I created this artifact for a talk I gave at Bay Area Search, a local group of search experts. At the time, Adobe had just moved from boxed to subscription and was now moving into product-led growth. That presented an opportunity to increase discoverability on non-brand use case searches such as edit pdf, merge pdf, crop photo, blur background, etc.

Shortly after this talk, I followed up with an internal strategy presentation at Adobe. Each business unit wanted to understand the ARR (Average Recurring Revenue) that SEO could deliver. Execs wanted a simple but data-driven way to understand searcher intent for offerings in the document delivery, photo, and imaging spaces.

An example of a story I told at Adobe to get buy-in is about the SEO non-brand TAM (total addressable market). It showed a set of top searched non-brand keywords where competitor sites had higher visibility — and the significant traffic (and derived revenue) opportunity of ranking in the top 3 positions for this set of keywords.

The company was on board with building out an SEO strategy before I was hired, but the opportunity across different product areas was something that my team and I came up with and then socialized across different business units.


This was an especially great time to leverage SEO as Adobe was launching web-based features as a way to provide visibility into the product before the sign-up stage. This meant that users searching for this functionality organically could see a trustworthy company offering web-based services, and would be more likely to sign up.

Estimates should be very robust before presenting to execs. Execs will want to know the calculations, so working with finance to build models is a pre-requisite before taking the strategy and operational plan to executives.

The process for estimating monetary value was based on estimating search demand, assuming that a % will convert to clicks at full potential (top 3 positions), applying an average conversion rate for each page (pattern) type, and applying an average order value to the conversions/orders.

The formula was:
(Total monthly search volume based on a representative set of keywords) * (click-through rate at the top 3 positions in Google) * (CVR) * (order value).

Arpana Tiwari

I created these talking points to explain my team’s SEO strategy when Adobe was switching to a web-based product-led growth model.

Selling SEO Internally at a Large Enterprise

1. How to sell SEO internally to execs

2. Estimate the monetary value of SEO

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