ROI in SEO
-
Hi there! I'm just doing the SEO for a client and I just don't know exactly how could I estimate the ROI associated to the SEO actions that are taking place. Should I only consider the conversions made via organic search? Is there another parameter, metric or item I must measure? . Is there something "formal" to follow'? I think I'm missing something.
Thanks in advanced.
-
I really appreciate this answer! I am new to SEO on top of being the only In-house internet marketing employee with an insurance agency so it helps me to learn what everyone else is using in the real world SEO industry. Organic traffic has increased 65% in the last three months on my website but actual conversions are coming in much slower. Measuring ROI has been difficult for me. I’ll utilize your ideas in the future.
-
Thanks a lot for your answer.
-
thanks Takeshi!
-
What kind of business does your client do (ecommerce, lead generation, user signups, etc.)? And what are you counting as conversions (ecommerce sales, contact form submissions, phone calls, newsletter signups, user registration, etc)?
Here are the main KPIs I would normally report on for SEO -
Total organic visits - compare month-to-month, quarter-to-quarter, year-to-year. Ideally this number will increase each month as a result of your SEO efforts.
Total organic visits from unbranded keywords - usually these are the keywords you are targeting with the SEO campaign. By "unbranded" I mean any keyword excluding those which include the name of the company/product, personnel, address, phone number, etc.
Conversions generated by organic traffic - the specifics of this metric largely depend on whether its ecommerce, lead gen, signups, etc. If you can prove that organic traffic (especially from unbranded keywords) is generating an increase in qualified contact form submissions, then you're golden. Especially if the client is able to provide you with figures on how much they pay per lead from other marketing channels, like if they are used to paying $300 per lead from radio commercials and you are charging $1,000/month for SEO and generating 10 leads a month, then you are cutting their acquisition cost by 66%!
Revenue generated - this is more easily determined for ecommerce sites, but it can be done with lead generation sites. You can use Google Analytics conversion tracking to track the initial conversions but hopefully you and/or the client are keeping track of the leads throughout the sales funnel so you can determine which leads convert into revenue for the client and then you can attribute that number back to the original source. So if you find that your SEO efforts generate 10 leads a month and 3 of those leads result in sales, generating $5,000 in revenue, then you can confidently make the assumption that the ROI of the SEO campaign is 400%!
-
The two main KPIs I would report on would be the amount of organic traffic you are bringing in, compared to what the site was doing before you started your SEO efforts, along with organic conversions. If you have conversions set up in Google Analytics, you will be able to see multi-touch attribution, so sales that didn't originate from organic but were influenced by it.
Basically, if traffic and sales are increasing as a direct result of SEO, that should be a pretty clear indicator of ROI.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
What are best SEO plugins for wordpress?
Hi, I hope you are doing well. I want to know what are the best SEO plugins for wordpress website? https://www.myqurantutor.com/
Reporting & Analytics | | Bigbrand0 -
PDF best practices: to get them indexed or not? Do they pass SEO value to the site?
All PDFs have landing pages, and the pages are already indexed. If we allow the PDFs to get indexed, then they'd be downloadable directly from google's results page and we would not get GA events. The PDFs info would somewhat overlap with the landing pages info. Also, if we ever need to move content, we'd now have to redirects the links to the PDFs. What are best practices in this area? To index or not? What do you / your clients do and why? Would a PDF indexed by google and downloaded directly via a link in the SER page pass SEO juice to the domain? What if it's on a subdomain, like when hosted by Pardot? (www1.example.com)
Reporting & Analytics | | hlwebdev1 -
Does PPC affect SEO Traffic?
Last week my website (www.cooke.co.uk) started PPC advertising with Google. This has been successful in increasing the amount of overall traffic to the site. However, since we started the PPC advertising, our traffic from organic search has decreased significantly. Our rankings haven't changed dramatically enough to warrant such a decrease. Has anyone else been in a situation where organic traffic has dropped as a result of launching a paid campaign? What did you do to rectify it? Thanks.
Reporting & Analytics | | AAttias0 -
SEO Working GREAT! Although Keyword Rankings Only Directing to Home Page.
Since I've become a fellow MOZer I've seen an increase on my sites and proud to say that ALL of my clients have now accomplished 1st page rankings on at least 2 of their top 3 keywords. Yes, I am as stoked as them. Although I am a bit worried because as I rank keywords and test them on Google and engines alike all of our rankings direct to the homepage. I am essentially new to SEO. So as happy as I am to be doing something right I'm worried I'm losing the end user. By having them need to Search our site/menus/blog for the keywords/phrase that got them to us will turn most searchers away. They want the content now. What am I doing wrong? My pages are pretty specific so I never cared to use rel-canonical's...I dont have duplicate content, other than your typical footer/side bar consistent info. So I'm curious where I've gone wrong. Little history on my sites: I Use Joomla 2.5 & 3.x. I manage seo details through sh404seo. I've cleaned all duplicates I can up other than what these dynamic cms generate by just using one. I've done fairly well and all my pages rank A for moz's onpage grader for the keyword optimized around. Any help is appreciate, THANK YOU!
Reporting & Analytics | | Funk-Creative-Media0 -
How to transfer 5 domains under one Brand domain without using 301 redirect with minimum SEO loss
My situation is rather complicated , I have 5 domains with different but identical services. Some with good traffic some without, but 2 main domains have manual penalty from Google (I have tried a lot to get rid of the penalty but no success) so finally I have decided to move all our websites under one anchor website 'a brand' and pass all the seo juice + blog articles under the same. Now the problem with the procedure is that we cannot redirect the penalized domain urls to new one as penalization will also be transferred and the whole motive of creating a new brand will be lost. So if somebody could guide me as of how I should proceed transferring SEO value with minimum traffic loss but without using 301) **One way I could figure out is using canonical (Am not confident over it) but say I create 5 identical pages on new domain and declare them as canonical of old domain pages (So is it safe? will it transfer the penalty of old domain to canonical new urls? ) ** Rest i am bifurcating all the traffic sources like direct / organic / referral / Social etc and chalking out what we can control manually and in what ratio, gradually I will work on each section to transfer the traffic. Main Problem is of Organic and Not available. Some suggestions or blog urls would be appreciated.
Reporting & Analytics | | ngupta10 -
SEO & CPC
So...I know Google secret sauce is just what secret but on a couple occasions I've seen a Phenomenon occur that I'd like some help understanding. I work at a fairly new eCommerce sit called www.savvisdirect.com. We have the normal new site desires...more traffic. Most of our traffic is coming from CPC but we were seeing about a 33% increase in organic wk over wk, until...we drastically cut our CPC spend on Google for a wk. Then organic dropped by about 1/3'rd. Nothing else changed, that's it. I know Google says that CPC spend doesn't affect rankings but I've seen this phenomenon a couple time @ a couple different sites & I'm getting to the point where I just don't believe it. What's your perspective on this?
Reporting & Analytics | | RPD0 -
Google SEO - Where have I disappeared to?
Okay, so first off Google, I hate you. Before I signed up for SEOMoz, my website was hitting page 9 and page 10 for some ultra difficult keywords. After spending a month using Hubspot and SEOMoz, I finally made it on to page 2 of google, for said 'impossible to rank high' keywords, which I was super happy with. But last week, I login to find that I have disappeared off the top 100 pages of Google for about 100 of my top keywords!!!! What the hell did I do wrong? I tried to please Google, but my website is still indexed, but just not ranked at all for any of my top keywords. The last thing I did before I disappeared overnight was add "follow me" buttons to all my pages and "share this" buttons to all my blogs. Could this be the problem? My website and main keyword is Process Server Is there anyone who could help push me in the right direction? I have no idea what I did wrong. 😕 Martyn
Reporting & Analytics | | spymore0 -
301 Tracking with Google Analytics hurts SEO?
Hey guys, I have an old-domain.com and a new-domain.com. old-domain.com has reputation and through a 301 redirect it's handling it over to new-domain.com. I want to know how many people still visit old-domain.com and track this with Google Analyitcs. I read the best solution for this would be a Google Campaign URL. My question: Does a URL like "http://www.new-domain.com /?utm_source=&utm_medium=redirect&utm_campaign=" hurt the effectiveness of the 301 redirect?
Reporting & Analytics | | optimiert-es0