Marketers spend hundreds of millions of dollars a year on paid search but only hundreds of thousands on SEO. Marketers know SEO isn’t thousands of times less valuable, but it can feel thousands of times harder to realize its value. In the words of one Redditor: “SEO is incredibly time consuming, often involves multiple people, involves difficult and in-depth technical skills, and even when done perfectly, you may not see tangible results for three to six months … Meanwhile you can do [paid search] and wham bam thank you ma’am, you can get many results in a short timeframe, [and it] only needs one person to get up and running. And you can prove 100% attribution to the marketing team.”

This sentiment is shared by countless marketers. It reflects SEO’s marketing problem.

SEO’s greatest challenges (and opportunities) come from:

  • Necessary cross-functional collaboration. The SEO process depends on in-house and/or agency content marketers, web developers, UX pros, performance marketers, and more working in sync to implement content and technical fixes that lack immediately apparent ROI. Many SEO tasks, including enhancing site speed, implementing data markup, analyzing log files, removing duplicate content, and regularly updating content, are tedious and don’t pay off right away. Therefore, they’re deprioritized. In the process, SEO reveals cultural disconnects between siloes.
  • Search engines’ evolution. Search engines ranging from Google to Bing, Perplexity, and ChatGPT are increasingly conversational, assistive, and agentic. Instead of keywords and ranked links judged by users, search engines exercise agency and infer unasked questions. They anticipate intent, interpret natural language, and guide users on complex, click-free journeys. As a result, metrics like organic traffic, click-through rate, average position, and ranking, on which SEO practitioners are typically goaled, become obsolete.

SEO Remains An Influential And Cost-Effective Channel

Despite its challenges, SEO is critically important. Practically every buyer’s journey is influenced, blatantly or subtly, by organic search. Making a brand increasingly visible across ChatGPT and Perplexity is still SEO, but it demands new skills and tools. The market for SEO solutions is growing to meet marketers’ evolving needs.

SEO solutions resolve marketers’ problems with the channel by reducing SEO’s effort. They accelerate and simplify the SEO process and derisk cross-functional collaboration. They also help practitioners adapt to the rise of generative AI (genAI) and diversification of search beyond Google.

Our new Landscape report on SEO solutions clarifies the SEO market’s maturity, dynamics, notable vendors, top use cases, functionalities, and future. It features end-to-end platforms, point solutions, and agency tools. Some specialize in creating and auditing brands’ content while others focus on making brands’ sites increasingly intelligible to search engines. All try to keep pace with genAI and prove SEO’s value.

Stay tuned for our Forrester Wave™ on SEO solutions, which will publish in Q3 2025. As always, contact us to learn more.