SEO is a great way to drive traffic to a website, but how can website owners tell how effective their SEO efforts are? It doesn’t matter how much time and energy is invested in SEO if the tactics being used are not bringing target users to their website.
According to SEMrush, one way website owners can see how effective their SEO efforts are is by calculating ROI. It’s an easy, intuitive calculation. ROI is found by subtracting the cost of a website’s SEO efforts from the revenue earned from SEO and dividing that number by the cost of SEO (revenue – cost / cost). But where do these numbers come from?
Cost
To find the cost of SEO efforts, website owners must consider the total cost of all everything related to SEO. For example, SEMrush suggests adding together the cost of paying employees who optimize the website, the cost of subscriptions for SEO related programs (such as SEMrush), the amount it costs to pay other websites that link to a website, etc.
Revenue
SEMrush suggests using Google Analytics to track how much traffic a website receives from organic search. The traffic from organic search is generated by SEO efforts because SEO factors into SERP ranking. Users are likely to only click links at the top of the SERP or at least links on page one. Boosting SERP ranking through SEO in turn boosts organic traffic. Google Analytics can tell website owners how much of the traffic coming to their website is from organic search. Therefore, this tells them how much traffic is resultant of their SEO efforts.
Once website owners have these two numbers, they can calculate ROI and see how effective their current SEO efforts are at driving traffic. This can tell them whether or not they need to switch up their tactics.
4 Responses
This is a great post that covers a great topic! I don’t think that many SEO professionals are thinking about this at all. I definitely wasn’t but it is something that all SEO professionals should be paying attention to!
Calculating ROI is definitely trickier if there is no revenue component to your website, but instead just information and visits. You can still calculate ROI based on the reach of your efforts and how many clicks you have achieved, but that leads to further questions for marketers and SEO professionals to determine what percentage increase justifies the cost spent. Definitely a really interesting topic.
I feel like when we’re looking at the price points with SEO, it’s definitely worth it. Just the visual aesthetic of an optimized page is so much better to the eye for viewers. Earning more clicks and links is worth the cost in the long term with growth of the company and brand!
I like this topic. The difficulty of calculating ROI can be bad. Using google analytics can be a helpful tool. One can use these tools to effectively evaluate their performance.