Seo & Roi

[morleymouse]

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Inspired by this thread which is more focused on the actually selling of SEO services I wondered...

How do you measure the ROI from SEO?

Lets say you have a site, you run PPC for it and spend £5k a month on PPC with a return of £8

You then spend another £5k on SEO a month - how do you measure sales made from this process?

Just base it on any sales increase? So bottom line goes from £20k to £30k do you jsut presume the £5k SEO investment has made £10k?

Just be nice to hear affiliates, merchant and SEO experts opinion on this

[3wdl]

I think it's generally done on a case by case basis. You could drill down to certain keywords via analaytics and see which ones lead to ROI before your SEO campaign and then look at during / after the SEO work you do (remember it could take up to 3-6 months to have full impact) and see if there are new keywords / improved rankings and compare this to your previous stats.

You could see the ROI as working on the keywork analysis with the client and then concentrating on certain keywords and looking for an improvement too. But if ROI is the bottom line then I guess the first option would be best,.

[hpops]

ROI measurement is clearly simplified with a robust analytics package. The real problem is successful benchmarking, although you could do month on month comparisons on sales generated through specific keywords, that doesn't take into account seasonal trends/buying cycles. The obvious thing to do is move to a year on year comparison cross-referencing month by month, however this doesn't allow for any natural organic growth.

You could argue that positions increased is an ROI measurement (it is, just not a very good one).

However, when it really comes down to it, ROI from SEO should outperform everything you ever do - because its lifetime value remains. We tend to measure through analytics and report on SEO ROI through this method with the caveat that some of it was there before we were!

[10k]

It should be measurable through your analytics package the question is what time period should you measure over? Whereas you will stop getting new visitors from ppc the moment you turn the campaign off, a good investment in seo should mean you will continue to get increasing numbers of new visitors as time goes on

[ian-d]

Can i throw PPC into the discussion also. Most beleive that if PPC is converting, then its a worth while marketing investiment, which is very true, but what happens if its not converting, is that wasted money? Not always. PPC is still bringing in genuine keyword specific traffic to your site, and whilst the potential customer might not buy at that time, or anytime in the next few weeks/months, they may remember who you are, and what you do, and come back. Question is whether paying that amount of money for PPC without visable conversion is worth it, who knows! I ponder this question all the time.

As for SEO, i'm still somewhat scepticle about paying for SEO. I beleive valuable content, coupled with a long term business and good customer recommendations will gain you just as high a position as if you paid a professional outfit. Of course correct coding for the robots helps etc, but this can be researched. I'm finding 20% of our traffic and 60% of of all conversion is coming from visitors searching our company name as the keyword...now thats SEO you cannot buy

[hpops]

I'm finding 20% of our traffic and 60% of of all conversion is coming from visitors searching our company name as the keyword...now thats SEO you cannot buy

Or an illustration that you're not getting your share of generic or specific traffic in your verticals!

[ian-d]

Sorry, it reads wrong, 20% of all traffic is coming from business name keyword searches, of which of that 20%, 60% are converting! Think thats clearer!

[10k]

Hi Ian - it may be worth doing some further testing on that if you have the opportunity - what most analytics packages do is show you the last referring keyword, but customers must have found you from somewhere initially. It's interesting to add seperate parameter to cpc advertising for generic/specific and brand. What you'll probably find is that the customers searching on your brand on google initially clicked on another of your google ads before coming back and clicking on your brand.