Unlike short-lived ad campaigns, SEO delivers consistent and sustainable results that can increase organic traffic, keyword rankings, and conversions. This measurable ROI makes SEO more attractive to companies that prioritize profitability.
Showcase your SEO agency’s effectiveness by sharing relevant success stories with potential clients, and how you content optimisation and link building. Make sure to present concrete numbers like search rankings, organic traffic, and revenue.
1. Increased Traffic
SEO can increase a client’s website traffic through keyword targeting, content marketing, backlinking, and other best practices. This traffic growth can increase brand awareness, lead generation, and sales. This measurable impact on organic search metrics helps to justify the cost of professional SEO for business owners and decision-makers.
Using a tool like AgencyAnalytics, you can provide your clients with an SEO ROI report that includes metrics on organic traffic, search ranking improvement, user engagement (e.g., time on site, pages per session), and more. These numbers are easy to understand and can help put your client’s investment in SEO into perspective.
For example, a local coffee shop could see a large increase in website traffic after implementing a solid SEO strategy. If this increased traffic leads to a handful of sales, this is an example of a high ROI.
Another key metric to track is conversions. Depending on your client’s business type, you can measure this by setting up conversion tracking in Google Analytics 4. This allows you to track ecommerce transactions and online revenue, as well as other types of conversion goals like form submissions, email signups, click-to-call phone numbers, driving directions, chat, and more.
You can also look at broader metrics like user engagement and brand searches. For a blogger or affiliate, these can be a proxy for revenue, but for a business that relies on its website for traffic and leads, SEO is often the most important part of its digital marketing strategy.
As you can see, it’s critical to have a strong SEO strategy that prioritizes the right keywords and targets the right audience. This can take a while to pay off, but it’s essential for long-term success in the digital landscape. By focusing on your client’s business needs and ensuring that they’re reaching the right people, you can deliver real results for your client that can last years. This is why SEO is such an effective investment for so many businesses. Just remember to be patient and communicate clearly with your clients about how SEO works, as it can be tricky for business owners who are used to instant gratification. SEO takes time to heat up, but it can continue to bring in a steady stream of traffic and revenue for years to come. This is why it’s so important to set clear expectations and use concrete data to calculate SEO ROI for your clients. This will allow them to feel confident in your strategies and make the most of their investment.
2. Increased Conversions
SEO is a powerful way to increase traffic and engagement with a client’s website, but it can be challenging to translate these gains into real sales. That’s why it’s important to track and measure conversions that can be attributed directly to SEO efforts. Whether this is website purchases, lead generation forms, or phone calls and store visits, tracking these metrics gives SEO professionals a direct line between their work and financial outcomes for clients.
To do this, you’ll need to set up conversion tracking in your analytics tool (Google Analytics is a good choice). From there, you can determine how many conversions are made through the channel and then compare that number before and after SEO implementation. You can also use the Multichannel Funnels feature to view attribution models like First-Touch, Assisted Conversions, and Last-Click Conversions, which give different marketing channels varying amounts of credit for conversions depending on their role in the customer journey.
A high conversion rate from organic search can indicate that your client’s SEO strategy is successfully driving relevant visitors to their site and encouraging them to engage with the content on their pages. However, it’s essential to remember that just because the number of conversions has increased doesn’t necessarily mean that the value of those conversions have improved. This is why it’s important to look at the revenue generated by these conversions, which can be calculated using ecommerce tracking or by comparing the cost of advertising campaigns to the total revenue that has been brought in by each campaign.
In addition to assessing the value of conversions, it’s important to consider how much time and money was spent on SEO. This can be a difficult calculation, as SEO often includes a wide range of activities that can make it hard to isolate the impact of individual components. To get started, you can try to track the costs of in-house team labor and freelancer or external agency fees. Once you have these numbers, you can then subtract your total SEO costs from the total revenue gained and divide by your investment to calculate your ROI.
Whether you’re an in-house SEO specialist or an agency, ROI measurement is critical to showing the value of your work and securing budget approvals from senior management. By analyzing these key metrics, you can show the true value of your SEO strategies and make data-driven decisions to optimize your campaigns for even greater returns. Start measuring your SEO ROI today with a free 14-day trial of AgencyAnalytics! Sign up now and see how you can improve your clients’ SEO performance with a clear and easy-to-use dashboard. It’s completely free and no credit card is required. Get started now!
3. Increased Revenue
The goal of SEO is to bring in more revenue, and it does so by generating more leads and sales. SEO can also save businesses money by reducing the need for other marketing channels. For example, a business with top search engine rankings will likely not need to invest in Google Ads, which can be costly and compete with organic traffic.
A solid SEO strategy will increase brand awareness and improve the customer experience. This can lead to increased retention, which is a valuable metric that can’t be directly measured but is a crucial factor in ROI.
To measure the impact of your SEO efforts, you can use conversion tracking in Google Analytics to see how much of a return on investment you’re getting from the work you’re doing. Alternatively, you can look at the total amount of revenue generated by your SEO campaign and compare it to the cost of the campaign. This is a more holistic approach and shows you how SEO contributes to the bottom line.
You can also track SEO ROI by looking at first-click conversions (those that happened directly from a search) and assisted conversions (those that came from other channels). Using multichannel funnels in Google Analytics will give you a more accurate picture of the impact of your efforts on a client’s revenue.
Lastly, you can track ROI by looking at the increase in your client’s CLV (customer lifetime value). This is an estimated sum of all the revenue that will be generated by a customer over their entire relationship with your business. SEO has a significant impact on CLV, as it is often responsible for driving highly targeted and qualified leads that are more likely to convert into paying customers.
As an agency, it’s important to understand the ROI of your clients’ SEO campaigns so you can provide them with the best possible service. By focusing on the right metrics, you can help your clients grow their traffic and revenue while also building trust in your abilities.
