How To Measure ROI On SEO

The best-performed SEO (Search Engine Optimization) activities for your business determines that the Return On Investment (ROI) made on your website.

The success of any SEO marketing strategy is determined by revenue generation including, increasing organic traffic, gaining referrals, and conversions that provide you finances, thus, representing your business on the digital platform.

But many marketers calculate this success either by one or another metrics such as online traffic or backlinks of the website which won’t help with the ranking on SERPs all alone.

In the chart below, some of the primary metrics such as ranking, traffic, leads, and sales are what an SEO must accomplish when we are tracking its success.

So, the million-dollar question is how do you measure ROI from all metrics laid out by Google algorithms and guidelines.

Today, marketers are understanding the need to measure it, as in Demand Gen Report of 2021 states that,

44% of marketers say that measuring the ROI is better for our demand generation initiatives which are their top priority as of last year, 2021.

That is why the SEO return on investment is getting popular among marketers and in this blog I am going to help you with everything that is ROI on SEO.

But first, let’s understand the meaning of ROI for SEO.

So, let’s get started.

What Does ROI Mean For SEO?

Return on investment for SEO applied means estimating the overall optimization activities at their face value is invested by your business while keeping in mind the difference in their cost to assess profitable and strong ROI SEO techniques.

SEO Return On Investment is a performance metric used to assess profitable investment in SEO operations and techniques, which may vary from industry to industry. 

The graph below shows the SEO ROI statistics by different industries showing different returns on investments between 6 to 14 months of a working business. 

Here, you can see the estimated ROI on SEO techniques doesn’t have any cost value but shows a hike in the essential KPIs (traffic, sales, and conversions) and increased productivity in the form of more than 500% (for Addiction Treatment, B2B SaaS) and 1000% (for real estate, financial services).

Does this makes your head roll! 

Well, the cost when measured in numbers such as capital invested or revenue gained is easy to understand as is the case of the shopkeeper who bought 100 pens for 70 rupees and sold them for 120 rupees.

Here, it is easy to measure that the difference of Rs 50 is the profit gained for the shopkeeper.

But, a digital platform promoting a brand’s product requires special techniques called SEO expertise and so, the ROI SEO formula comes in handy.

The formula can easily calculate SEO ROI, but first calculate the revenue of your business which is the product of the difference between the value of SEO before and after a campaign into the time taken for SEO to work, as shown in the picture below. 

And from the above data, the campaign costs are another element calculated by adding SEO campaign costs with the product of ongoing costs, and the time taken which requires constant site checks and calculations. 

This accounted for SEO costs is for a constant time to remove, add and improve SEO elements as per the requirement of your website and earn revenue by making conversions.

Now, as you would become aware of the SEO ROI formula, that is

Note: For a successful SEO marketing campaign, your website should get more search traffic and better rankings because those are the things that would lead to more money in sales for your business, so SEO gets more ROI than ads.

You can observe the return on investment by an applied SEO is much more effective and long-term than the PPC campaigns of Google Ads.

How To Measure ROI On SEO

ROI on SEO is a challenge for those business owners that don’t like to be involved with the technical side of the SEO and for many years it was difficult to calculate the ROI of SEO correctly which is because SEO doesn’t have a fixed cost like PPC.

As the COVID wave changed the market, businesses are eager to keep an eye on every dime that they spent and invest in their business online.

And, as you know that SEO is all rage on the digital market platforms today as it is all about earning organic traffic and ranking, you must know how to measure SEO.

A fact by Hubspot states,

“Nearly 93% of all web traffic comes through search engines (Search Engine Journal) and nearly 75% of all searchers click a link on the first page of their search results”

These statistics show the evidence of opportunities presents online on search engines in the form of organic traffic which is 93%, nearly the whole population on the internet as shown in the picture below.

So, if you are an SEO marketer or business owner, that is you sell digital products and services, the ROI on SEO justifies your existence here and that is why you must know how to calculate SEO ROI.

Now, let’s understand how to calculate ROI in SEO in detail.

Collect Data Of Your SEO Investments

Investments in SEO can credit you with more than you have estimated and more you would earn through increased traffic and conversions.

Here are some statistics from Backlinko that backs my statement,

ROI for Thought Leadership Marketing( Transactional top quality keywords research & blog write-ups) is around 748% in less than a year

Another, 

ROI for Technical SEO (Technical repairs, keyword study, title tag rewrites) is approx. 117% in 6 months

And, the last one,

ROI for standard Web Content Advertising( average quality keywords research study & blog write-ups) is about 16% in 15 months

The data above showed a promising return on the investments made on SEO of your websites such as targeted keywords, title tags, and other improvement techniques to make your website a better experience for your customers as shown in the graph below.

In the above graph, you can observe different SEOs used to enhance your website and what percentage of SEO are highly used- SMM (50%), Keyword Research (44%), and so on.

On this note, your SEO investments can be divided into three categories:

i) In-House Staff

Your content creator, front end- and back end- web developers, and any other involved employee that works directly for your website optimization.

Their salaries paid every month are also investments that could reduce a larger portion of the marketing finance budget as shown in the information.

The hired individuals are essential for your website to enhance traffic and promote a good ROI. Although small businesses can’t hire all the experts but ones who are a necessary evil for your growth.

ii) SEO Tools, Freelancers, And Agencies

The agencies and freelancers, in essence, are the hired workforce to optimize the content, page, and structure of your websites and should be the ones to calculate the SEO ROI of your website.

The picture below shows that agencies provide the expertise in certain investment strategies to get better ROI with a monthly package that is much more affordable for the small businesses instead of for the In-house staff. 

Also, including the investments in tools such as Ahrefs, Grammarly, and others that enhance your website’s performance, their costs should be included when calculating the ROI.

Generally, the ROI for Software Sector (B2B SaaS) is 702% in less than a year and so, is an essential element of SEO investments.

So, it’s the choice of the business whether they invest in agencies or the “In-house” employees as they would make the SEO folks who would optimize the website.

On A Side Note:

Content strategy also includes promoting the published content online. 

Although Google and other search engines have warned marketers to never buy links, the reality of the link building is a bit in the neutral zone.

So, if you rely on buying links online from trustworthy sites and platforms, remember to include that cost too.

Altogether these costs of in-house staff, agencies or freelancers, and tools (plus bought links, if you did) makes up for the invested costs of SEO for the website.

The total investment cost is combined for a chosen time- weekly, monthly, quarterly, or yearly- depending on the growth level of your company.

Collecting Conversion Data

When you gather data from the platform that you are using, keep a clear eye on which crowd of traffic is engaged with your website, the prospect, and the one that showed the promising will to convert or has already converted.

The thing is ROI for SEO has a very simple formula, you just have to remain clear on what information of investment is the input for your formula.

And as you calculate the cost accurately, the need to know the ‘true’ conversions arises, meaning you have to track and measure your actual conversions.

And if this budget management is performed poorly you may get the revenue but the amount of ROI would be so small that it would be negligible as compared to the correct calculated budget as shown in the illustration below.

I know this seems to be a lengthy process but in the truest sense of calculating the investment of your business.

Identify & Estimate Your SEO ROI

Identifying SEO ROI is about recognizing the value ($) factors that helped you gain an increase in traffic, sales made, and ranking received by your business website over a desired period of the campaign.

Here are the value factors ($) of the costs of SEO: 

i) The collected and calculated data of your SEO investments

ii) The collected and calculated data on revenue earned

Putting these factors in the formula, 

For example, 

Here, we assume that the Value of Conversions = $100,000 and the Cost of Investment = $25,000 calculated over a month.

So, according to the formula above, ($100,000 – $25,000) / $25,000 = 3.

The ROI is $3 over every $1 invested in the SEO marketing campaign, that is 300% ($3 x 100 to calculate percentage increase) measured ROI on the SEO campaign.

So, you see you can simply use the formula given above and put in the required invested and conversions costs to calculate the ROI of the SEO campaign monthly, quarterly, half-yearly, or yearly as shown in the data of an SEO campaigned website.

Just remember to calculate and add the costs accurately to remain informed about the factor values so that you can estimate future ROI on an invested SEO campaign. 

ROI From Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a go-to platform to collect data about your overall website elements and standing in SERPs. 

So, it is not shocking that GA as a Google search engine tool has provided you with different ways to calculate SEO ROI for your business website.

Here are some ways through which you can calculate ROI from Google Analytics:

Value Of WebPage

One WebPage has a different value from other pages on your website. As each page contains specific content, then, it indexes and ranks according to the relevance of content and the SEO element that Google bots find noteworthy.

So, every WebPage on your website has a different page value and can easily be observed in Google Analytics when its “Advanced Filters” is ON as shown in the screenshot below.

These values are more prominently seen in ecommerce sites where a transaction has taken place on every WebPage, that is that WebPage has a transactional value.

Although sometimes with lead generation pages, a cost has been assigned when accomplishing a goal such as filling a form, transaction completion site, etc.

The thing is, the value of ROI on these SEO pages requires more data, and work so that your calculations and estimations could contribute more to a site’s revenue.

Track Sales & Average Order Value

So, first of all, this path is for those who have an eCommerce business and would like to predict and plan.

According to the criteria such as sales, advertisements, orders, and so on terms used in the ecommerce industry.

Also, a report by Moz states that, 

“The average ROI for eCommerce SEO is around $2.75 for every $1 invested”

And another report regarding companies advertising through emails stated that,

“89% of marketers use email as the primary channel for generating leads” 

Here basic Email Marketing is so popular among marketers that you can say that the Email = ROI as it directs traffic to your business where you can nurture them to conversions and get the ROI worth $42 to every $1 spent on Email Marketing.

GA helps you track the sales on your website by setting up the advanced settings of ecommerce in your Analytics panel as shown in the screenshot below.

After setting the option the Analytics would directly provide data about the economic value of the traffic that is visiting your website, sales, and financial value of all the eCommerce components by calculating the SEO ROI of your eCommerce website automatically.

There are many other costs of ROI available on GA platforms such as sales performance, or engagement events could also, contribute to the invested SEO ROI measurement.

Read More: GA4: How To Use Google Analytics 4 For Your Website?

SEO ROI Calculator 

Here, we have a tool to calculate SEO ROI.

Click on the link below and you will gat a tool to calculate ROI. 

https://www.incrementors.com/tools/roi-calculator/

Conclusion 

There is no magical technique when it comes to SEO, the techniques applied should be checked, calculated, and accounted for, which would give you a better idea of what outcomes you can estimate and how much time n optimization would take.

Because yes, SEO takes time.

Here calculating SEO ROI for your business isn’t the only task you have to simplify all the factors, calculate investments, and understand what could be considered the return on investment.

Now, this is done, to close the gap between the money spent on the best-suited tools and the returns earned through them.

And SEO ROI is pretty frustrating for business owners sometimes when SEO experts, managers, and other authoritative bodies are unable to justify the cost put to work for certain metrics.

But, I hope this text provided enough information on how to measure SEO so that you could work on deciding how do you measure ROI could result in ranking, getting traffic, and earning revenue. 

For more marketing tips and services, you can schedule a free-of-cost 30-Minute Strategy session with our experts. In this call, our experts would discuss your business and provide you with the free strategies that you can use to boost your sales and revenue.