Why should you implement SEO when you don’t understand how worthy an investment it is? You’ve come to the right place as we’ll be covering the numbers and the talking points that justify the SEO ROI, or the return on investment of your SEO campaign.
The ROI of SEO
ROI of SEO is an important topic for websites and business owners to understand the importance of SEO work for their businesses.
As a business owner, taking decisions with a really limited budget or other resources is really tough. Therefore, we’re going to help you understand why SEO is worth that resource expenditure.
Calculating the ROI and the profit potential of SEO
A business owner who has to deal with a really tight budget needs to understand the actual potential profit when it comes to SEO strategy. But we can actually see the potential profit of SEO with really simple math.
Let’s say your website is currently ranking number three in the SERP for one of the most relevant lucrative search terms related to your products, for example, “vanity units for bathrooms”. That means the organic click-through rate of your website on the third position is 7% based on a transactional search query you type on Google.
In this case, the KPIs are organic SERP ranking and click-through rate. Those are all fairly common concerns for SEOs but it’s possible that yours might vary. With that 7% click-through rate, your page is generating 500 monthly organic click-throughs on average. When customers come to your product page, they have about a 3% tendency to convert or actually purchase your products.
That is a high monthly revenue from organic search for e-commerce. Assuming that vanity units cost $50, we’re looking at a monthly revenue from an organic search of $750 for that page.
500 x 3% x $50 = $750/month
From that case, an SEO tool will help you in conducting in-depth keyword research, competitive analysis, identifying potential link targets, etc. In turn, that’s going to help you write some really solid on-page content, run your technical audits and maybe earn some new, high-quality links pointing to the entire website and this product page in particular.
With the SEO tool, you can bump your website page in SERP from the third position for the keyword “vanity units for bathrooms” up to position number two. Your page that’s already in the second position earns about 11% organic click-through on average. It means your page is drawing 785 organic click-throughs per month. To keep it simple, let’s keep the 3% conversion rate once the customers are on your page.
With still the same price, $50, the page is bringing in $1,200 from organic search every month. So there is a $450 increase per month compared to the previous rank, number three. If you take out the cost of the tool, you can end up with a profit of $270, and that works out to about $3,000 in profits per year.
500 + 285 x 3% x $50 = $1.200/month (+$450) – $179/month = $3000/year
So if your page is ranked number one with those numbers, as a result, it has a click-through rate of 22%.
If you can do that with a constant conversion rate and the same price of the vanity unit, then the organic click-throughs that are getting greater increase will give you an extra $1,600 per month in profits. Moreover, if you maximise the use of that SEO tool, the profit will be $17,000 per year.
500 x 1,070 x 3% x $50 = $2,350/ Month (+$1,600) – $179/month = $17,000/year
You may think that I just threw a lot of math at you, but imagine if your website, with hundreds of products, improved its search ranking even by a small percentage.
In reality, the average return on investment for SEO for an e-commerce company is roughly $2.75 for every dollar spent.
As you can see from the example above, after implementing SEO, a bathroom supply store gets ranked number one with a transactional search query “bathroom warehouse macquarie park”.
Obviously, mileage will vary depending on your industry, the website metrics that you are starting out with and the competitive landscape in which you operate. If you’re working on a non-e-commerce website, working out the dollar value of your efforts will be more difficult at times. If you’re developing a lead generation site, you must determine a possible dollar value for each lead you generate. However, this model works regardless of your industry or your competitors.
Forecasting and proving the ROI of SEO
As one of the most useful and effective tools used for SEO, Google Analytics can help you forecast and prove your return on investment.
Google Analytics is a free and relatively simple way of showing exactly how much your SEO work is affecting your bottom line. You can set up your goals in your Google Analytics account’s View Settings so that every time a user performs an action, such as scrolling down a page to a specific point, hitting a button, or, obviously, making a purchase, it is logged as a goal completion in Analytics.
Within your dashboard’s Conversions menu, you can view all of your goal completions for any time period you want. If you have a dollar value assigned to some or all of those goals, you can narrow this down to only organic traffic to see how much money each of those goal completions brings in per month.
This can still work if you can assign a dollar value to your accomplishments or goals, even if they aren’t necessarily related to e-commerce. If you sell products, the E-commerce menu under Conversions will provide some additional really useful insights, such as how well each of your products performs each month and which of your coupon or affiliate codes performs the best month over month.
Invest in SEO to outrank your competitors
Talking about SEO in terms of dollars and profits is the best way to convince yourself that investing in SEO is a good idea. However, you should be aware that your competitors may already be ahead of you.
Currently, any business or organisation without an SEO strategy is way behind the curve. When it comes to inbound marketing 60% of marketers currently say that SEO is their number one concern. According to Forbes, over $80 billion is spent on SEO each year, and that number is growing all the time.
So if you want to outrank with your competitors who are occupying SERP space, you must be able and willing to play the same game as them. Moreover, the study showed that only 49% of small businesses say that they invest in SEO. This is because almost 100% of purchases these days involve organic search in some way. And yet less than half of small businesses are doing the work that it takes to become part of that buyer journey. So if you’re a small business that works with small businesses, your biggest competitors are almost certainly already investing in SEO.
But if you join them, you might be able to beat out some of the smaller guys who didn’t make the wise investment decision. This statistic contains a lot of potential.
The cost of not investing SEO for your business
Not investing in SEO will cost you losing out on the SERPs to your competition. Moreover, if you decide not to invest in that tool suite, not to hire the SEO agency, or not to let your team focus on SEO work, your website will stagnate or deteriorate as a result of a lack of attention being paid to routine SEO maintenance. If products are removed from your catalog, your internal links will quickly become out of date.
On-page content can also quickly become out of date. If you had some valuable traffic coming to your website from other sites that were linking to you externally, if your site changes, those links may become outdated, or they may simply choose to remove them without your knowledge. If you have to go through something like a complete site migration or a reorganization of your internal architecture, the outcomes can be terrible if you don’t pay attention to the key SEO issues at hand.
Final takeaways
It is important to keep in mind that SEO takes time. It is exciting to think about dollars and profits from the potential results but you need to be aware that it all needs time and work to improve your website.
Google also takes even more time to do all the work which eventually affects the SERP rankings and the click-through rate. you will find the gap between where you spent the money on that tool suite and where you actually saw the return. it can be really frustrating for any business owners and SEOs who are trying to justify their work.
That’s why it’s critical to manage expectations about timing and the plausibility of your results during the sign-off process, before the check is signed, in order to reduce the frustration that can result from waiting.
But if you can get your stakeholders on board with your SEO efforts and use all of the excellent methods you’ve learned to produce the best and most effective results possible, you’ll earn that buy-in, make your bosses happy, and it’ll be much simpler for them to sign off on the next project you suggest.
How we can help
If you’re not optimising your website for search engines like Google, you might be missing out on potential customers and more profits. Moreover, you might also lose the opportunity to the competition. Now that you understand how the ROI of SEO works, optimising your site for search engines will help your site rank better in search engine results pages (SERPs). However, with your full-time job as a business owner, you may find that optimising your website is difficult, especially if you’re not technically savvy. Why not reach out to our web experts for help?
Top4 Marketing is a leading SEO services agency based in Sydney, Australia and Indonesia. We know the ins and outs of search engine optimisation since we’ve been doing it for over two decades. Top4 Marketing has provided SEO services to e-commerce businesses in different industries and niches, from bathroom supply stores to sporting goods stores. We’ve also partnered with clients that use a range of e-commerce platforms, from Shopify, BigCommerce, WooCommerce, Wix ecommerce and more.
To find out how we can help you with your Website + Marketing, using our unique location marketing platform called Top4, get in touch today at www.top4marketing.com
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