{"id":2137,"slug":"conductor-2025-91-percent-seo-impact","title":"Conductor 2025 State of SEO — 91% of digital experts say SEO positively impacted website performance","kind":"reference","scope":"business","status":"current","audiences":["kevin","candid-team"],"topics":["marketing-spend-benchmarks","smb-seo-budget-norms"],"reference_body":"**Claim:** Conductor 2025 State of SEO (survey of **350 digital experts**) — **91% of respondents reported that SEO positively impacted website performance and marketing goals in 2024**, rising to **97% among the most mature programs**.\n\n**Source:** Conductor (SEO software vendor).\n\n**Caveat:** Vendor — sells SEO platform. Incentive to portray SEO as valuable. Quarantined as directional.\n\n**Confidence:** Single-source / Directional (the direction — owned digital matters — is solid; magnitudes are vendor).\n\n**Why this matters for Candid:** Adoption evidence for owned-digital spend. Even with vendor incentive, the direction (mature SEO programs report higher returns) is plausible and consistent with [[ahrefs-2025-1-7-percent-new-pages-rank]] showing the difficulty has risen alongside the perceived value.","rationale_body":null,"metadata":null,"links":{"outgoing":[],"incoming":[{"slug":"research-brief-smb-widget-spend-benchmarks-june-2026","title":"Research brief: SMB widget spend benchmarks — feasibility of a \"digital-minus-ads\" % of revenue (June 2026)","kind":"reference","scope":"business","link_type":"relates-to"}]},"created_at":"2026-06-23T20:03:31.485Z","updated_at":"2026-06-23T20:03:31.485Z"}