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
-
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 -
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 -
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 -
Our SEO is garbage. can someone answer a few questions for me?
I've seen our SEO drop to more or less the bottom of the barrel, and I don't have any answers yet as to why. SEOMoz is running it's crawl currently, and I have a few errors about duplicate titles and content, so I know I have some work cut out for me. But, why the sudden drop? The only change I made at the time was a change to our URL structure, but all links were 301'd to their new location. Does this still hurt SEO that terribly? Also, our robots.txt file is getting indexed and showing up as the first result at times. Very embarrassing. It's doing better than our other pages. 😞 I don't get what's happening here. Yrzu3,fkbYu
Reporting & Analytics | | stagl0 -
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 -
Best practice SEO/SEM/Analaytics/Social reports
Hi All, does anyone have a best practice excel spreadsheet of a internal report we should be using.... ie what are the main factors we should be tracking? Unqiue views? time spent on site? Where they came from? seo/sem/network/direct to site? social media tracking? amount of +1/fb likes/tweets etc thanks
Reporting & Analytics | | Tradingpost0 -
Can I find results for my SEO rankings over an extended period of time?
I was hoping to put a report together chronicling my SEO performance over the last 2 months and couldn't find a place to see prior information.
Reporting & Analytics | | AppNeta0 -
Help with local SEO strategy for service industries
Here is the scenario I often wonder about: My client's tree removal service is ranking in #1 in local search for
Reporting & Analytics | | MozMan2
"tree removal town state." His Google Places account is set for a 30 mile radius. He has lots of directory listings and positive reviews. Some inbound links as well. The same client is ranking #1 in organic listing for "tree removal county state" ...I chose to target the county for organic listings because the client was dominating local search for the town. My reasoning: I thought, Google local search would bring all of the local specific searches for "tree removal town state" and organic listings would bring the broader searches for "tree removal county state." That is exactly what's happening and stats show there are some visitors coming to the site searching with the county name. Not a ton of traffic but a lot of keyword variations using the county name. The bulk of the traffic comes from the his Google Places listing for the town the business is located in which is great. Dilemma: My client is not ranking in local search results for neighboring towns just a few miles away and certainly not ranking in organic listings for neighboring towns either because we are targeting the county. He has a long list of town names he services in the footer area and this does seem to help for organic search in neighboring towns with little competition. Broad Question: How can I optimize pages for the same services in neighboring towns without duplicating content. For example, the home page title tag and H1 reads:
Tree Removal, Tree Trimming, Stump Removal, County State It would be very easy to create identical pages with title tags and page headings for the different towns but that would undoubtedly create duplicate content and would look weird to someone browsing the site. Specific Questions: Should I put the town name where the business is located in the title tag even though the site already ranks #1 for that town in local search, without having the town in the title tag? Why not use this importunity for an area that we are not ranking for? Do I nix the county and state and try to insert another town or two in the title and H1? Ideally I would like to have this site rank well in local search for all of the neighboring towns. This may be too broad of a post, (it is my first one) but perhaps there are a few of you out there that can outline strategies that work for service industries like, lawn care, tree removal, landscaping, etc. Thanks for reading.0