AI & SEO-Driven Content Marketing: How To Calculate True ROI for B2B Companies in 2025

Delve into AI Overviews that assist in connecting your SEO initiatives to tangible revenue impacts and enhance your marketing strategies.

How do you calculate the true cost of SEO content production ?

Are you overspending or underspending on SEO compared to its performance?

Can you connect SEO-driven awareness to pipeline growth and revenue generation?

How do you make SEO efforts more visible to your C-suite?

If you aren’t sure, that’s okay.

You may simply lack the tools to measure the actual impact of SEO on revenue.

So, let’s dive in and:

• Break down the true steps to B2B conversion.
• Highlight the tools to calculate the true SEO ROI (Return on Investment) of your SEO-driven content in 2025.
• Look past the simplified first and last-touch approach to multi-touch attribution.
• Leverage the need for multi-touch solutions that track engagement with SEO content throughout the buyer journey.

Can I Connect SEO To Revenue?

Yes, you can connect SEO to revenue.

Why Should I Connect SEO To Revenue?

SEO plays a large role in future conversions.

In fact, SEO helps prospects discover your brand, tool, or company.

SEO also provides easy-to-discover content with informational intent, which helps nurture a prospective lead into a sale.

Your prospect’s journey:

• Starts at the first time they find your optimized webpage on the search engine results page (SERP) .
• Moves into nurture, where your B2B prospects typically perform months of extensive product research via traditional searches and AI tools before a sale is closed.

The fact that informative content is found on SERPs is due to SEO .

But how is this tracked? How do you know which non-conversion pages are:

Part of the user journey?

Part of the overall SEO ROI ?

How Do I Tie SEO To Company Revenue?

Luckily, your C-suite likely recognizes the need for SEO content.

They are prepared to invest in a strategy incorporating AI search .

However, you need tools that validate the SEO investment and clearly showcase it for your higher-ups.

How To Keep Revenue High When SERPs Are Changing

Gartner predicts that traditional search engine volume will drop 25% by 2026 and flow directly to AI chatbots and agents.

As AI continues to accelerate the evolution of SEO , it’s critical to ensure that high-performing pages:

• Continue to rank in traditional SERPs.
• Appear in Google’s AI Overviews.
• Get referenced by the Gen AI tools your audience relies on.
• Are tracked, so these visits are attributed to a sale.

That’s why you need to understand why certain content is picked up by AI tools and the cost of generating the content to calculate the true SEO ROI .

Step 1. How To Create Content That Gets Seen In Traditional Search & AI Overviews

With the shift in consumer search behavior, your first step is to create, optimize, and measure the ROI of content sourced by leading AI tools.

That means appearing in AI Overviews and AI Answers that contain list-based content and product comparisons.

Search Your Brand & See What Each AI Tool Recommends

That’s the first step to determining whether your content or your competitor’s stands out.

Try these prompts:

• What is the best solution for…
• Give me the top tools for…
• Best alternative to…
• Is [competitor] solution better than…

Optimize Your Existing Content & Strategy To Feed AI’s Answer Base

The next step is optimizing existing content and adjusting your strategy so that you write copy that gives AI the answers it’s looking for.

Traditional SEO strategies championed by Google remain effective.

Just like traditional search, AI tools also favor:

• Proper site and article structure with explicit metadata and semantic markup.
• Content with lists and bullet points that are easier to scan.
• Websites optimized for speed.
• Updated content, keeping things fresh with context.
• Content with backlinks from high-quality publications.
• FAQ sections.
• Mobile-responsive websites with indexable content when pulling sources to provide an answer.

These factors give your content more authority in your industry, just like the content outside your website that Google and LLMs look for to find answers from, such as videos on YouTube, reviews on G2, and conversations on Reddit forums.

Producing enough quality content for all those channels to optimize for AI and be visible in traditional search is no small task. It requires substantial human resources, SEO tools , and time.

Step 2. Grasp All Facets Of The Genuine Cost Of SEO Content In 2025

SEO is a long-term commitment, particularly in B2B marketing, where the journey from the initial click to purchase can stretch over weeks or months and involve multiple touchpoints.

Now, with AI tools shaping how content is discovered, the cost of executing effective SEO has risen.

To precisely evaluate the cost of SEO-driven content in 2025, it’s essential to look beyond production budgets and organic traffic figures.

Break Down Your True SEO Investment

Begin by pinpointing all resources involved in content creation and upkeep:

• People: Writers, designers, SEOs, developers, and editors.
• Tools: SEO platforms, content optimization tools, keyword research databases, analytics software.
• Distribution: Paid support for SEO content, social promotion, and email newsletters.
• Maintenance: Refreshing outdated content, updating links, and enhancing page experience.

Monitor Content Performance Over Time

Track the performance of every piece of content using more than just rankings:

• Organic traffic (from both traditional search and AI surfaces).
• Time on page and engagement metrics.
• Cost per lead and pipeline contribution (if feasible).
• Assisted conversions across all touchpoints.

Map Content To Buyer Journey Stages

Content doesn’t merely convert; it nurtures. Align content assets with specific stages:

• Top-of-funnel (education, discovery).
• Mid-funnel (comparison, product evaluation).
• Bottom-of-funnel (case studies, demos).

Even if content isn’t the final touchpoint, it still plays a vital role. Traditional tools often overlook this.

Adjust, Monitor & Pivot

No single metric will reveal the complete picture. Instead:

• Adjust: Re-optimize content based on AI overview visibility, CTR, and engagement.
• Monitor: Observe how users arrive via search versus AI sources.
• Pivot: Allocate more resources to formats and topics that gain traction among both human and AI audiences.

Without full-funnel multi-touch attribution , even highly engaging content may appear as a cost center rather than a revenue driver .

That’s why precise measurement, aligned with total investment and the entire buyer journey , is crucial for understanding the true SEO ROI of your content in 2025.

However, we recognize that:

• AI Overviews and similar answer engines significantly influence education and nurturing.
• Attributing a sale to content consumed via an untrackable AI Overview is impossible, yet it’s happening.

This is where the calculation becomes challenging.

Step 3. Integrate Multi-Touch Attribution Into Your Revenue Calculations

Now that we’re here, you’re starting to grasp how challenging it is to tie ROI to AI Overview responses that nurture your prospects.

How do you accurately determine the cost?

Some teams are developing their own attribution models to calculate ROI .

Most, however, are relying on tools specifically designed for this new type of calculation.

The only way to precisely calculate costs in B2B SEO is to capture engagement with content throughout the buyer journey , which conventional attribution models fail to credit.

Address These Blind Spots: Pre-Acquisition & The Post-Lead Journey

A significant blind spot in SEO measurement arises when companies focus solely on pre-acquisition activities—everything that happens before a lead enters your CRM.

Consider the typical journey enterprise clients take in an account-based marketing approach:

• After multiple organic searches, a prospect converts into a lead via direct traffic.
• Once qualified as an SQL, they’re added to an email sequence they don’t respond to but later return through a Google Ads campaign promoting a white paper.
• They download it from an organic search visit and continue reading more blog articles to understand your product and the outcomes they hope to achieve.

Can your marketing team track how each channel (direct, paid search, and organic) influenced the deal throughout the sales process?

Multi-touch attribution tools enable marketers to finally link SEO content to tangible business outcomes by tracking which SEO-driven content leads interacted with before making a purchase.

True Value of SEO-Driven Content Marketing

SEO is more than just ranking on Google; it’s about driving impactful engagement with quality content referenced across the multiple search tools buyers use. Heeet tracks which content prospects engage with and ties it directly to revenue outcomes, providing marketing and sales teams with critical insights that propel them forward. With our Google Search Console integration, we’re helping marketers consolidate more data into Salesforce to gain a unified view of their content performance in one place and connect search intents with business outcomes (leads, converted leads, revenue , etc.). This empowers marketers to align ranking position with search intent and revenue , enhancing content strategy and tracking performance over time.

From SEO to events, paid ads , social organic, AI referrals , webinars, and social ads, Heeet helps uncover the real performance of your marketing efforts and turns revenue data into actionable insights.