• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, January 21, 2012

Retail, financial services and technology brands continue to leave more than $112 million in sales on the table that they could add to their coffers by being more aggressive in search engine optimization. That's according to findings scheduled for release Monday by BrightEdge, a digital marketing platform provider.

BrightEdge analyzed terabytes of page rank, social signals, keyword, backlinks and cost-per-click data to identify the financial opportunities left behind in specific vertical market segments. The company found that retail brands leave about $51 million in potential revenue, followed by financial services at $51 million, and hardware and software companies at $5.4 million.

Advertisers attempting to predict the return on investment for search engine optimization have struggled for years to find tools that prove it, according to Mark Mitchell, head of search in the U.K. at Omnicom Media Group. He views it as a catch-22. SEO has often been under-invested in because it has been difficult to predict ROI for organic search campaigns.

Mitchell claims that Omnicom found a forecasting tool in the BrightEdge S3 platform. Agencies and clients spend a lot of time trying to build out methods and tools, but it is time-consuming and difficult to aggregate all the data, which makes forecasting difficult.

BrightEdge developed a forecasting model for ROI on SEO that it plans to release this week.

"What's missing is the tool that lets marketers plug in the data to determine opportunities driving revenue based on conversion data," said Brad Mattick, vice president of marketing at BrightEdge, who joined the company six months ago from Salesforce.com. "You need to build a framework and have the ability to analyze the numbers."

Other companies will join BrightEdge this year to help marketing forecast SEO ROI, as more marketers find support in attribution and data, and tie together SEO, social, paid search, video, display retargeting and other media.