SEO is one of the important prerequisites for a business website nowadays. In fact, organic searches in the search engine of Google is responsible for 59.2% of web traffic in the world. However, even if your website is visited by a lot of people, the lead conversion will determine the success of your marketing strategies. Cumulatively, it is called return on investment or ROI and it determines the profitability of the investment.
A significant struggle
One of the toughest jobs performed by most SEO professionals is to calculate ROI for SEO. It’s true that SEO experts do have the access to keyword volume data, which is an indicator of the preferences of the prospective customer. According to the SEO expert Doug Cunningham, the golden ratio of keywords [The number of Google results that have the keyword phrase in the title divided by the local monthly search volume (LMS); provided the LMS is less than 250] should be 0.25; websites having this ratio shall be within the top 100. Let us know about the factors which can be instrumental when you calculate ROI for SEO are given below;
Perform keyword analysis
You will need to perform a keyword analysis to estimate the volume of keywords. For Google, you can use the keyword planner service, or otherwise, there are many online free or paid tools for you to use. Essentially, you would need the targeted words with the associated data of their volume. It would be better to collect and collate all the data in a single excel file for later reference.
Keep a record of your keyword data
After deciding on the terms to target for a specific project, the next step is to calculate the difference between the existing performance and the estimated change due to the applied change. In short, you have to get the keyword data for the term the site already ranks for; in addition to related terms with it. Ideally, up-to-date impressions, clicks, click-through rate (CTR), and average position would be the information you need if working on a Google search console. The best way to calculate ROI for SEO is with 12 months of data, which may not be possible in Google. However, there are several third-party tools that can provide you with this data.
Calculate current CTR against the average position
After collecting and collating all the data, you will need to find out the CTR and average ranking position for each keyword. Thereafter, you will need to average out the CTRs across all the keywords. Usually, keywords with brands are searched for more than generic keywords.
Final steps
After the calculation of keywords with the updated CTR, you will need to complete the following steps;
- Identify the keyword gaps and opportunities.
- Summarizing the keywords
- Estimating the clicks from the keyword volume.
- Calculate the average conversion rate and revenue per conversion rate.
- Calculating the approximate ROI for the project.
Completion by professionals
The huge amount of numbers can be confusing while doing the arithmetic to calculate ROI for SEO. However, using a properly programmed excel sheet can come in handy in this respect. Employing professionals for this project is also a good idea.