journey.
(Cue the ask, “Why do we even invest in content? It doesn’t generate revenue!”)
The result?
Leadership is slammed. 30 things fighting for his or her attention at all times.
They look at dashboards, see paid search showing a 4:1 ROAS, and do the obvious thing:
Double down on what looks like it’s printing money.
Meanwhile, SEO becomes background noise. Not because it doesn’t work, but because we, as SEOs, haven’t made it easy to see and understand the ROI.
That’s the real issue: not a lack of impact, but a lack of measurement.
And when you can’t prove value, you don’t get credit.
Which means when the budget cuts come… and they always do…
SEO is first on the chopping block.
Raise your hand if this sounds familiar… no?
Yeah, not me either (never…) 🫣
The consequences: Lazy measurement hurts us
Here’s where it gets even worse: We don’t just suffer from attribution problems, but have accepted them as an industry.
SEOs don’t push hard enough for better reporting. We vent in Slack. We write about “the long game.” But when is the time to show the results? Crickets.
And leadership doesn’t have time to decode our reports.
So leadership ignores us.
And when the business tightens its belt?
Budget cuts hit SEO first.
Team reductions start with the “non-revenue-driving” folks.
Someone inevitably says, “Let’s pause SEO for now and focus on performance marketing.”
(Hit you right in the feels? Yeah… me too.)
All Because We Struggle To Quantify Value.
That “halo effect” we love to reference? It becomes an excuse to justify our work, but it is rarely backed up with data.
Leadership rarely cares about good intentions. They care about results, and results only count when they're measurable.
They’ll assume it isn’t there if we can't show it.
And honestly? That’s on us.
(Deep breath. I know. I’m not getting a Christmas card this year. It’s fine.)
The Opportunity: It’s On Us To Do Better
I’m not just pointing fingers. I need to do better, too.
We may never get full buy-in for a perfectly customized attribution model that treats non-paid efforts fairly. But that doesn’t mean we’re off the hook.
We must get creative and show the data, even if it’s messy, directional, or incomplete.
“Cool rant, Nick. But what are YOU doing?”
Fair. I’d be asking that, too, if I made it this far into another newsletter.
Here’s one thing I did recently with a client. My NDA is tighter than a Google employee’s lips during an algorithm leak, but I’ll share the concept.
We finally got buy-in to invest in editorial content.
Traffic? Immediate.
Revenue? Looked… bad.
Cue the “we don’t know if we can justify the budget” speech.
So we got creative.
“Trust Me, Bro” Isn’t a Strategy
I worked directly with their analytics team to answer two simple questions:
How many first-time users visited the site via the blog, then returned (likely through another channel) and converted at checkout?
How often did a site session include at least one blog view AND converted at checkout?
Now, I can’t share the exact setup, but the point is that we built a way to answer these questions. You won’t get this data from standard GA or Adobe models.
The result?
We were able to quantify the blog’s real monetary contribution.
And not just from first touch landing blog page sessions.
The number? 4–5x higher than what traditional attribution showed.
Perfect math? Nope.
Strong enough to grab leadership’s attention?
You betcha!! (Cue the Minnesota memes. Leave me alone.)
Final POV: Stop Letting Attribution Hide Your Impact
Let’s be honest, this example does not show incremental growth.
It’s not pure lift.
It’s “rob Peter to pay Paul.”
But in a world where paid media gets the benefit of the doubt?
I will play the game if it gets SEO a seat at the grown-ups’ table.
Because here’s the truth:
No one’s coming to rescue your budget. You need to prove it (or lose it.)
SEO is a compounding channel. It builds momentum.
It builds brand. It builds trust.
But none of that matters if leadership doesn’t understand what’s being built…or worse, if they never see the ROI within the data!
So stop hiding behind phrases like “it’s a long game” or the infamous “halo effect.”
Start getting creative with measuring, packaging, and communicating the value of your SEO initiatives.
Because if you don’t advocate for your channel’s performance,
someone else will gladly step in to promote theirs…
…and they’ll probably be holding a paid media deck.