We’re all familiar with the benefits SEO can bring to our businesses, including greater brand awareness, more leads, and new customers.
But how can you tell whether your SEO efforts are actually adding to your bottom line?
To answer that, you need to calculate your SEO return on investment (ROI).
In this article, we’ll explain everything you need to know about measuring SEO ROI – what it is, why it’s important, and how to do it (with or without our SEO ROI calculator). We’ll also cover some expert tips for increasing your search-related profits.
So let’s start with some fundamentals.
| Rank | Company | Phone | Website | Location | Pricing | Clients | Score | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | HigherVisibility | 888-967-1992 | Memphis, TN | 50 – 100 | Medium | PBS, Ebay, Warner Brothers | 99 | |
| 2 | Distilled | 206-965-9265 | Seattle, WA | 50 – 100 | High | Microsoft, The Telegraph, Staples | 95 | |
| 3 | Acronym | 212-691-7051 | New York, NY | 100+ | Medium | Humana, Priceline, LA Times | 91 | |
| 4 | Seer Interactive | 215-967-4461 | Philadelphia, PA | 100+ | High | Revzilla, Drexel Online, Wisdom Tree | 89 | |
| 5 | Icrossing | 212-649-3900 | New York, NY | 100+ | High | Coca-Cola, LG Electronics, Porsche | 88 |
The SEO company data above is sourced from BestSEOCompanies.com who curates results from a proprietary ranking methodology.
SEO ROI is a metric that tells you whether the revenue you generate through SEO campaigns outweighs the costs of implementing them.
While the concept is simple enough, calculating the return on your SEO investment is notoriously challenging.
Unlike other channels such as paid search, display advertising, or even email marketing, attributing conversions and sales to SEO isn’t a clear-cut process.
One reason is that SEO is a long-term undertaking that delivers non-linear benefits over time. For example, it’s common for SEO campaigns to produce negligible results during the first six months, only for organic traffic to start skyrocketing once rankings have had enough time to improve.
Another reason is that SEO activity often contributes to sales that are attributed to other channels. Suppose a customer spends days browsing your products and reading your content. They eventually decide to make a purchase but do so by clicking on one of your Facebook ads. In that case, the sale would be attributed to your social media ad spend, with SEO taking no credit.
Lastly, assigning a monetary value to some of SEO’s core benefits is hard. Undoubtedly, better organic visibility and user experience are good for business, but quantifying these benefits is tricky at best.
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Despite the difficulties involved, measuring SEO ROI is important for the following reasons:
Whether you’re part of an in-house marketing team or work for an agency, you’ll need to prove to the higher-ups that your SEO efforts make money.
Without cold, hard numbers to back up your arguments, you’ll struggle to convince senior decision-makers to continue allocating budget and resources towards SEO (even if it’s working!)
On the other hand, if you can clearly demonstrate how your SEO program generates revenue, you can make a strong case for more investment.
Working out your SEO ROI is also crucial for identifying which specific SEO activities drive the best results and which are underperforming. You can then re-prioritize your efforts accordingly.
For example, if you notice that your recent push to refresh your blog content is delivering better results than expected, you might decide to double down on the project. But at the same time, if aggressively targeting highly-competitive keywords doesn’t seem to be paying off, you might decide to reallocate those resources to your digital outreach efforts.
Keeping tabs on your SEO ROI also allows you to make smarter decisions when planning future marketing campaigns.
So if your SEO campaigns turn out to be more cost-effective than your display advertising campaigns, you could redirect some of that budget into organic search over the next six months.
We’ve touched on the advantages and difficulties of calculating SEO ROI – but how do you actually do it?
Here are the steps you need to follow:
First, you need to figure out exactly how much you currently invest in SEO. Be sure to account for the following costs:
How much time does your team spend devising and implementing your SEO strategy?
Make sure you consider those who work on your website full-time and those who contribute to it on an ad hoc basis (like web developers and copywriters).
This should be a straightforward calculation, provided your team members keep track of how many hours they spend on different projects.
You’ll also need to factor in any SEO work you outsource to agencies, contractors, or freelancers.
Again, this should be an easy calculation since most agencies work to a monthly retainer fee, while contractors and freelancers work to a fixed project or daily rate.
Finally, you’ll need to tally up how much you spend on SEO technology. This could include keyword research tools, rank trackers, crawling software, and link management platforms.
If you use the same software across multiple projects or departments, work out what fraction of the cost is used up by SEO.
You’ll need to set up conversion tracking in Google Analytics to work out how much revenue your SEO efforts generate.
This process is pretty simple if you run an eCommerce site and the main conversions you care about are sales. You can follow this Google guide for instructions on how to set up eCommerce tracking in Google Analytics.
But things can get a little trickier if the primary purpose of your site is to generate leads. What you deem to be a valuable conversion may include newsletter sign-ups, free trials, or contact form submissions. If this is the case, you’ll need to assign a specific dollar value to each conversion based on its importance to your business.
As we mentioned earlier, SEO often impacts conversions indirectly. So you’ll need to factor in these contributions to build an accurate picture of how much SEO adds to your profits.
The good news is that the latest version of Google Analytics (GA4) uses a data-driven attribution, which lets you see how much credit various channels should take for specific conversion events.
Now that you’ve calculated how much you spend on SEO and how much you gain from it, it’s time to crunch the numbers.
The easiest way to measure your return is with our free-to-use SEO ROI calculator. Input the relevant data into the appropriate fields.
But if you prefer the DIY approach, here’s the formula you should use to work out your SEO ROI.
((Value of conversions – cost of investment) / cost of investment) x 100
Suppose you spent $50,000 on SEO in a given period, and your total organic conversion value was $300,000. Here’s what the ROI calculation would look like:
((300,000 – 50,000) / 50,000) x 100 = 500
So your SEO ROI for that period would be 500%.
Now that you’re clear on how to calculate your SEO ROI, what can you do to maximize your return?
Besides consistently monitoring your SEO performance, here are some tips we think will have the most impact.
When deciding which keywords to target on your site, it’s essential to consider factors like keyword difficulty and user intent.
Optimizing for hyper-competitive terms or creating content that fails to fully address the user’s problem are common mistakes that lead sites to underperform in the search results.
Google urges website owners to focus on creating “helpful, reliable, people-first content” instead of obsessing over other ways to improve rankings.
And the fact is Google’s algorithm is pretty well-adapted to identifying and ranking high-quality content in response to user queries.
There is simply no better way to sustainably improve your organic performance than to commit to publishing the best content you can. Not only will it boost your site’s ranking potential, but it will also help you earn the trust and loyalty of your visitors. This, in turn, will help your business grow.
While it’s common for SEO professionals to emphasize the value of content, backlinks, and website crawlability, page experience is an often-overlooked ranking factor.
To improve your website experience:
Check Google’s page experience guide for advice on making these improvements.
As with all business and marketing activities, SEO’s worth ultimately boils down to whether it brings in more money than it costs.
Sure, calculating SEO ROI has its difficulties. But without it, you have no objective way to judge whether your SEO is on the right track or whether you should invest more or less into your campaigns.
Once you work out how much you spend on SEO and how much money it brings in, you can easily calculate your ROI with our calculator.
As a final note, just keep in mind that the business benefits of SEO can’t always be linked directly to revenue. Better rankings, greater organic visibility, and increased traffic are hard to quantify in financial terms. But there are all positive signs that SEO is helping your business grow.
| Rank | Company | Phone | Website | Location | Pricing | Clients | Score | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | HigherVisibility | 888-967-1992 | Memphis, TN | 50 – 100 | Medium | PBS, Ebay, Warner Brothers | 99 | |
| 2 | Distilled | 206-965-9265 | Seattle, WA | 50 – 100 | High | Microsoft, The Telegraph, Staples | 95 | |
| 3 | Acronym | 212-691-7051 | New York, NY | 100+ | Medium | Humana, Priceline, LA Times | 91 | |
| 4 | Seer Interactive | 215-967-4461 | Philadelphia, PA | 100+ | High | Revzilla, Drexel Online, Wisdom Tree | 89 | |
| 5 | Icrossing | 212-649-3900 | New York, NY | 100+ | High | Coca-Cola, LG Electronics, Porsche | 88 |
The SEO company data above is sourced from BestSEOCompanies.com who curates results from a proprietary ranking methodology.
The purpose of SEOCalc.com is to demystify the costs of SEO and your expectations of what can be acheived.