How to measure the ROI of your SEO Campaign

Search Engine Optimization

The main question our customers ask when looking to promote their websites with Search Engine Optimization is “how can we calculate the Return On investment of our SEO Campaign?”. There are many tools to measure that variable, but it’s not as easy as it might seen.

Why is that? – ROI implies a growth on business transactions to make more income. Improved Search Engine Optimization results doesn’t correlate immediately to bigger income. If your website ranks on position #1, with your “mainkeywords” and brings a high volume of of new visitors to your website but no conversions, no new income will be generated. That doesn’t mean the campaign didn’t work or that you’re not obtaining your money’s worth, this actually means the other elements of your web site and/or your sales system is not seixing that traffic.

From our point of view, Search Engine optimization must be seen as a very important piece of an overall Marketing strategy, and in that context everything is being done to bring more visitors, make conversions, and obtain more clients.

Considering the above, there are methods to track the way your SEO campaign is paying off.

SERPs – Where is your website ranked with the main keywords? What has been the improvement on those positions? Consider that a huge proportion of clicks is lost after the first Google Page and any ranking improvement towards the top 10 position is highly valuable.

Traffic – The Main Goal of any Search Engine Optimization campaign is to bring more visitors and continuously increase their volume. Monthly analytics of the traffic will tell us what keywords is performing better, which one should be changed or even discarded. Monitoring visitor volume, behavior and source is a verry important component of the off-page optimization activities.

Links from other websites – The number of reputable inbound links is one the the best indicators of the success of your SEO campaign. Google considers highly ranked links as “votes” for the content on your website and this affects the position your site will finally have on search results.

PR or PageRank: part of Google’s ranking system that gives a number or PageRank to every site on the internet. The main reason of this rank is to differentiate the important sites from the least important. It’s not a heavy component of Google’s algorithm anymore but it still affects Search Results. When SEO is properly done the PageRank for any site is improved helping it become more important and credible next time it will be indexed by search Engines.