Six months ago, there was a significant update to your website hosting. But it didn’t happen.
It wasn’t because your team fixed your canonicals, redirection problems, replication problems, and JavaScript rendering eight months earlier. It was the kind of boring job a technical engineer or developer got stuck in because the ticket was last on their list.
And you don’t have your proof, do you. Without experience from years in SEO and seeing that your site has all the signs of sites hit by the review.
It may cut your traffic in half. It didn’t happen.
There is no parallel internet timeline where you have not done the work, so there is no way to verify it. There is no record.
This is why technical SEO ROI resists proof. It’s an ideological problem with no governing body, and we always pretend it’s a reporting problem we can pour our way out of.
The internet never stops
We are in two open systems when we work digitally, at least: the Internet and the marketplace. Third, if you consider the maturity and expectations of Internet users. Fourth, if you count the infrastructure of our website. More than that, actually, but we don’t have time to write them all.
The long and short of it is this: the ocean we swim in is constantly changing, moving, growing, and shrinking. There is no way to pin down a single, solid “before” situation, and there is no neat way to put all those influences into a “what if I had done nothing?” We try to do it with things like Bayesian prediction, but that’s still an educated guess.
Technical work may have an immediate impact on visibility today. Make the same change six months later, and it may not happen. That may be because Google has decided to change its crawl budget or change the way it reads websites.
Cause and effect are not bound in time. Google re-draws and re-writes on its schedule, so any result stays away from change and is washed out in every re-crawl cycle, which defeats pairing before and after all clean test requirements.
Like SEO in general, there’s a lot we can’t control. Trying to keep track of all the changes across the web that might affect our website can lead to many sheep and sleepless nights.
Technical SEO adds another layer because we rarely post alone. It’s never just “here’s this one change to the website.” “We have about 30 fixes from five different teams that will come out on Thursday, so if things fall through, we have people on Friday who can try.” (Please do not post on Fridays.)
A lot of technical work is also done to keep our heads above water: managing technical bills, or doing the work needed to stay on top of updated rules and new releases of codebases or frameworks. Development and improvement are difficult.
A career in technology is very similar to insurance or public health. You only realize how important it was when it stopped working. What we do with technical SEO is often to prevent disasters, not to build new cities. We cannot write an invoice for an earthquake that did not happen.
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The control group never existed
Another reality of technology changes, SEO-led or not, is that most of them are global and, of necessity, should be global. There is no control group. Provide pipelines, budget for resolution, site speed. It affects everything at once, so no untouched piece is left to act as a control.
Two examples to consider:
- The Sunset 301 redirect is over a year old: The server stops reading all redirect lines on every page load. The advantage is the clarity and efficiency of the resource, which is not reflected in the figures.
- A properly executed migration: The win condition is “no traffic loss.” Flat line, maybe a little uptick. The migration function is only visible when it fails.
Your only comparison is the past, which existed under different external conditions. Time itself is now a trick. The only things you should compare are relative, over time, and incremental, and the results change depending on what metrics you use to measure success and what mindset you and your leadership bring to the conversation.
If possible, we want to do a proof of concept. SEO A/B testing, essentially. Select a section, make the change there and not elsewhere. Measure and decide. But that doesn’t always happen, and it requires a different kind of buy-in.
And we are in a time where LLMs make everything possible. Every answer is personal to you, and many of the measurements we rely on are no longer decisive.
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So keep a relative
There are two levels of kinship here:
- How to prioritize work.
- How to measure impact.
How we prioritize work helps determine the impact we want to make.
My approach to prioritizing technical work is to look at impact first. How much of the website is affected by this problem, and how much of the impact is on key sections or pages? After that, it’s regular scoping and tuning discussions led by development teams.
But for me, impact is what matters.
Now, when it comes to measuring and reporting, a large part of the SEO industry, myself included, talks about how we actually measure everything now, not just technical work. We’re in a weird situation because of all the accelerated LLMs.
We don’t have “what if…” on our websites, but we do have our competitors. Observing how our competitors’ websites react to global events, such as Google updates, is probably the closest we can get to answering that question in technical SEO practice. It’s the closest ROI-by-proxy to voice sharing.
And funding
Technical SEO is infrastructure. Insurance. If you are having trouble making or getting financing, look at your draft.
At its core, technical SEO is insurance against open system shocks. Treat it like that. It is not a revenue driver.
Yes, it can bring meaningful improvements and help that bottom line move to the right, but the workhorse, 80%, most of technical SEO, keeps the engine running. The job does not promise to look up. Reduces the chances and costs of finding a tank. The main update that didn’t sink was the claim that was paid.
So do what I recommended earlier and talk to finance. Learn how they measure, value, and analyze insurance, security, and infrastructure.
Start looking at your technical SEO that way. Start talking about it that way.
Technical SEO is the constant growth your flywheel can do without, not an investment you can’t justify.
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