If there’s one thing all SEOs struggle with regularly, it’s proving the ROI of their efforts - and I can understand why.
After all, how do you show a tangible return on something as volatile as content marketing or search engine rankings?
How do you convince stakeholders to continue allocating budgets to a channel they suspect might have worked without your input anyway?
To combat this, SEO teams develop different strategies to measure the SEO ROI. Yet, many fall under scrutiny from their CFOs and other stakeholders. Oftentimes, this is due to the unclear metrics on which they report.
In this post, I will help you overcome this challenge. I’ll show you a strategy for proving the ROI of SEO many of our customers have already used successfully.
Before we get to that, let’s first define the main SEO KPIs.
SEO KPIs
When advising our clients, we always recommend splitting SEO metrics into two distinct categories.
The primary KPIs are those that prove the success rate of your efforts. Metrics in this category include:
- Traffic
- Conversion Rate
- Revenue
- Rankings for non-branded keywords,
- Increase in the SERP real estate, and so on.
The secondary KPIs showcase the value SEO delivers for an organization. We usually suggest tracking the following metrics in this category:
- Repeat visits, to demonstrate an increase in brand awareness and loyalty,
- Assisted conversions and revenue,
- Increase in domain authority, and finally,
- A growth in searches for branded keywords, suggesting a rise in brand awareness as well.
Why split KPIs into two categories?
My answer is simple. You do this to state the full breadth of the benefits SEO offers to an organization.
By focusing on primary and secondary metrics, an SEO team can show how their work can also affect other areas of growth (i.e., brand awareness) and strengthen other channels (i.e., assisted conversions).
Two Reporting Challenges SEOs Fight Off
There are, however, two more challenges I know SEOs face when reporting on their efforts.
The first is taking credit for brand traffic. After all, brand terms can drive a significant amount of traffic and conversions. In fact, for many sites, it might easily be the majority.
As a result, SEOs have to defend questions about the validity of their efforts. Many tell me about hearing how, if the company did nothing, the channel would still perform well on its own.
But, with SEO, an organization can never tell which tactic provided the biggest growth. Often, an insignificant keyword set could drive the most valuable conversion rate.
The other challenge is tying the ROI to specific SEO strategies, particularly technical and on-site optimization. After all, how do you prove the effect of improving a technical SEO aspect on conversions?
Even though such changes seem insignificant, their effect on the user experience (and, in turn, SEO results) could be immense.
Personally, I always recommend our clients to overcome this challenge by setting baseline reports and set events.
This is also a situation where having a dedicated SEO platform like seoClarity pays off more than accessing data from Google Analytics, for example. By combining multiple data, an enterprise-level platform allows the versatility you need to report on your efforts fully.
- In seoClarity, you can set events to mark implementation dates (below).
- Then, add impacted pages to Page Types to measure the performance growth.
- Finally, create dashboards to measure the long-term impact of the change.
Measuring the SEO ROI
Now that you know what marketing metrics help track ROI of SEO, let’s look at a strategy for demonstrating the ROI of SEO.
We based this method on a simple idea: to measure SEO ROI, you must look at the incremental KPI growth. But to report on the SEO ROI fully, you must also consider the cost.
Therefore, the complete ROI calculation would include YOY incremental change (ideally, revenue) divided by the cost of delivering SEO efforts.
For more insight on how to calculate the ROI of SEO, we have an entire post that outlines five different ways to do so.
Conclusion
Most SEOs struggle with reporting on the channel’s ROI properly.
Many of them feel under pressure to do so well, particularly given how often their reports get compared with SEM or PLA, for example.
As I’ve shown you in this post, however, reporting on SEO ROI isn’t as difficult as it's often perceived. It requires you to implement two factors:
- A solid, two-tier KPI set to indicate the full breadth of the benefits SEO offers to an organization clearly.
- An enterprise platform that allows easy access to data and information about all aspects of an SEO campaign.
Don't let your SEO efforts go unnoticed. Prove the value of your strategy when you use our platform. Click below to schedule a demo with our expert team to see how you can increase search visibility with predictive insights.
<<Editor's Note: This post was originally published in July 2018 and has since been updated.>>
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