Calculating ROI for SEO is not a dream

Webmasters use Search Engine Optimization for many reasons such as build brand awareness, increase website traffic and to generate leads and sales. I believe that the ultimate goal of SEO for commercial websites is to increase revenue.

Calculating ROI of SEO Campaigns

Measuring ROI can be difficult for SEO. Large e-commerce sites uses software such as Omniture's Site Catalyst or WebTrends 8 todo it. If you use Yahoo or Google analytics you can also work out the revenue and profits coming organic search engine optimization.

Organic SEO v/s Paid Advertising

First of all you should distinguish the sales coming from paid campaigns from those coming from organic SEO. If you are running and Adword campaign, use “Destination URL auto-tagging”. This will allow Analytics to report users that arrive at your site from your ad. If you are running other online campaigns you should manually add tags to the destination URLs in order to identify the campaigns and/or ads that bring more traffic and sales.

Set up your Goals

Setting up goals in Web Analytics is the best way to measure conversions. These goals are not sales but actions that generate leads. Every little action such a phone call has a monetary value. For example, if you receive 100 call requesting information about your services and two of them leads to a £10,000 contract, the value per call should be £ 200.  In order to provide an accurate value to these actions, you should keep a daily record with the number of actions and sales carried out. Analysing past data you can work out an average sale value, figure that will make a bit easier all these calculations. 

If you receive a high number of calls but the conversion is low, there is no way that you can blame the SEO bloke. After all, for a business to success, there are a number of factors that need to be taken into consideration. However, any serious SEO specialist shouldn’t limit his job to add some keywords and get more inbound links. A good SEO practitioner should understand the nature of the business and visitor’s preferences. Understanding your costumers’ behaviour will help you to find the best way to increase your site's sales potential

Keep a record of all the actions

It is advisable to keep a daily record of sales, conversions, CTR, calls, emails and actions in general. If your website gets 5,000 visitors (from organic SEO) everyday and you get just an average of 10 enquiries per day, something is wrong. Maybe the meta-titles and meta-descriptions aren’t attractive enough.

If you do get a high click through rate but the number of enquiries is still low, probably there are some issues with the website content and /or design. The SEO practitioner should work close with the web designer in order to create what Bryan Eisenberg calls persuasion architecture. The site must have an easy-to-use navigation that anticipates every visitor needs in order to increase the conversion rate.

SEO is measurable after all.  All you need to do is organize the data coming from webs analytics, emails and phone calls. Build a daily spread sheet with the number of visitors that you get from organic SEO, the number of calls or email enquiries, the number of sales and the total revenue. You should also include the net margin and the money spent on SEO. By dividing your profit by the money spent on SEO, you can get the ROI for you search engine optimization.

Being analytical is essential to succeed on business. It requires a lot of work, but measuring ROI for SEO is not a dream after all.

A good SEO practitioner should urdersand the visitor’s preferences. He should work close with the web designer in order to create what Bryan Eisenberg calls persuasion architecture. The site must have a easy-to-use navigation that anticipates every visitor needs. Use tracking a Web Analytics tools to try to understand users’ behavior and find the best way to increase your site's sales potential.

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