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
-
Pagination, SEO, and you
So, i have done some research on this and I am running into 2 problems. We run a review site for a specific niche. wordpress is viewing our category pages as an "archive" which i don't know that it really is. Google seems to only be indexing the first 9 pages of this category. We would like google to be indexing these pages because thats the only place on our website where all our specific products are linked. Any thoughts are greatly appreciated.
Reporting & Analytics | | HashtagHustler1 -
Google Analytics SEO Queries Not Showing
Hi All, This might be a silly question, but for all the properties I monitor in Google Analytics, I'm now showing no data for SEO Queries under Acquisition for the past 6 days. Normally I would expect a few day delay in queries, but nothing for 6 days is somewhat peculiar especially as it was functioning fine prior to November 12th. Does anyone have insight into what might be going on? Thanks! URaNMa3
Reporting & Analytics | | amichaels0 -
Is there a way to map your on-page SEO changes with the organic growth?
Hi Mozzers, I was just wondering if there's a way we can map our on-page SEO changes with the increase/decrease in organic traffic. For instance, I introduced brand pages' link the product page breadcrumbs and suddenly organic traffic for my brand pages increase from X to 2X in 1 couple of weeks. Now, this can be because of this breadcrumb change purely or because of some algorithm update or may be, bots started finding the content interesting and hence, started ranking them up (in case the brand pages were launched recently). So, you can't say which change should be mapped to what increase/decrease in organic traffic. Or, is there a way to map this?
Reporting & Analytics | | _nitman0 -
SEO dealing with a CDN on a site.
This one is stumping me and I need some help. I have a client who's site is www.site.com and we have set them up a CDN through Max CDN at cdn.site.com which is basically a cname to the www.site.com site. The images in the GWT for www.site.com are de-indexing rapidly and the images on cdn.site.com are not indexing. In the Max CDN account I have the images from cdn.site.com sending a canonical header from www.site.com but that does not seem to help, they are all still de-indexing.
Reporting & Analytics | | LesleyPaone0 -
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 -
Wordpress SEO vs Regular Site SEO
Hey Mozzers I'm building a Wordpress-powered site (self hosted on different domain). I know there are different plug-ins and whatnot for Wordpress SEO, but what exactly am I getting myself into? Am I required to use these plug-ins even if I already know how to do regular SEO on-page coding, or are they mainly dumbed-down tools for mom-bloggers to use? Am I still able to use Google Analytics as I am with a regular site?
Reporting & Analytics | | Travis-W
What else is there to think about? Thanks!0 -
I am new to SEO. Would appreciate anyone share with me how can i further optimize my website to attract more visitors based on this scenario?
Hi all, Thanks and really appreciate for your time helping me out here, and i am very new to SEO. Just a brief introduction, our team have been developing a gaming review website (specifically targeting MMO game, facebook game, and browser-based game) since September 2011, and the website show significant improvement for the 1st month, and we got daily UV spiking up to 2k in November. The issue here is that the visitors start to become very stagnant, and even dropping now. Even though we try hard to publish more game reviews and there is NO IMPROVEMENT AT ALL for past 2 months in terms of number of visitors, and we have no idea how should we further proceed to attract more visitors...We have about 7 k site pages (however not all are with content). For the past 2 months it seems like there is nothing going on that proportionate to the effort we put in. Pretty discouraging, so we decided to sign up SEOMOZ to get SEO help from the community here. Some general questions we have: 1. Is it because of the the quality of the content we write ? (not enough keyword density, review too short, etc). 2. Is it because of the website designed not user friendly and not optimized? 3. Is it because of the general gaming trend, or other competitors? 4. Are we penalized by google by any chance? Are we spamming or anything wrong that deter our improvement? 5. Our main revenue source is on advertising, and currently we are using adsense. Would the ads placement affect anything? 6. Based on your knowledge and expertise, any advice would you give us? Would appreciate if you can take a kind look at the website to understand the scenario better: www.gameonline2.com, with 3 subdomain of: wiki.gameonline2; gameplay.gameonline2; cheats.gameonline2. For your reference, example our competitors are: www.onrpg.com; www.bbgsite.com; www.mmohut.com I would be happy to share with you any further information including google analytics if needed. I have report generated from SEOMOZ but i would appreciate the pros to help me take a look to give me a more complete ideas of how can i further improve to gain at least 10k visitors per day. Thanks again for your kind help and time. Andrew
Reporting & Analytics | | andrewsoh070 -
How would you measure the SEO success of new site launch?
It has been 12 months, and it is time for some serious SEO reality check up. I think we have done some really nice things (social integration, on page optimization etc) but we honestly could do a million time better on some other elements (anchor, text, link building etc...). Would love to hear from the community what would be the top 10 criteria you would use to judge the quality of the SEO work done for a new site during is first 12 months. PS: we are a very content rich over 1,500 new articles/post in our niche with 12 months - our site is migraine.com Thanks
Reporting & Analytics | | OlivierChateau0