How to Measure and Boost SEO ROI — Plus 5 Tips You Can Use Today

If you’re trying to figure out your SEO return on investment (ROI) but don’t know where to start, you’re in the right place.

You’ve invested in organic search and are doing the work. But how do you know it’s working?

A well-implemented SEO strategy should yield a significant return on investment. By tracking the progress of your efforts — using KPIs — you can determine the impact your strategy is having on your bottom line.

And one of the critical metrics for tracking performance is ROI.

In the article below, we’ll break down the basics of calculating the ROI of your search engine optimization (SEO) strategy.

Specifically, you will learn:

What is SEO?

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the marketing initiatives, strategies, and tactics that help online businesses improve the quantity and quality of organic traffic through search engine rankings.

To get the most value from your SEO efforts, you should develop an SEO strategy.

A solid plan starts by understanding where you are (analysis and benchmarking), where you want to go (goals and KPIs), and how to get there (roadmap).

SEO tactics are the day-to-day strategic actions you take that help to achieve your online marketing goals. For example, one of the most important SEO tactics is conducting a competitive analysis to identify key competitors, their SEO strategies, and available opportunities.

Other tactics include keyword analyses, technical SEO audits, on-page optimization, and SaaS link building.

Check out Boost eCommerce SEO: 10 Proven & Easy Ways to learn more.

What is SEO ROI?

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Return on Investment (ROI) is the revenue—or money—earned directly from SEO marketing. ROI is a metric used to ensure that your SEO strategies and tactics generate the intended financial results.

There are two types of ROI: (1) actual ROI and (2) projected ROI.

Actual ROI is the actual revenue minus costs, while projected ROI is the expected (or forecasted) return on investment.

While it’s good to know both types of ROI, we will focus on actual ROI in this article.

How do you calculate SEO return on investment?

Calculating SEO ROI is extremely important to understand whether or not your SEO strategy is working. Since search engine optimization is a long game, understanding ROI—and how to calculate it—helps you track, improve, and grow your online marketing incrementally and over time.

But how is SEO ROI calculated, you ask?

ROI is the total profit minus the associated costs divided by total costs. Therefore, you can calculate ROI with the following formula:

Typical SEO costs include agency fees (external), resources (internal), tools, content writing, etc.—basically, any costs directly associated with your SEO marketing initiatives.

To calculate an accurate ROI, track all associated SEO marketing costs and revenue.

For this example, let’s say that SEO revenue is $150K, and the SEO costs (agency fees) are $5K/month or $60K/year. 

---

As you can see, the return on investment is 66%, but how do you know whether or not it’s a good ROI? That depends on your website’s specific goals and the KPIs you’ve set for it.

To start tracking your ROI over time, first baseline your ROI, if possible. This baseline will help establish a starting point.

Then, track ROI incrementally, like weekly, monthly, or quarterly, with year-over-year comparisons. Track the ROI of your SEO initiatives regularly to stay on top of your SEO goals.

What tools can you use to calculate SEO ROI?

Now that you have a good understanding of calculating the return on investment of your SEO marketing efforts, let’s look at some tools that make that calculation easier:

• Excel Spreadsheets/Google Sheets
  Spreadsheets are readily available, simple to use, and free or low cost. Create an SEO ROI calculator and a dashboard to track your metrics over time with basic formula knowledge.
  
•  Google Analytics (GA)
  For content pages, like blog posts, use GA’s page value to assign a monetary value to each page viewed in the buyer’s journey. For eCommerce stores, like Shopify, enable eCommerce tracking in GA and set up tracking on the store, too.
  
• Online SEO Tools
  Subscription-based SEO tools, like Semrush, include SEO ROI calculators as part of their solutions. With a bit of finagling, you can get ROI from Google Search Console, a free tool.

Online marketer Neil Patel offers seven free tools for boosting and tracking SEO in the video below:

Five Ways to Improve Your SEO and ROI

Improving SEO can increase your overall marketing ROI. Do these five things to improve your SEO:

1. Clearly Define Your Target Audience and Their Needs
   Highly relevant content speaks directly to your customers in a way that resonates with them. Relevant content requires a deep understanding of your customers and what they want from you.
   
2. Research Customer-Focused Keywords
   Once you understand your customers’ wants, needs, and pain points, research keywords that help you create customer-centric content specifically for your target audience.
   
3. Identify Content Gaps and Opportunities
   Look for content areas related to your company’s offerings with significant search volume but little to no content on your site to attract those searchers.
   
4. Create Useful, Specific, and User-Friendly Content
   Create content that is useful and tailored to your specific audience. Format the content so it’s user-friendly, easy to consume, and share-worthy.
   
5.  Improve Site Speed
   Fast sites rank better. Perform a Site Speed Test to identify critical fixes—like image, code, and server optimizations—to improve the speed of your site.

Use these five ways to improve your site’s content, customer experience, SEO, and, as a result, your ROI.

Using an SEO Agency

With Google making multiple algorithm changes each year, SEO is constantly evolving and there’s no shame in calling for backup.

We provide eCommerce SEO services to brands who want to grow online sales and scale their store. Our goal is to ensure that you’ll increase organic traffic — and bring the right traffic.

Our experts can also help you regain lost search engine rankings if you were impacted by an algorithm change or website migration.

In Conclusion

SEO is a long game, and so is ROI. Be strategic, consistent, and patient. Remember, it can take six months or more before you see results.

Rank higher, increase qualified traffic, and get more business. Contact us now for a free, no-pressure eCommerce SEO consult.