The ROI of SEO

Search engine optimization (SEO) is far from dead in 2023 and will be even more alive and valuable in 2024. SEO is still one of the best and fastest ways to improve a business website’s visibility in search engines. SEO marketing centers around optimizing on-page website elements and launching campaigns related to products, services, and information. This process often involves using long- and short-tail keywords based on what people search for online.

The more visible your website pages are, the easier it becomes for potential customers to find them. If you have not yet invested in SEO keyword research as a marketing strategy, now is the time. SEO statistics revealed that 53% of all website traffic is responsible for organic searches. And the global SEO industry will reach an estimated value of $122 billion by 2028. This estimation means you should get on top of your business’s SEO strategies fast to claim and retain your market share over the long term.

The long-term part is crucial because you don’t want to make a big splash and get all the organic traffic to your website, only for it to fizzle out weeks later. SEO, when done right, is sustainable since you can use it across paid and organic campaigns and on social media.

Furthermore, the longer your website ranks high on search engines, especially Google, the better the chances of it being seen as authoritative. This helps improve your business’s reputation and boosts overall engagement with customers, allowing you to make more money.

Benefits of Investing in SEO

Your SEO strategy aligns with your return on investment (ROI) formula. A positive ROI SEO outcome is the top benefit you’ll enjoy when implementing SEO strategies.

The highest ROI of SEO is the goal. So, the more effort you put into your SEO digital marketing methods, the more stellar your ROI will be. SEO marketing offers a close rate of nearly 15% on new leads, compared to the meager 2% that traditional marketing offers.

This entire process relies on search engine searches, which, in turn, relies on good SEO. You won’t generate quality leads if your website does not rank on the first page.

You need to ask yourself: What is a good ROI for my business? Then, get cracking on SEO to reach that goal.

Learn about actionable insights demonstrating the power of organic search through keyword rankings. The other benefits of investing in SEO include the following:

1. SEO Marketing Results in High-Quality Traffic

It’s not good enough to drive hordes of visitors to your website. Using digital marketing techniques like SEO, you can drive targeted traffic at the best possible times. Doing this allows you to get their attention while they are searching for your products and services.

2. SEO Continuously Promotes Your Products and Services

Google handles around 99,000 searches every second, equating to 8.5 billion searches every day. Bing sees 900 million searches a day, while DuckDuckGo processes nearly 100 million searches per day. Granted, not all these searches link to your products and services, but at least thousands will be.

Implementing SEO on your website means you’re providing online users with the results they are searching for. You are giving them a solution to their problem. And, the best part is you can promote your business 24/7, but not in an in-your-face promotional way.

Furthermore, using SEO, you can reach potential customers at every stage of your marketing funnel without contacting them directly from the get-go. It is the opposite of cold calling and email marketing. You are providing your target audience with information they are actively searching for. Modern consumers want relevant or useful content, which is what SEO marketing gives them.

3. SEO Improves Brand Awareness

Extensive SEO marketing allows your brand and website to show in multiple searches. For instance, if you manufacture air conditioning units and someone searches for new aircon units, they will come across your website. If they search for a specific air conditioning brand that you also provide, your website will pop up again.

SEO marketing improves brand awareness and shows your target audience that you are an authority in this specific niche. Consider adding video marketing to your SEO efforts, and you won’t look back.

4. SEO Enhances PPC Efforts

Business owners often lump pay-per-click (PPC) and SEO together as one strategy. However, PPC advertising refers to paid strategies, while SEO is mostly free. Yet, despite this marked difference, these strategies work well together. Your website gets a better chance of appearing at the top of Google SERPs when you use PPC campaigns and organic SEO strategies. Furthermore, you can also apply your SEO keywords and phrases to your PPC content for paid search strategies.

Combining PPC and SEO gives you more reason to calculate ROI and allows you to get far ahead of your competition in the search rankings. It increases your overall competitiveness in your niche market and expands your ROI. All the extra profit your business makes from putting effort into your SEO campaign can go towards creating a new product line or adding to your team. This is what makes SEO a win-win choice.

5. SEO Content Reaches All Types of Audiences

Your business likely has more than one target market. For example, if you run a health and wellness brand, your SEO content will attract those who want to live healthier lives. But your business content will also appeal to executives who need a break from their hectic work schedule. SEO helps you reach both audiences if you create keywords that both would typically use in their online searches.

Using SEO to reach multiple audiences will also lower your advertising budget. A well-thought-out SEO campaign aimed at more than one audience will get you on the first page of Google and other search engines while using fewer PPC strategies.

SEO is a sustainable, ongoing marketing tactic you can use over the long term. You can update your strategies when search engine algorithms change to ensure maximum success.

How to Prove the ROI of SEO

SEO ROI calculates the value that SEO activities bring to your business compared to their cost. Calculating ROI is not complicated, but there are several factors to consider.

Firstly, you must learn how to calculate the exact ROI value of your SEO campaigns. There are several formulas you can use, but a simple method involves dividing your SEO profit by the amount you’ve spent on SEO-related campaigns.

Put more simply, this formula would be:

SEO ROI = (value of organic sales – cost of SEO investments) / cost of SEO investments

Calculating the Cost of SEO

While SEO is a free way of advertising your business, there are several costs associated with it as well as time investments. When calculating the ROI of your SEO, you must include the cost of hiring content creators, SEO agencies, SEO software subscriptions, content distribution or link building, and other SEO tools. Calculate the combined sum of these costs over a set period.

For instance, you may only use an SEO agency for a few months to oversee your SEO content campaign. Or you may choose to employ an in-house SEO team to provide SEO services full-time. The same goes for software. You must decide whether you want to subscribe to an annual SEO software plan or if you want to use the free version for only a couple of weeks.

Calculating the Value of Organic Conversions

You must use Google Analytics to track your website traffic and sales to calculate the value of your organic traffic conversions. When you generate an analytics report, define your criteria as ‘organic’ and use the figure provided.

If you want to, you can also include the value of so-called assisted conversions and e-commerce conversion values. To track e-commerce conversion, you need to use Google Tag Manager to add e-commerce events to your website.

Calculating ROINow that you have the required figures, you can use the SEO ROI formula for ROI calculations. For example, if you generated $100,000 with your SEO campaign and your cost of investment was $20,000, your formula would be:

SEO ROI = ($100,000 – $20,000) / $20,000 = 2

So, for every $1 spent on SEO, you earned $2. So, your ROI is 200%. This calculation is the foundation of calculating SEO ROI.

SEO ROI Forecasting

Once you have the calculations down, you can start forecasting SEO ROI. Doing this will help you use your resources more efficiently and make changes where needed. Forecasting requires you to evaluate your website’s previous SEO performance and average conversion rate. Also, consider the potential of your organic traffic. Once again, you can use online analytics tools to generate reports on your SEO campaign performance.

Other Factors To Consider

Other factors also come into play when you try to determine how successful your SEO strategies are. You should set up KPIs (key performance indicators) to track your successes and failures.

Your main KPIs should include search rankings and organic traffic. It should also include your website’s bounce rate. The bounce rate refers to users clicking on a link to your website but then leaving without taking any further action. It is essential to find the reasons for a high bounce rate, as this will have a massive impact on the success of your on-page SEO content.

Another must-measure KPI is organic CTR (click-through rate). This KPI measures how many users click on your website after finding your information on the first page of Google. A high CTR means that your SEO efforts are paying off and reaching your target audience with appealing content.

Moreover, you should be monitoring both soft and hard conversions. Hard conversions relate to phone calls, demos, and contact forms, while soft conversions refer to newsletter signups, social media engagement, and blog downloads.

Other essential KPIs include site speed, pages visited per session, and organic impressions.

Challenges With Measuring SEO ROI

Some challenges may arise when measuring your SEO ROI, including flawed marketing attribution. It is not always easy to calculate conversions by marketing channel because there are so many touch points to consider. It is also difficult to attribute conversions to organic Google search traffic. Website data is often blocked by quick bounces and ad blockers.

Another challenge is the connection between brand-building and SEO. For instance, if someone watches a video on YouTube, searches for the product, and buys it from the website, organic traffic is attributed to the conversion, even though SEO did not motivate the sale. But you can also maintain the effectiveness of SEO on search engine searches throughout the sales funnel and convert prospects that way. However, the assessment is still challenging because you cannot segment branded and non-branded organic traffic with conversion data.

Furthermore, you cannot measure your brand’s SEO retention value, even though it has a visible impact on online searches.

What is a Good ROI for SEO?

So, now that you know the ROI formula for SEO and how to prove SEO ROI, you may be wondering what a good ROI for SEO is. Firstly, no business’ SEO ROI is the same as the next. An online business won’t have the same ROI percentage as a lawyer’s practice. This is because online businesses can sell and track sales directly related to SEO marketing. On the other hand, a lawyer’s firm has a far longer sales funnel, which ends in leads and not sales. Attribution also plays a huge role in determining the best SEO ROI for your business.

However, there is a rule of thumb. When it comes to the ROI of SEO, you should aim for a sales and marketing ratio of at least 5:1. This means that you should earn $5 for every dollar spent on marketing, including SEO.

You can also determine a good ROI for SEO by comparing it to your other marketing touch points. If your SEO ROI is higher than your paid digital marketing investment, it indicates that your ROI is good.

Your business’s SEO ROI will be unique to your niche. But, in general, SEO is proven to exceed the results of paid marketing strategies. This means your business will continue to benefit and reach new audiences over the long term without requiring a higher or additional investment.