SEO ROI stands for Return on Investments for Search Engine Optimization campaigns. This is what every client expects from people who either work as Search Engine Optimization strategist within organization or provide SEO services to different client. Every client likes to calculate the investment and returns to continue with services. ROI is considered good If your revenue is higher than your investments. Most commonly this practice is followed in paid marketing tactics such as search engine ads, social media advertisements and affiliate campaigns. But it is equally important for clients when they hire SEO consultants.
SEO is an on-going process so ROI doesn’t reflect instantly but it can be calculated at the end of the month.
How to do ROI Calculations
While calculating ROI for SEO, there are few common factors you need to keep in your mind. Being a SEO strategist myself, I was asked so many times whether SEO ROI can be calculated by any formula or not? The answer is there’s no official formula to calculate SEO ROI. But if you work smartly, you could track results of your performance and evaluate it according to client investment.
Given below are few key points to calculate SEO ROI.
Total number of customers landed on website via organic searches:
In order to track total number of customers landed on website via organic searches, you could collect data from Google Analytics and compare it with previous duration. All you need to do is:
Login Google Analytics
Navigate to Acquisition
Select All Traffic
Choose “Channels”
Track the number of subscriptions and registrations through organic source
In order to track number of events such as subscriptions and registration, you need to enable Event Tracking in Google analytics. For this you have to Set up event measurement by using Google Tag Manager. Here is the Google Guide to set up Event Measurement.
Once you are done with event measurement setting, you could get events data in Google Analytics under Behaviour>Events.
Track website leads
Work on tracking leads, customer queries and Conversions on the website from all source/Medium. For this you need to set up goals in Google Analytics and keep a track on goal completion. According to project requirement you can set up goals. Social Shares, Registration forms, Enquiry Forms or maybe custom goals according to project need. You must always refer Create, Edit and Share Goals a complete Google guide before adjusting or creating goals.
Additional SEO ROI Indicators
Apart from above listed indicators there are few important factors which we could consider as a good ROI factor.
Increase in Non-Brand Organic Traffic
We all know that there are two types of keyword searches
- Brand keywords
- Non-Brand Keywords
In brand keywords, the users search for services which includes brand name. For example, at TheSEOGuy I provide digital marketing services and if any customer searches for “TheSEOGuy digital marketing services” it will be the brand keyword search. However, if the customer don’t include brand name and search for “Digital marketing Services” and land on my website, It will be the non-brand organic search for my platform. If the non-brand searches for different product or services are increasing then SEO results are good and it will help to justify SEO ROI.
Keeping an eye on Landing pages and tracking all conversions is also a good indicator. For Local SEO ROI, I would suggest you to track all phone calls made by customers and calculate the value of each call by running test ad campaigns.
Hope this would help you to understand SEO ROI. If you have any question, feedback or suggestions for this information then do comment below.