SEO ROI: Why It’s Tricky To Work Out (And How To Do It)

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If you want your business website to be visible online and have a healthy flow of organic trafficOrganic search traffic (sometimes called natural or unpaid search) is the traffic that's driven to a website because of unpaid placement on a search engine results page., conversions, and sales, you can’t ignore the power of SEO. After all, three-quarters of search engine users say they never scroll past the first page of results, which means you can’t afford to scrimp on your SEO strategy. Of course, paid search advertising costs money, but organic SEO isn’t free either.

There is no doubt that when executed correctly, SEO is a valuable investment for any company, but it can be tricky to convince those who are responsible for budgets and making big decisions. Before giving you the green light to go full steam ahead, they’ll want to know what the SEO return on investment (ROI)The ROI is the ratio of the return from an investment to the cost of the investment. will look like and the cold, hard benefits of such investment. This is easier said than done because organic SEO is seen as a long-term investment that can take months or even years to pay off, so coming up with a concrete figure for your ROI on SEO can be difficult.

If SEO ROI is confusing you, our blog is here to help you work out the real ROI of SEO.

What Is ROI for SEO?

Theoretically, the ROI of SEO is the amount of revenue your business generates from its investment in an SEO strategy. To do this, you need to monitor your organic traffic, revenue gained from organic search, conversionA conversion is a desirable result on a website that leads to an action such as completing an order, filling out a form, or simply clicking on a link. rates, and other key performance indicators (KPIs). This might sound straightforward, but there’s a lot more that goes into determining ROI on SEO.

How To Work Out the Basic ROI of SEO

Figuring out the ROI on SEO is pretty easy at a basic level. All you need to do is take the revenue you’ve gained and subtract the cost of your SEO efforts from this. It’s as simple as that, right? Wrong.

You’ll likely know how much you’ve spent on SEO, but the problem comes when judging the value of the conversions that directly result from SEO attribution. This is because it can be difficult to know exactly where your customers have come from.

For example, they might be aware of your business because of clicking on your content in the SERPs (search engine results pages), but it might be a social media advert that they click on just before making a purchase, which means the SEO part won’t take any of the credit, although it would have helped the customer grow trust in your brand before making the purchase.

Determining The Costs of Your SEO Strategy

The easy part of working out your SEO ROI is knowing how much you spent on your efforts. Even if you decide to keep your SEO work in-house or do it yourself, this will still take up a lot of time for you and your employees. SEO can take a long time to bring results, so it’s best not to concentrate on monthly comparisons.

These are the costs that are usually associated with organic SEO:

Your In-House Employees

Are you keeping your SEO in-house? That’s fine, but don’t forget that you’ll have to account for your employees’ wages. Whether you keep your content creation and writing, technical SEO, web design, or other marketing elements with your in-house team, you’ll need to factor their wages into your SEO strategy costs.

Freelancers

Do you rely on freelancers for some aspects of your SEO? If so, you need to factor these costs in.

SEO Agency

Outsourcing to professional SEO services is a smart move. It means you can rest assured that your digital marketing efforts are going in the right direction, but you’ll need to account for this.

SEO Tools

Don’t forget about subscription costs that you might pay for specific software or tools like SEMrush.

Link BuildingLink building is a process of acquiring links pointing to your website. These links are obtained by creating content, participating in social media or commenting on other blogs.

If you pay for your linksHyperlinks, also known as links, are the connection points on a webpage that take you to other webpages. or pay a team to distribute guest posts, you’ll have to factor this into your SEO spend.

Calculating The Value of Organic Traffic Conversions

Knowing how many conversions come from organic SEO can be complex. One of the most important ways to determine this is by setting up conversion tracking in Google Analytics (GA), ensuring it is set to organic search resultsOrganic search results are the natural, un-paid search results for a keyword on Google..

This will tell you how many conversions Google thinks happened because of your SEO efforts. These figures are helpful and reliable if you run an eCommerce business, as your goal is more sales. However, your conversions will be harder to monitor if you’re a business that runs on lead generation.

Other Factors That Indicate Your Strategy’s Value

There are other ways to measure the SEO ROI value that don’t involve traffic conversions. These are the KPIs that indicate your SEO efforts are paying off:

Click Through Rate

Your CTR is how many users saw your page in the SERPs and decided to click through to it.

Soft Conversions

These include email newsletter sign-ups, downloading content, and sharing on social media. Soft conversions tend to result in you getting a new lead, so they’re as valuable as hard conversions when it comes to brand awareness.

Number of Organic Visitors

If your organic visitor numbers are increasing, it’s a sure thing that your brand awareness is, too, even if your sales aren’t seeing the same uplift.

Search Engine Rankings

Your rankings are probably the most important KPI when judging ROI on SEO. If you’ve seen that you’re climbing up the SERPs, that’s proof that your SEO is working.

Pages Per Session

Pages per session tell you how many pages a visitor clicks on before leaving your site. If the number is high, that’s a good indication that they are engaged in your content.

Organic Impressions

Impressions are how many times your content has appeared in the SERPs. If this gets bigger, you can rest easy knowing your brand awareness is increasing.

Assisted Conversions and GA4

We’ve already touched on how tricky it can be to determine which marketing channel brought your converted traffic. For example, a user might have read your blog content through relevant search results but might only purchase after clicking on an ad on social media. In this case, SEO won’t get any credit even though it’s done a lot of foundational work in gaining customer trust and brand awareness.

Assisted conversions can help with this and give you a clearer idea of how customers choose you, giving each channel its respective credit. To do this, you need to be using the data-driven attribution model (DDA) with Google Analytics 4 (GA4).

This SEO attribution model means each relevant marketing channel involved gets its share of the credit for conversion events. Using machine learningMachine Learning is the branch of artificial intelligence (AI) that gives computers the ability to learn without being explicitly programmed., it distinguishes between:

Conversion paths: A series of touchpoints that eventually lead to a conversion. Each channel in the path will get partial credit. Basically, with this method, the algorithm pieces together what happened to lead to a conversion.
Non-conversion paths: These are exactly the same, but the touchpoints don’t result in a conversion, which means the data gets discounted.

These are the touchpoints that Google sees as the essential ones for each conversion path:

Organic search
Organic social
Email
Referral
Paid search

The DDA model will give you SEO graphs for each touchpoint so you can see how much weight each touchpoint had at different sales funnel stages. Obviously, to track your ROI SEO, you should focus on organic search.

Why SEO ROI Is Difficult To Measure

SEO takes time, search engines change their algorithms, and it can take a while for any tweaks you make to account for these to bear fruit in the SERPs. It’s a long-term marketing strategy, not a one-and-done job, which means the usual methods of determining ROI aren’t effective.

ROI For SEO Takes A While: It can take as long as a year before you start to see the positive effects of your SEO efforts. For effective SEO, you need to invest for the long term.
Attribution Has Its Flaws: GA4 won’t collect data from every session, maybe because the tracking code was blocked.
Can’t Measure Retention or Brand: SEO ROI doesn’t look at customer loyalty and retention and doesn’t account for brand awareness, even though SEO undoubtedly helps with this.
Limited Testing and Comparison Opportunities: Unlike paid options, you can’t ‘test’ SEO easily as it can’t be turned off and on again to see what happens without it.

SEO ROI: What Should You Concentrate On?

We’ve made it clear that measuring the true value of your SEO ROI is trickier than you might initially think. There are lots of elements that can contribute to it due to the long-term nature of SEO. If you notice that your search visibility is increasing and use a rank tracker to monitor this, it’s a solid sign that your SEO efforts are paying off. For a more well-rounded view of how well your SEO is doing, always factor in the KPIs we’ve mentioned when crunching the numbers. If you need help maximising your ROI through SEO management or any of our other services, contact the team today!