Measuring ROI on SEO
Here are a lot of companies and individuals out there that claim to be SEO experts. Prices range from tens of dollars to tens of thousands of dollars.
A lot of time the companies paying for this service don’t have very clear reporting on what this service is actually doing for them.
Here’s the way you should look at it.
SEO is explained in this article (Link to the SEO Article) and if you read that article you know that the purpose of SEO is to get your website to show up when someone enters a certain search into Google.
But so what? How does this help you?
What if your company is named Acme motors and you have an SEO company that sends you a report saying that they now have you showing up for Acme motors, Acme motors in (your town), or Acme motors owned by (your name). Is this good SEO? Does it help you?
It depends. You should get a comprehensive report when you start an SEO campaign and list out all of the terms you already show up for on the first page. Get the exact position you rank for these.
Strategy
In a good SEO campaign you are going to take some time at the beginning of the campaign to set some targets that are designed to back up your existing marketing and sales process.
Example 1:
If you have no issue getting in touch with potential prospects but need to boost your authority with them, you may pick some terms that are not that competitive, but that are relevant to your industry. This way when you execute your campaign you’ll be able to tell them to look up those specific terms and see that you show up #1.
This won’t get you new people that haven’t ever heard of you before, but it can help back up your existing sales process and is a valid use of SEO.
Example 2:
You could also have the case where you are trying to get in front of a lot of new people so they find out about your product or service. It’s usually best practice to start with a paid ad campaign (link to paid ad service) to test responses to different messages and searches, but if you have a good idea of what terms you should show up for you can dive straight into the SEO campaign.
In this case you should be able to track your position in the search results and compare it against the number of people that visit your website based on finding you in search results.
You should also track how many of those visitors turn into sales prospects, how many of them are sold and how much profit you make from those sales.
Comparing the results of the campaign to the amount you spend on it over time will give you a good idea of the return on your investment into SEO.
Conclusion:
There are a number of different reasons you might be running an SEO campaign. They could all have separate reports that were required to track the ROI of the campaign.
You should always at least get the report at the beginning of the campaign on your ranking and then get regular updates so you can see the progress towards showing up for your targeted keywords/searches. Always track or make sure you are getting accurate reporting on this no matter what else you are tracking on the campaign and you’ll have a fairly accurate look at your ROI on a properly run SEO campaign.