Worked example
Will a $90 link budget pay back? Payback maths for a store
A link is a purchase with a return date. Here is a made-up store, three possible outcomes and the break-even point, so you can swap in your own numbers before spending anything.
The store, the traffic and the conversion rate are hypothetical numbers chosen to make the sums easy. They are not results from any real shop, and your own figures will differ.
Start with what one visit is worth
Ecommerce SEO link building only makes sense once you know the value of a single organic visitor. Merchants know this number for paid ads and forget it for organic. Calculate it once.
Picture a store selling kitchen scales. Its main category page gets 400 organic visits a month. Conversion is 1.4%, the average order is $62, and contribution margin after product cost, shipping and card fees is 40%. Contribution is what is left to pay for everything else.
Multiply it out. 1.4% of a visit is 0.014 orders, times $62 is $0.87 of revenue, times 40% is $0.35 of contribution per visit. That is the ceiling on what a visit can justify, and it is smaller than most people guess.
Three outcomes for a $90 budget (three links at about $30)
| Outcome | Visits per month after | Extra contribution per month | Payback | Net after six months |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Nothing moves | 400 | $0 | Never | -$90 |
| Modest lift | 550 | $52 | About 1.7 months of gains | +$118 |
| Strong lift | 800 | $139 | About 0.65 months of gains | +$466 |
Reading the table without flattering yourself
Break-even sits at 259 extra visits across the whole period, which is $90 divided by $0.347 per visit. Simple. Reaching it is harder if the page ranks nowhere near page one.
Notice the first row. It is a real outcome, and nothing in any marketplace, ours included, rules it out. Google's link spam update of December 2022 and the March 2024 core update both reminded owners that a purchased link is not a guaranteed lift, and the downside of the row above is simply the money gone.
The lag matters too. Links get crawled, the page is re-evaluated, and rivals keep moving. Two months of waiting before any gain shows up is a fair assumption, which is why the six-month column starts counting in month three.
Redo the sums for your own store
Pull three numbers from your platform
Conversion rate, average order value and the share of revenue left after cost of goods, shipping and fees. Shopify and WooCommerce reports both give the first two.
Find the page's organic visits
Open Search Console, filter to the category URL and read clicks over 90 days, then divide by three. Use clicks, not impressions.
Multiply to get value per visit
Conversion rate times order value times margin. Write it on the first line of your spreadsheet.
Divide the budget by it
The answer is your break-even visit count. If it is more than the page could plausibly add, skip the order.
Order small, then wait
Add two or three rows to the basket in our marketplace, pay, and check Search Console in four to eight weeks before touching the budget again.
When the maths says no
Plenty of stores should not buy links yet. A 15% margin catalogue turns a $0.35 visit into $0.13, and break-even for the same $90 jumps to roughly 690 visits. Fix pricing or the page first.
Before ordering, check your margin per product, and read the category page teardown to see whether the target deserves the money. If the store gets no organic visits at all, start with the triage list.