How to Measure the ROI of your SEO Campaign?

how to measure the roi of your seo campaign

Unless you monitor the results of your SEO efforts, you will not be able to know whether money, effort and time in terms of digital marketing have been effective or not. The best way to drive visitors to your website is by using Digital Marketing services, which aim to create a pool of relevant visitors to become paying customers for your business. When these customers become interested in purchasing services or products, that is when you receive the ROI of SEO.

Calculating ROI of SEO is complex and dynamic

Calculation of ROI from SEO services is not always an easy task. Picture this- someone visited your website while searching for a keyword, bounced off the site and then came to your brick-and-mortar store to buy something. This customer is certainly not part of your organic searches as neither are you sure about this nor can you really ask the customer about it. Several parameters need to be measured, and one needs to do extensive internal analysis to obtain an accurate picture of SEO performance. 

In comparison to the above, it is relatively easier to measure SEO ROI in Google Analytics in e-commerce websites. SEO marketers look to place an e-commerce tracking code within various product pages and then come up with INR values for product SKU’s.

SEO ROI= (SEO Revenue – SEO cost)/SEO Cost In the case of regular websites, it may be helpful to set up conversion values and goals. ROI of SEO conversion could be in the form of multiple page views, demo signup, long visit duration or webinar sessions. Any of these can be helpful to gain revenue from SEO by making visitors into customers and meeting your advertisement goals.

Tracking ROI of SEO

You need to look at unique attributes in order to ascertain that SEO is working for your company website. Here they are:

  1. Establishing conversion tracking: The first step to calculate ROI from SEO campaigns is to establish conversion tracking within Google Analytics. All conversions that generate ROI in SEO can be tracked in this manner. E-commerce stores will make use of e-commerce tracking to extract data from online transactions and then account for exact revenue, while lead-based businesses assign INR values to consumer data.
  2. Categorizing businesses as per channel: Once you track conversions for a month, you will be able to estimate ROI on SEO. Many companies calculate ROI by making use of the net profit from every sale in every channel, in place of total revenue. Make use of the same value for your SEO strategy. 
  3. Witnessing an increase in traffic from branded organic searches: When you track the traffic from branded organic searches, it is a sure-shot indicator of the fact that your SEO campaign is proceeding in the right direction. Searchers who type keywords that are connected to your brand will be closer to buying your products or services, in place of those typing non-branded keywords into search engines. 
  4. Inbound links to your site: The fundamental basis of SEO has always been to create backlinks. However, over time, Google started filtering the links it considers worthy of determining search engine ranking. Among the tools required to measure revenue from SEO, Google Analytics is the most used one. Similarly, a tool most used to analyze inbound links to websites is AHREFS.    
  5. Obtaining high-quality traffic from search engines: Simply an increase in traffic on your website may not always mean that the benefits of SEO and your efforts are paying rich dividends. In case there are thousands of visitors but no real spikes in conversions or sales, it implies that quality traffic on your website is very less. For example, an increase in bounce rate means that people are simply being misdirected to the website. Google Analytics can help analyze the quality of traffic more closely.