Forecasting ROI for SEO Strategies
Historically, SEO professionals have always found it kind of tricky to measure ROI based on SEO strategy and implementations. I feel that this is close to being the number 1 thing clients ask for and it is a little difficult for SEOs to come up with an accurate projection of ROI considering no two SEO strategies are the same. They consist of different action items and different goals. However, explaining this to a client is a sure way to get them to be disinterested. So why exactly is it so difficult?
SEO is really split up into two pieces, the technical part and the content part (at least in my opinion.) When configuring technical components for an SEO strategy, I think its harder to come up with ROI ties to this part versus content strategy. However, there are some common components.
What you really want to keep in mind when creating ROI projections for SEO is a targeted keyword or a set of target keywords. But this is getting into the weeds of per page and based on monthly search volume of a keyword. When considering a website the issue gets much more intimidating to evaluate. This is where looking at site conversions and assigning a value to conversions pays off. Here is where the grey area kicks in
What happens if you optimize website X for a certain highly sought-after group of keywords which you can attribute search volume too. Let’s say when you optimize this website, you hopefully take a bigger slice of the pie of these keywords. For example, let’s assume you are optimizing an e-commerce website you need to assign internal KPI’s such as average order value (AOV) to groups of web pages (product pages)
Here are some formulas to help you calculate revenue. To calculate ROI you will need internal KPI’s from your client.
ROI formulas for SEO forecasting
• Click through rate* search volume = click estimation
• Traffic/clicks = click to traffic ratio
• Traffic to click ratio * clicks estimation = traffic estimation
• Traffic estimation * conversion rate = transactions
• Transactions*AOV = revenue
Here is a forecasting calculator to use for your next project
These formulas work for sites as a whole and page groups. Going back to my earlier point about splitting SEO up into two groups, technical and content, attributing ROI to these things specifically can be hard. However, when working on specific technical or content recommendations opportunity should be forecasted.
Technical
Technical SEO is essential for a well-functioning website and web presence. Optimal technical SEO is critical for web page discovery. It is hard to tie specific recommendations to technical action items because it is not a 1 to 1 correlation between something like page speed to clicks/conversion/rank increase etc. So how do you measure this? You tie it back to a keyword or a group of keywords.
For example: Let’s say part of the website is not being crawled because of poor linking structure. To evaluate this we can analyze the group of webpages that are not getting crawled by linking those pages with target keywords and their search volume. From this we can infer everything else
Technical SEO’s goal is to enhance visibility to crawlers and making your site performance able to rank so content has a chance to get optimal click through rates. Each action item when it comes to technical SEO like enhancing page speed or inserting breadcrumbs will ultimately help with the end of goal of ranking for a set of keywords. It is important to relay this to the client to make them understand that SEO is a comprehensive build.
Content
Building content and optimizing content for SEO is a little more black and white. Why? Because you have a target keyword you are ranking for by writing or modifying content. There is a direct correlation. For example, if you have keyword x that has 1,000 average monthly searches and you rank in the third spot on the first page of Google. You can estimate the number of visitors per month based on the click through rate of that position.
What if SEO issues don’t get addressed?
We can quantify this impact in a few steps:
• Find out the daily average revenue for a group of pages like product pages that are being negatively impacted by the issue
• Estimate the time it would take to fix the issue
• Multiply daily average revenue for affected pages by the time it will take to implement the fix
At West Loop SEO we try to incorporate ROI into our strategy and audits. This is what makes us stand out because at the end of the day ROI is what matters.
