The SEO Go/No-Go Investment Test
SEO is not free. Price it fully, then compare it against every other growth channel.
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Time to result
- ~weeks to results
- Steps
- 3
- Confidence
- 94%
Most companies default into SEO because they raised money and 'everyone does SEO'. Schwartz insists on treating it as one funded product bet among four growth engines (SEO, paid, virality, sales) and killing it explicitly when the buyer journey does not run through search. The test has three gates: is there a search journey at all, what is the fully-loaded cost, and would the same money return faster elsewhere.
Origin
Eli Schwartz, formed from repeated client engagements — Mixpanel (where textbook SEO simply did not convert), a Google Cloud interview loop, and a gardening SaaS whose entire customer base came from trade-show booths.
Core principles
- 01SEO is a channel investment, not a birthright of having a marketing team.
- 02The disqualifier is not 'nobody searches' — it is 'nobody would ever buy from that search'.
- 03Fully-loaded cost = agency or headcount + CMS + engineering + design + content.
- 04The question is not 'will SEO eventually pay back?' but 'will it pay back sooner than the alternative use of the same money?'
- 05Nobody says 'I just raised money so I should buy a Times Square billboard' — apply the same scrutiny to SEO.
How to run it
- 1
Test for a search journey
Ask what problem the user would type into a search box that leads to your product, and whether they could plausibly complete the purchase from that journey. If the answer requires a sales committee, a security review or a six-figure contract, there is no SEO journey.
Pro tip Blank stare from the team = your answer. Schwartz uses this literally as the disqualification signal.
Watch out Distinguish 'they search for the topic' from 'they buy from the search'. People do search SOC 2 certification; they still buy via a salesperson.
- 2
Price it all in
Add up the real cost. An agency starts around $10k/month ($120k/year); an in-house hire costs more. Then add the CMS, the engineer, the designer, the content. Arrive at a single all-in annual number.
Pro tip Write the number down as a dollar figure, e.g. '$1M/year', so the next step is a real comparison.
Watch out Beware agencies whose deliverable is content, because content is easy to bill for and often the thing you least need.
- 3
Compare against the alternative deployment
Ask: if that same money went into brand ads, influencer campaigns, paid on Meta/Google, or trade shows, would it return faster? SEO will usually pay back eventually if it is the right fit — the question is whether a startup can wait.
Pro tip Look at how your existing customers actually found you. If they all came from booths, buy more booths.
In the wild
A SaaS for gardeners was set on doing SEO and brought Schwartz a $15,000/month all-content agency proposal. He asked how their existing paying customers had found them: gardening trade shows, at $10,000 per booth.
→ For the same budget they could attend every show in the country and collect in-market leads who had actually tried the tool — instead of buying hope.
Schwartz executed textbook SEO for Mixpanel — right keywords, content built, links built — and it did not convert. Digging into the journey, he found Mixpanel is an expensive, company-wide integration you cannot buy on a credit card off a search result.
→ The eye-opener that led to his position that most SaaS should not do SEO: the friction, not the ranking, was the blocker.
Common mistakes
Believing SEO is free
There is a cost in time, resources and direct expense. Treating it as free removes it from the tradeoff conversation entirely and it gets funded by default.
Doing SEO because competitors do SEO
Competitors may be wrong, or may have a different buyer journey. Schwartz points to Google Cloud, which could probably never attribute a single customer purely to SEO.
Is it for you?
Best for
A founder or CMO at an early-stage company deciding whether to fund an SEO team or agency with limited resources.
Not ideal for
Large companies that already run all four growth engines and simply need to optimize an existing SEO investment.
From the transcript
“if you can't answer the question about what is it that someone's going to do a search on then don't do SEO”
“myth that SEO is free because it's absolutely not free there's a cost in time”
“or if they took that exact same million dollars and put it into brand ads or they put it into influencer campaigns or they put…”
From the episode
Rethinking SEO in the age of AI
Eli Schwartz (SEO advisor, author)