Revenue Focused SEO Strategy with Alex Galinos | Marketing Stack 2025
In this session of Marketing Stack 2025, Alex Galinos, an International SEO expert, advisor, and Head of SEO at Hopa, discusses how to transition search strategies from vanity metrics to actual business outcomes. He has spent his career promoting the idea that SEO success should be measured in revenue rather than just keyword rankings or traffic volume.
Why is traditional SEO disconnected from business revenue?
Traditional SEO often focuses on metrics that business owners do not understand or care about. Many agencies report on vanity metrics such as domain rating, the number of backlinks, or the volume of blog posts produced. Alex notes that these are just means to an end and should not be the final goal.
Businesses care about sales, net profit, and return on investment. This creates a gap in which stakeholders do not see the value SEO brings to the table. Alex argues that SEO is a user acquisition channel similar to PPC.
Paid search campaigns always focus on business metrics, such as conversion value, at the keyword level. SEO teams must learn to speak this same business language to maintain support from their organizations.
How can marketers track revenue without keyword data in analytics?
A significant problem in modern SEO is that search engines hide specific keyword data in analytics platforms. Marketers often have to rely on sampled data from the search console, which is not always complete. Alex suggests using PPC data as a proxy to solve this attribution problem.
Marketers can identify non-branded keywords in paid campaigns that lead to high-value sales. They can then check the average conversion value for those specific terms. This provides a layer of verification for user intent. By matching these converting keywords to organic rankings, a marketer can estimate the revenue their organic efforts generate. This allows the team to prioritize pages that act as money makers for the company.
What is the success story of the revenue-focused winter strategy at Hopa?
Alex shared a specific case study from his work at Hopa, an aggregator in the travel sector. The company was very dependent on summer destinations and saw a major drop in performance during the winter.
Instead of just chasing high-volume keywords, Alex looked at high-value destinations. He found that customers travelling to ski resorts in Switzerland were worth much more than regular travellers.
A single ski trip booking was worth 10 to 15 times as much as a standard booking. He mapped these destinations and improved their organic performance, even with relatively low search volume. This strategy transformed the company's revenue landscape by focusing on profit margins rather than just traffic.
How are AI overviews and LLMs affecting the travel industry?
The impact of AI and large language models varies significantly by industry. In the travel sector, Alex observes that LLM referral traffic is currently very low at around zero point three percent. He believes that many people are exaggerating the extent to which these tools are used across all audiences. The travel audience is not always as technically savvy as those in the software industry.
Furthermore, AI overviews primarily impact informational queries rather than commercial ones. Users looking to book an airport transfer usually want a quick transaction and specific vehicle options. They are less likely to spend time researching in a conversational AI interface when they need a ride immediately.
How should SEO strategies evolve for the next five years?
As search technology changes, the definition of an SEO page is expanding. In the past, marketers only focused on pages that targeted specific search patterns. Now, traditionally non-SEO pages like the about us or contact us pages are becoming critical. AI models extract brand information from these pages to verify an entity's authority.
Brands must ensure their information is consistent across their own site and third-party directories, such as TripAdvisor and other review platforms. SEO is moving closer to general marketing, where brand presentation is a top priority.
Alex advises marketers to be observers and run small tests with chunk-based content to see how AI processes their information. He suggests slowing down and focusing on in-depth research rather than chasing magic formulas or shortcuts.
