Scrutinizing the success of your allocated search engine optimization (SEO) strategies is essential to determine whether your money, time, and efforts are spent adequately and effectively. To achieve hightailing results, you have to use a range of key performance indicators (KPIs) and refurbish them to match your company’s needs and preferences. However, if there’s one thing that potentates all KPIs, it’s the return on investment (ROI) you gain from your SEO campaigns.
What Is Return on Investment (ROI)?
Return on Investment (ROI) can be referred to as a performance measure for evaluating your investments’ efficiency and portability while also comparing different SEO campaigns’ effectiveness levels. Essentially speaking, this key attribute assesses whether you’re putting the right amount of resources in addition to getting the most out of them. Or, in other words, by calculating the ROI, you can ensure that nothing is going to waste or causing your net income to deteriorate.
Calculating Return on Investment (ROI) for SEO Campaigns
To measure the ROI of your SEO campaign, you must set up your conversion tracker in Google Analytics, which conveniently lets you track the conversions occurring on your website at any given time. However, the type of conversion tracking mostly depends upon your online page’s nature and whether it performs direct eCommerce operations.
If you’re running an eCommerce site, tracking your conversions this way will offer you direct access to the sales figures generated through online transactions, hence allowing you to measure your total revenue in a specific period.
After that, you can calculate the ROI percentage by using the given formula:
[(Gain from Investment – Total Investment Cost) / Total Investment Cost] * 100
7 Ways to Measure the Return on Investment (ROI) of Your SEO Campaigns
To put things into further context, given below are the top seven ways for calculating the ROI of your SEO campaigns effectively:
1- Sales Figures
Sales are the first thing that defines the success of any SEO campaign. It’s not challenging to understand why since that’s what concludes whether your implied optimization techniques impact the bottom line or completely miss the mark.
Calculating the ROI for eCommerce is a straightforward process. By setting up advanced eCommerce tracking in Google Analytics, you can directly extract the monetary value of the organic traffic coming your way using simple formulas. Alternatively, on a professional service website, the completed website inquiry forms, and phone number truncation measures a conversion to enable the SEO Agency to get the most approximate sales figures and metrics. You should ensure that all your inbound forms, calls, and leads are tracked and channeled correctly into the system for evaluation.
2- Leads
It’s just as important to track the exact or, at least, the approximate number of qualified leads from organic resources to determine the ROI generated with the active SEO campaigns. More often than not, while companies measure rankings and organic traffic, as these factors are key indicators of success, they don’t evaluate the leads that directly result in an ROI boost.
3- Organic Traffic
Looking at the overall organic traffic upthrusts experienced in a given period for specific URLs is also one of the most convenient ways to measure your SEO campaigns’ ROI. After calculating this metric, you can compare the result value with the new and non-branded keyword positioning. And lastly, you can tie it all together with your Google Analytics goals, including sales and leads originated from organic search.
4- Qualified Organic Traffic
While an increase in organic traffic is an infallible sign that your SEO campaigns are performing as they should, you need to further explore this metric for achieving better ROI. After all, the more engaging and relevant the content would be to your viewers, the more time they would spend exploring your website’s different pages.
That’s why measuring your organic traffic is just not enough. To boost your ROI, you have to pinpoint the exact area from where your ‘qualified’ organic traffic comes from. For instance, if you’re running a beauty products site but getting your organic traffic from holiday destination websites, your SEO efforts will probably go to waste rather than making any positive difference.
5- Keyword Research and Mapping
Another one of the best ways of measuring the ROI of your SEO campaign is via keyword research and mapping. There are a handful of options to make that happen. For instance, you can map the total cost-per-click value of your target keywords as your estimated traffic digits and take it from there. One can also use any other complex method involving calculating traffic projections and total keyword search volume to make timely estimations. There is a challenge, as data in Australia from several tools may not be entirely accurate.
6- Bounce Rate
The next approach you can take to evaluate your ROI from SEO campaigns is to consider the average time spent on the individual web pages and its bounce rate. When the average time rate that visitors take for exploring your website increases, it signals Google that the said site’s content is valuable for the people looking into a similar niche online.
7- Click-Through Rate and Conversion Rate
The click-through rate (CTR) and conversion rate can also be used to calculate the ROI of your SEO campaigns when you’ve already taken measures to improve the website’s relevancy level for the targeted audience. It’s essential to understand that you can never measure your ROI correctly as long as the calculations are done concerning the rankings alone. However, with the current CTR and conversion rate, you’re bound to get a much clearer picture of your company’s online and financial stability.
The Final Verdict
The next thing that pops into mind after you measure the ROI of your SEO campaign is whether what your company is generating constitutes a good percentage. The answer to this question depends on how much you invest in your SEO campaigns and what you get in return. In general, gaining $2.75 for every dollar you spend is generally considered a good ROI, especially for long-term investments. The best approach to acquiring this result is by working with an expert SEO agency that professionally handles and optimizes your website content using effective techniques. The true value of an SEO-generated new buying customer must factor in the cost per acquisition – including the average transaction sales value of your service but also be sure to include considerations of how many word of mouth referrals are generated for every one new SEO channel client.
