One of the most common questions we hear from clients is: “What’s the ROI of SEO?” It’s a fair question. Every business wants to know where their money is going and what they’re getting in return. The challenge with SEO, however, is that it doesn’t behave like paid advertising, direct mail, or other short-term marketing tactics, where you can draw a straight line between spend and immediate revenue. SEO is different. In fact, the best way to understand SEO is to think of it like exercise.
Exercise isn’t something you do once and immediately see permanent results. It’s a long-term discipline. It’s preventative. It’s cumulative. And when you stop doing it, the consequences don’t show up overnight, but over time your performance declines. SEO works in much the same way.
SEO as a Best Practice, Not a Switch You Flip
SEO is not a campaign. It’s not a one-time project. It’s a best practice, something that should be built into how your website is structured, how your content is created, and how your brand shows up online.
Think about exercise. You don’t “finish” exercising. There’s no point where you can say, “Great, I’m done forever.” Instead, exercise becomes part of a lifestyle. The goal isn’t just to look good for a week; it’s to keep your body functioning properly over time. SEO works exactly the same way for a website.
Search engines are constantly evolving. User behavior changes. Competitors publish new content. Algorithms update. If you stop doing SEO, your site doesn’t stay frozen in time, it slowly falls behind. The businesses that continue to optimize, improve, and adapt are the ones that maintain visibility and performance.
Metabolism and Websites: A Powerful Parallel
Let’s extend the analogy further.
Your metabolism determines how efficiently your body converts food into energy. When your metabolism is healthy and supported by regular exercise, your body uses nutrients effectively. You also have more energy, better endurance, and better overall performance.
When you don’t exercise, your metabolism slows down. Your body becomes less efficient. Food that could have been converted into energy is instead stored as fat. Over time, this leads to weight gain, sluggishness, and reduced performance.
Now replace “body” with “website” and “food” with “traffic.”
Your website’s “metabolism” is its ability to convert visitors into leads, subscribers, and customers. SEO plays a huge role in keeping that metabolism healthy.
When SEO is done well:
- Your site loads faster
- Your content aligns with user intent
- Your pages are easy to navigate
- Search engines understand what your site is about
- Visitors find what they’re looking for quickly
The result? Traffic gets converted into action…conversions.
When SEO is ignored:
- Pages become outdated
- Technical issues accumulate
- Content no longer matches search intent
- Competitors outrank you
- Users get frustrated and leave
Just like an inactive body, the website still receives “calories” (traffic), but it doesn’t convert that energy efficiently. Visitors come in and leave without doing anything. Traffic turns into “fat,” not fuel.
Why SEO ROI Is Hard to Measure Directly
Another similarity between exercise and SEO is how difficult it is to attribute results to a single action.
If you start exercising today and feel better three months from now, what caused it?
- The cardio?
- The strength training?
- Better sleep?
- Healthier eating?
- Consistency?
It’s the combination that matters.
SEO works the same way. Rankings improve not because of one blog post or one technical fix, but because dozens (or hundreds) of small, correct decisions compounded over time. That makes the ROI of SEO harder to isolate, but not less real.
Some of the challenges in quantifying SEO ROI include:
- Delayed impact: SEO improvements often take weeks or months to show results.
- Attribution complexity: Users may find you via organic search, leave, return later via email or direct traffic, and then convert.
- Assisted conversions: SEO may introduce the brand, even if the final conversion happens through another channel.
- Defensive value: SEO protects existing traffic from erosion rather than always generating “new” gains.
Just like exercise, the value is often most visible when it’s missing.
What Happens When You Stop Doing SEO
Many businesses don’t realize the benefits of SEO until they stop investing in it.
At first, nothing changes. Results are good. Rankings hold. Traffic looks stable. Leads continue to come in. This is similar to someone stopping exercise for a few weeks. There’s no immediate collapse and everything seems fine.
But over time:
- Competitors publish fresher content
- Google favors faster, more optimized pages
- Technical debt builds up
- Keyword rankings slip from page one to page two
- Click-through rates drop
Eventually, the decline becomes noticeable. Traffic decreases. Lead volume shrinks. Paid advertising has to work harder (and cost more) to compensate.
At that point, restarting SEO is like getting back into shape after years of inactivity. It’s possible, but it’s harder, slower, and more expensive than maintaining consistency in the first place.
SEO Improves Efficiency Across All Channels
Another overlooked benefit of SEO is that it doesn’t just impact organic search. It improves the effectiveness of everything else.
When SEO is done correctly:
- Paid ads convert better because landing pages are optimized
- Content performs better on social media
- Email campaigns send users to faster, clearer pages
- Brand trust increases because users recognize you from search results
Exercise does a lot more than help you run faster, it improves posture, sleep quality, mental health, and resilience. SEO works the same way. It strengthens the entire digital ecosystem of your website and SERP presence, not just rankings.
Blogging is a big piece of this puzzle. Blogging serves many purposes: It increases the time on site, it gives you the opportunity to set your business up as the expert in your industry, it helps with branding, it feeds the search engines with content, it provides opportunities to link to other content on your site, it improves visibility on Google’s AI Overviews, ChatGPT and other LLMs, and you can share it on social media. Most of all, it improves the overall performance of your website.
SEO Is Preventative, Not Just Growth-Oriented
One of the most important mindset shifts for clients is understanding that SEO is as much about prevention as it is about growth.
Exercise helps prevent:
- Chronic illness
- Injuries
- Fatigue
- Declining mobility
SEO helps prevent:
- Loss of search visibility
- Dependence on paid ads
- Poor user experience
- Falling behind competitors
You may not “feel” these benefits every day, but they protect the business long-term. And just like health, prevention is far cheaper than recovery.
The Compounding Effect of Consistency
Perhaps the strongest similarity between SEO and exercise is compounding.
- A single workout doesn’t change your body.
- A single SEO fix doesn’t change your business.
- But consistent effort over time produces exponential results.
- Content builds authority.
- Links build credibility.
- Technical improvements reduce friction.
- Brand searches increase.
- Trust compounds.
After a while, SEO starts working even when you’re not actively pushing it, just like a fit body burns calories more efficiently at rest.
Final Thought: SEO Is Invisible Until It Isn’t
SEO, like exercise, often suffers from a perception problem. When it’s working, it’s invisible. When it’s neglected, the damage becomes obvious.
You don’t exercise because you expect immediate results tomorrow. You exercise because you understand that a healthy body performs better, adapts faster, and lasts longer.
SEO is the same. It keeps your website agile, efficient, and competitive. It ensures that traffic becomes energy—not wasted potential. And while the ROI may not always fit neatly into a spreadsheet, its absence is always measurable in the long run.
In short, SEO isn’t optional maintenance. It’s fundamental fitness for your digital presence.
Interested in learning more about Wildfire’s SEO services? Contact us today!
