I'm finally in a position to push for a dedicated SEO budget at my B2B SaaS company. We have around 50k monthly organic visits.
Ahrefs is the obvious candidate, but I need to build a solid case. I see the features, but the price tag is significant for us. How are you all actually quantifying the return?
I'm curious about real-world KPIs beyond "more traffic." For those who have justified it, what did you track? Was it purely organic growth, or did you factor in things like link building efficiency or content gap analysis saving research time?
~ Jenny
Learning every day
Great question. We recently went through a similar justification process, and we looked at it in terms of time saved and opportunity cost.
Beyond tracking organic growth, we quantified the time saved in keyword research and backlink analysis. Our content team estimated that using Ahrefs for content gap analysis cut their research phase per article by about 3 hours. That time could be redirected into production. For link building, it made prospecting much more efficient, which we measured by the increase in quality pitches sent per week.
I'm curious, though, for those who have also evaluated Semrush in a similar situation. How did the ROI calculation differ between the two, especially regarding the accuracy of their keyword difficulty scores or site audit features? That comparison often seems to tip the scale.