Measuring SEO ROI: from enquiry to closed deal

The number of SEO visits it takes to win one order differs for every business, so there is no general figure. An example from one seopaslaugos.io client's e-shop: every 81st visit from SEO became an order, while other channels needed 167 visits. Another business will have a different ratio, so it is worth calculating from the business's own GA4 data. More anonymised client cases are published on the SEO results page.

Cost per enquiry and cost per closed deal in SEO differ in the denominator: cost per enquiry is the SEO cost for the period divided by enquiries from organic search, and cost per closed deal is the same cost divided by the deals closed from those enquiries. For a service business cost per enquiry does not show SEO ROI, because the number of potential enquiries shows the volume of contacts, not confirmed deals.

A potential enquiry from SEO is a phone click, email click, phone-number copy or form submission recorded in GA4. A service business closes a deal by phone or email rather than in a website basket, so the enquiry becomes a closed deal only after the contact.

SEO ROI turns positive in the month when net revenue from the SEO campaign exceeds the spend on that campaign. First Page Sage, using its own campaign data from Q1 2021 to Q3 2025, reports positive SEO ROI over a 6–12 month period. In seopaslaugos.io's experience larger enquiry volumes arrive over 2–12 months, depending on competition and the state of the current website.

GA4 fails to record some SEO orders for two reasons: the visitor declines cookies, or the visitor does not return to the site from the payment provider. Events from a visitor who declines consent are not associated with a persistent user identifier, and behavioural modelling only applies once the property collects at least a thousand events per day without consent for at least 7 days. The payment provider's domain can be listed in GA4 as an unwanted referral. Real e-shop revenue from SEO is therefore usually higher than GA4 shows.

Yes, GA4 can count the same SEO order twice when the purchase event is sent without a unique transaction ID. GA4 removes duplicate purchases only when they share the same transaction ID, and only in web streams, not app streams. When the ID is empty, GA4 merges all such purchases into one.

For SEO ROI, GA4 offers three attribution models: data-driven attribution, paid and organic last click, and Google paid channels last click. The first click, linear, time decay and position-based models are no longer available as of November 2023. All models exclude direct visits from attribution credit, unless the path to the key event consists only of direct visits.

No, 748% is not the average SEO ROI. First Page Sage publishes this SEO ROI figure for one of its own service types (thought leadership and SEO), based on its campaign data from 2021 to 2025 and a three-year average. A business's own SEO ROI depends on its margin, job value and SEO cost, so it has to be calculated from its own data.

Yes, for service businesses seopaslaugos.io offers a model in which the business pays an agreed share of closed deals only, while seopaslaugos.io builds and ranks websites in the business's niche at its own cost. The no-retainer partnership page explains how it works.