Measuring Return On Investment for SEO

Unlike traditional marketing, or even other forms of online marketing, measuring the success of a SEO (search engine optimisation) campaign is no easy thing.

With a banner marketing campaign or even a pay-per-click-campaign, it’s very easy to get a cut and dry figure: X amount of impressions, X amount of clicks and X amount of conversions: costing Y amount.

Since search engine optimization leverages a whole range of services including design, development, research and content creation. While a lot of those also occur in other marketing campaigns, they’re much more “contained” within a measurable block of time. SEO, on the other hand, is an evolutionary process, and its effects may be measured over months and years, not just during a “one month slab”. It’s also difficult to determine an “exact” result from the SEO process. Sure organic rankings may go up, therefore creating increased traffic rankings, but no one  (not even the eggheads at Google, probably) can give a 100% accurate prediction of just how much you’ll jump in the SERPs (search engine ranking positions) due to SEO. Anyone who claims they can is just full of it.

So taking that into account, let’s at least try and establish a baseline equation for calculating return on investment, even if it will be a somewhat hazy one at best.

[Return On Investment (ROI)] equals [Total Conversions from Organic Traffic x Value of Each Conversion] minus [Total cost of search engine optimisation]

Or…

ROI = ORGANICCONVERSIONS * VALUE-SEO

Hmmm… not much of a scientific equation there, especially as it’s so full of holes! Time for one, is the key issue. An SEO campaign may not “kick in” for many months, but may continue to deliver traffic for many years! Also, there are a multitude of other factors… every time you update your web site SEO will still be there in the background, contributing to your new content. Every online marketing campaign will also – to a lesser extent – piggyback of your SEO efforts. Someone might see a branded banner, but ignore it in the short term, yet search later based upon the marketing’s message. It’s there where SEO will also contribute. There’s also the branding impact, as a strong organic ranking delivers a sense of confidence in the typical end-user, after all, if Google trusts it, they should take that on board.

With all this said, it’s apparent that getting a truly accurate return on investment equation is always going to be a guesstimation at best. This is where web analytics is crucial. Through your web analytics platform, it is much easier to get a long-term view of your SEO campaign’s performance. When it comes to SEO campaigns, you’ll be trying to track metrics in multiples of months and years. Only then will you be able to notice some of trends and be able to start to formulate some sort of ROI benchmark. Of course it is important try and benchmark the difference performance between paid traffic and organic traffic, so that you can try and build a picture about just how productive your SEO process is, and how much it is ultimately paying off.