Why do digital marketers invest so much money in their SEO strategies?
Given that organic search accounts for more than half of all website traffic, optimizing your website to draw in as much traffic as possible makes sense.
More traffic may increase sales. But you need to know how to calculate SEO’s ROI effectively if you want to know what to concentrate on to increase your website’s revenue potential.
To evaluate the effectiveness of search engine optimization, you can utilize a variety of metrics in Google Analytics (SEO). You can monitor your website’s traffic, referrals, conversions, and other indicators. But one statistic should take precedence to assess your campaigns’ genuine worth: Return on investment (ROI).
You’ll be well on your way to knowing what causes SEO ROI, how to convey SEO ROI to clients, and how to boost ROI for your website once you’ve finished reading this article.
What is SEO ROI (Return on Investment)?
A calculation known as SEO ROI evaluates the Profitability of search engine optimization. Using the SEO ROI formula, businesses can determine SEO’s return on investment by examining search engine rankings, organic website traffic, and objective completions. Investment gain divided by investment cost is known as ROI.
How to calculate the ROI for SEO
Find out how to determine the ROI of SEO in three simple steps:
1. Set up conversion tracking
Setting up conversion tracking in Google Analytics is the first step in calculating your return on investment from SEO. This enables you to keep track of all the revenue-generating conversions on your website.
Whether or not you make sales directly on your website will affect your setup. Online retailers can utilize ecommerce tracking to gather information from their transactions and calculate their precise online earnings. This indicates that the information for online returns is very accurate.
Conversion goals, such as lead form submissions, can be set by lead-based organizations, such as service providers. Financial values can be assigned to such goals depending on customer information. To set up conversion tracking on their websites, both sorts of organizations can follow these steps:
1.1. Ecommerce: How to set up conversion tracking for measuring SEO’s ROI
Setting up ecommerce tracking according to Google’s guidelines is the most effective technique to monitor sales from an online business.
You may obtain an Ecommerce Overview report (Conversions > Ecommerce > Overview) with all the data about your online sales after you begin monitoring ecommerce data on your website.
This report helps track your progress and gauge the general success of your website. Hence, even if you don’t intend to estimate your ROI from SEO immediately, we advise you to set up ecommerce tracking immediately.
The more data you have to work with when you decide to go further into Analytics, the sooner you start collecting it.
1.2. Lead generation: How to set up conversion tracking for measuring SEO’s ROI
It’s a little more challenging to obtain precise information on your income generation if you don’t make direct sales on your website. The most precise estimate is obtained by putting monetary values on each of your on-site conversions based on data from previous transactions.
Create objectives for every on-site conversion by going to Admin > View > Goals in Analytics. If you have call tracking set up on your website, these objectives might include phone calls, free quotation requests, and submissions of contact forms.
Finally, add an expected value for each conversion in the Target Details box.
Although these numbers won’t be exact, you can get a reasonable approximation if you have access to analytics data.
- Determine how many of the leads convert into sales. This objective has a 25% conversion rate. For instance, if you receive 100 lead forms every month, and 25 of those leads convert to clients.
- Determine the average value of each sale. Your average value is $200 if each of the leads that convert spends $200.
- Determine the value of each lead. By dividing the total value of conversions by the initial number of leads, you can calculate the worth of each lead. Applying the figures above, you would profit $5,000 if you acquired 25 clients, and they each spent $200. Each of the 100 leads you initially generated is worth $50 on average, so divide $5,000 by that number.
Before continuing to the next stage, use this formula for each goal and input the relevant values.
2. Sort your conversions by channel
Once you’ve been tracking conversions for around a month, you should have enough data to begin calculating your SEO ROI.
Seeing the Conversions report under Conversions > Multi-Channel Funnels > Assisted Conversions is the quickest approach to achieve this.
You may sort all of the conversions on your site within the given time frame by the channels that influenced them by selecting “Conversions” at the report’s top.
3. Calculate your SEO ROI
You may calculate your ROI by comparing the amount of money your SEO strategy brought in over a certain period (usually a month or a quarter) to the amount you spent on SEO during that time.
Most companies utilize the methodology below to determine SEO’s return on investment.
You may compare SEO ROI to your company’s other marketing channels if it already has a system for doing so.
For instance, some businesses determine ROI by utilizing the net profit from each sale rather than the whole revenue. Use the same metrics for your SEO approach to ensure a fair comparison.
If you don’t already have a way to figure out your marketing ROI, you may use the (Gain from Investment – Cost of Investment)/Cost of Investment calculation from Investopedia. The ROI is then calculated as a percentage by multiplying the result by 100.
Two other Google Analytics reports for measuring SEO ROI
You may refer to a few more Google Analytics data, depending on your company and configuration, to assist in calculating the return on investment from SEO.
The following reports are directly connected to your ROI; when combined with your initial estimate, they may help you get a broad sense of how your approach is doing.
1. Assisting Interactions Analysis
Whether the conversion is a purchase, the submission of a lead form, or anything else, most of your clients will visit your website more than once before making a conversion.
For instance, a consumer could come across your website in search engine results, browse your product pages during their initial visit, and then depart without purchasing. In the future, customers might enter your URL into their browser to visit your site immediately and make a purchase.
Depending on the conversion attribution approach you utilize, you can have a biased perception of where that consumer originated.
For instance, considering recent interactions, you could believe that a transaction came from direct traffic. You wouldn’t necessarily be wrong, but this approach ignores the fact that they arrived there via organic search, which means that a transaction most likely wouldn’t have happened absent SEO.
In this case, organic search helped to facilitate the conversion. Events like this and the value of the channels that don’t directly lead to conversions but contribute to them in the early stages are shown in the Helping Interactions Analysis report (Conversions > Multi-Channel Funnels > Assisted Conversions).
By taking into account the part each of your channels plays in conversions, even when they aren’t the last engagement, you can better understand the worth of each of your channels.
SEO ROI, SEO ROI, SEO ROI
2. Top Conversion Paths
The Top Conversion Pathways (Conversions > Multi-Channel Funnels > Top Conversion Paths) report considers all of the processes that lead to conversion, similar to the Helping Interactions Analysis report.
But instead of displaying the unique contributions made by each channel, it displays the typical routes your users use to convert. In this case, the most familiar user journey is discovering the website via organic search, returning later to the site directly, and converting.
This report is beneficial because it helps you understand how visitors to your website and other channels behave before purchasing or submitting their contact information. Also, the better your understanding of your target audience, the more successfully you can plan future efforts.
Here’s Your Moment to Show How SEO Is Valuable
As marketers, we are aware of the value of SEO. Yet your case must be stronger if you want other people to agree with you.
Marketing may feel much more real and substantial by personalizing the possible payout. Yet when the potential rewards are obvious, it is much harder to discount the power of SEO
