Measuring the return on investment (ROI) in SEO, like every other marketing channel, measuring the ROI (return on investment) in SEO is important for evaluating the success of your SEO activities.
The SEO strategy should always demonstrate ROI that can help you put a significant monetary value of your SEO efforts into perspective.
While ROI will differ for each company that invests in SEO marketing services, there are ways to reasonably forecast the potential value of this channel for your business.
Remember, that branded keywords tend to do a lot better and will bring more traffic and organic conversions if the company is already well established.
Calculating ROIs is quite a straightforward task in most online marketing channels, like Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising.
In PPC campaigns, you can easily define the amount that you invested in a given period of time. For instance, the amount you paid for each click on your ads (the cost of the PPC campaign) plus the agency fee (if you are outsourcing a team) or the cost of your in-house team.
SEO ROIs become more challenging because, unlike PPC, there is no actual cost per click involved in organic searches, where a certain amount of traffic is guaranteed for a certain amount of money.
SEO is all about gaining better visibility on Google and other search engines, thus it is challenging to directly measure the impact of SEO efforts on organic revenue through metrics like impressions and clicks.
However, the above example demonstrates the framework for solid SEO forecasting for startups and e-commerce businesses, where you can project not just traffic, but also actual conversions and sales.
Another challenge for measuring SEO revenue directly from organic traffic is the time lag between your actions and results. Sometimes it can even take up to 3 to 6 months for SEO to show results – depending on the indexation, crawl budget, domain authority of your website, and many other factors.
This means that SEO is not a quick-fix tactic, and SEO activities that are performed during a particular period of time won’t impact the traffic overnight. In fact, SEO is a sustainable, long-term strategy to grow your website.