How to Measure ROI of SEO Efforts
How to Measure the ROI of SEO Effectively
Marketing campaigns have a lot of moving parts. Many of those parts consist of the actions being taken to draw traffic to your website and, with a little luck and a lot of persistence, turn into full-fledged customers. An important post-campaign element is referred to as ROI, which stands for return on investment.
Many people reading this probably already understand ROI, but they may not consider how it relates to search engine optimization. Today, that’s exactly what we’re going to explore, so that your next marketing campaign can be properly measured for its success.
What is ROI (Return on Investment)?
Return on investment is a well-known business term that’s used to determine the success of a marketing campaign (among many other things). It’s basically the measurement of how much revenue a marketing campaign has generated in comparison to its operational cost.
Even though ROI is a bit different when dealing with SEO, the concept is still basically the same. You want to know how well a marketing campaign or initiative that’s incorporates search engine optimization has profited in relation to how much it cost to retrieve and use the SEO.
The Importance of Tracking ROI
Calculating ROI is a necessary component of every single marketing campaign. If you simply throw out marketing dollars to see what sticks and don’t track your returns for lead generation and other factors, much of the money may go to waste. You could potentially end up spending thousands of dollars before you realize that the SEO-infused marketing campaigns aren’t working very well.
The Challenge of Calculating SEO ROI
As essential as ROI is, the truth is that it’s often not very difficult to track. This is because it’s based on easy-to-understand numbers. Let’s take pay-per-click (PPC) as an example. With that type of marketing, you simply need to compare how many people clicked on an ad, how much each click cost you, whether or not the click converted to a sale, and how much profit that sale produced.
Search engine optimization ROI, however, is a wee bit more difficult. That’s because there’s no fixed cost per organic click for SEO. When dealing with SEO, the primary goal is to create organic visibility on Google and other search engines.
In other words, while hard numbers may enter into the process, much of it involves perceived value. That’s why many business owners turn to professional marketing companies when dealing with SEO because they’re trained to properly interpret results.
Basic Steps to Measure SEO ROI
If you want your marketing campaigns using SEO to succeed now and in the future, then you must know how each one is performing. Even though calculating SEO ROI is challenging because of the lack of a fixed price point, the basic process is relatively simple. For all intents and purposes, there are three primary steps:
Quantify the Traffic
The first step that’s involved is quantifying the traffic that’s coming to your site. You must determine which traffic is the result of a particular marketing campaign in which you’ve incorporated SEO. Neglecting this first step will make it impossible for you to properly calculate the ROI of a given campaign, which is already more difficult than normal.
Track Conversion Rates
Tracking conversion rates is, arguably, the most important part of the process. You need to know how much of the traffic going to your site is converting into an actual customer instead of simply visiting and then leaving. Of course, even some of the visitors who don’t stick around may return at a later time, but it’s not a good idea to take those into account, at least not to a large degree.
Assess the Return
This is the trickiest part of the process. You must determine how much profit was made in relation to how much was spent on SEO. Since this can be difficult, we’d recommend that you always use a professional marketing agency, but there are also online tools available that will help you out. These three seem to be the most popular:
- Google Analytics — Since Google basically runs the planet at this point, it’s no surprise that Google Analytics is the most popular online tool for this particular purpose. If you want to succeed, this tool is a must.
- Bing Webmaster Tools — Microsoft is definitely still in the game, and their Bing Webmaster Tools are very effective. But will help you determine ROI for SEO campaigns and any other type of marketing campaign.
- SEMRush — SEMRush has exploded on the scene and become very popular due to their effectiveness in conducting keyword research, competitor analysis, Google Ad optimization, ROI analysis, and other important pieces of the marketing puzzle.
Enlisting a Marketing Company for SEO ROI
Many businesses attempt to be jacks of all-trades in terms of building their business and acting as their own marketing company. But, time and time again, it’s been proven that professional marketers will give you a much higher return on investment because this is what they do on a daily basis. This is even more essential when dealing with SEO ROI because the results often need to be interpreted rather than simply read.
To give you an idea of what a professional agency brings to the table, here’s a quick list of the SEO key performance metrics that they’ll use to determine ROI:
- Search rankings
- Organic traffic
- Bounce rate
- Organic CTR (click through rate)
- Soft and hard conversions
- Site speed
- Pages per session
- Organic impressions
Contact P3 Agency to Measure the ROI of SEO
The marketing professionals at the P3 agency understand how to measure the ROI of SEO so that your business dollars are being used more wisely. Give us just a few short months, and we’ll start showing you real results. If you have any questions about SEO, ROI, marketing campaigns, or web design in Clearwater and beyond, give us a call at (727) 474 9064 to get a free marketing analysis today.