It is a truth universally accepted that some elements of the marketing mix are easier to justify than others. Calculating ROI from PPC, for instance, is very easy as you can track the journey of every person who clicks on your ads right through to purchase. PR and traditional advertising are both notoriously difficult to measure;  how do you know if people are purchasing from you because they read an article or saw an advertisement?  Whether you are a business owner yourself or report to a board of directors, it is always important to know if something you are spending money on is actually generating Revenue.  Why keep spending if it isn’t giving you a return and similarly if something is working, shouldn’t you be doing more of it?

So how can you measure SEO ROI?

Depending on whether or not your business is eCommerce, ROI from SEO isn’t always easy to calculate but there are definitely ways of doing so.  The first step is to work out how many sales are coming through your website.  If you are 100% eCommerce then this is easy to see through Google Analytics.  However, for most companies, it isn’t quite this straightforward.

The first thing to do is to set up goals in Google Analytics so that you can measure when people are clicking to enquire. Google Analytics lets you filter by traffic type so you can see exactly how many enquiries you are getting from organic search, PPC, social media and referrals.  If you want to increase the number of enquiries you are getting then you should speak to Tamar about Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO) to ensure your website is converting traffic into enquiries.

The second step, which is arguably the most important is working out your conversion rate.  If you have 100 enquiries from your website, how many of these are your sales team converting into actual business? It is also worth looking at ways for you to increase this conversion rate. If the leads you are getting are relevant then you should be converting a good % of them.  If they aren’t relevant then you need to readjust your SEO strategy and amend your targeted keywords.

The next step is to work out your average order value.  For every person that purchases a product or service for you, what is the average amount that they spend?  Once you know this you should be able to accurately predict the amount of revenue you should be generating from your website.

Once you add SEO to the mix things start to get really exciting.  You can look at your traffic growth and see how this translates into higher enquiries and ultimately more sales.  Simply divide this revenue figure by the amount you’re spending on SEO and there’s your ROI.

Here at Tamar we demonstrate an average ROI of 18x for our clients. That means that for every £1 they spend on SEO with us, they are getting £18 worth of revenue from organic traffic. Sounds impressive, doesn’t it?  If you’d like to see a forecast of traffic and projected revenue from ongoing SEO, talk to one of the team today.