Every year, businesses from all over the world invest a sizable chunk of money into search engine optimization (SEO) in the hopes of raising their rankings for pertinent terms, which they anticipate would increase visibility, traffic, and sales.
How much money are we discussing? According to reports, businesses in the US spent $73.38 billion on SEO in 2019—that’s approximately 9.5% of the $776.30 billion the industry as a whole spent on digital marketing.
Calculating The Return on Investment From Your SEO Efforts
ROI stands for “return on investment, ‘which Shopify defines as” the money an investor in a business earns for the injection of financial capital.”
The most widely used method for calculating ROI is to divide net revenue by the total cost of an investment. There are other acknowledged methods as well. The calculated amount would then be multiplied by 100 to create a percentage, which is how ROI is typically stated.
So, is the procedure this simple if you want to assess the ROI of your SEO efforts? Sadly, the short answer is NO.
One significant problem with determining ROI from SEO is that it doesn’t frequently have fixed expenditures attached to it, which would make it simple for a marketer to link a certain investment to a given period of time. There aren’t set fees for the hits and conversions an SEO strategy brings in since an organization must earn the traffic from organic search results.
All things considered, SEO is inherently complicated, which might make it more difficult to get an exact ROI. However, it is still crucial to evaluate the SEO ROI, which is often done by assessing performance and taking into account elements like conversion rates and the increase of organic traffic.
What Are Some of the Metrics That Can Help Your Company Get a Return On its SEO Investment?
We should probably now define the term “key performance indicator,” or KPI. KPIs are quantitative measurements of performance over time that may be quite useful for assessing how successfully your organization is reaching crucial business objectives.
It may rapidly become a difficult procedure to try to account for them all because there are so many variables that can affect the ROI that any particular SEO strategy offers. So let’s focus on only three major variables that will enable you to evaluate the return on your SEO effort.
1. Conversions From Website Visitors
We already discussed conversions; according to MarketingSherpa, a conversion is “the point at which a recipient of a marketing message performs a desired action.”
If those definitions seem a bit vague in terms of scope, it’s because conversions can refer to a wide variety of behaviors. And the specifics of what you decide to measure as conversions will probably rely on the current growth and development stage of your organization and the goals you had when you started your SEO strategy.
One example of a conversion is when a person who found your website through a search engine results page (SERP) purchases anything from your business, thereby “converting” from a casual visitor to a paying client.
However, a conversion need not result in a sale. You might be anxious to measure additional, smaller conversions, such website visitors signing up for your email newsletters or scheduling a product demo, especially in the early phases of your SEO strategy.
In fact, it’s definitely worthwhile to point out that a special focus on turning visitors to your website into paying clients would start to go beyond of the clear SEO bounds.
Your SEO effort may be regarded to be successful if your site receives high ranks in search results for pertinent phrases and receives pertinent traffic as a consequence. It can be a smart idea to hire conversion rate optimization (CRO) specialists if you appear to be having trouble turning that traffic into purchases.
2. Growth in Organic Traffic
It might seem almost too obvious to mention, but seeing increasing amounts of organic traffic to your website and foot traffic to your business’s physical location is another sign that your investment in SEO is paying off in a significant way.
One other element that you might consider alongside this, is keyword positions. The positions that your site is achieving in the search engine rankings for certain terms you have optimized for shouldn’t be regarded as a primary indicator of your site’s SEO performance. However, it is still wise to track keyword positions at a high level for a handful of money keywords that you know are of major importance to your organization’s bottom-line.
Nonetheless, the difference that your rankings make to the organic traffic your site receives is what is especially important – not simply whether you rank inside or outside the top three on Google for a particular keyword. This is why you must pay close attention to keywords that would generate revenue for your business when ranked higherup in search engine result pages (SERPs).
3. Link Acquisition
The backlink profile of your website, or the distribution of websites linking to it from other parts of the internet, will also have a significant impact on the ROI your SEO effort will provide.
It is essential that the backlinks your website receives are quality backlinks since they are the ones that will assist your site rise in the search engine results. You may increase the likelihood that Google will rank your site highly in the rankings by attracting a significant number of backlinks from sites that are currently highly ranked in its search results and are regarded as trustworthy.
By measuring your site’s effective “cost per link” over an extended period of time, you can measure link acquisition and improve the decisions you make for future link-building efforts.
Are you ready to help drive up your site’s ROI from SEO by joining forces with an SEO agency in Lagos that you can trust? If so, please don’t wait any longer to get in touch with the Osoria Digital team, so that we can explore the possibilities for how we could work together.
