The demonstration of ROI or the Return on Investment from the SEO activities conducted for your website determines your standing position in the market. The market strategy, when it displays its return value, can be benefitted from getting higher businesses. The SEO ROI measurement is also important because it gives the true impression of your SEO initiatives and the scope of improving your efforts in this regard.
It is not difficult to monitor the conversions, traffic, referrals, etc. However, the measurement of SEO return on investment is possible, provided you follow some given steps. The ROI for SEO is the only metric that offers you the true value of the campaign and your efforts put in the entire strategy. Therefore, we will talk about the process you can adopt to calculate the value of ROI of your SEO activities.
How to Measure ROI on SEO
Let us now talk about the calculation of return on investment on SEO by following the three significant steps:
- Activate the Conversion Tracking in Google Analytics
Getting a measure of the converted traffic on your site is the first step in calculating the website return on investment. This can be done when you set up the conversion-tracking tool in Google Analytics. The conversion tracking allows you to keep an authentic record of earnings of your website done via conversions.
The determination of this factor differs on the scale; your business earns revenue directly from the website, or your website acts as a lead generator for your business.
E-commerce Website
The e-commerce websites gather their sales directly from the website, so it is simple to track the exact online revenues. Since the income earned has online imprints, the data collected is accurate and precise. For doing that, set up the e-commerce tracking via Google instruction. This enables you to track the online revenues collected by your e-commerce store, which you can easily see under the e-commerce ‘overview’ head (conversions>e-commerce>overview).
Lead-Based Website
If your website acts as a lead facilitator for your business, it could be challenging to track accurate conversion values. Determining the revenues collected through the website could be the most precise way is to assign dollar values for the conversions done on the on-site activities based on past sales. To setup, a goal for your on-site conversions, follow Admin>View>Goals in Analytics. Range these goals from free quote requests, form submissions, and phone calls.
- Sort Data of the Conversions by Different Channels
After collection of the conversion data of your website for a few months, the next step is to sort it under different channels. This step shall help you locate the attributions, which you must include forgetting the accurate SEO ROI.For doing that, follow Conversions>Multi-Channel Funnels>Assisted Conversions.
This step shall let you see the Conversion report within the selected period depending upon the different channels that drew their attention towards your website. You can now easily locate the organic channels that resulted from your SEO initiatives and include them as SEO benchmark for ROI calculation.
- Measure SEO ROI using Formula
After the above steps, you will have access to the information related to the return of investments you generated on applying SEO strategies for your online campaign within a specific time period. All you require is to compare this value with the investment you made on SEO or the cost of taking the SEO strategies.
To determine that value, you must apply the given SEO ROI formula:
(Gain from Investment – Cost of Investment) / Cost of Investment
The above-given formula is the basic Investopedia formula that can be used if your company does not follow any specific method or procedure for calculating the website return on investment. If you multiply the resultant by 100, you will get the ROI in terms of percentage.
Therefore, using the above steps, you can calculate the actual returns gained by your website on the investment made in SEO strategies. This SEO ROI percentage can further be used to showcase your website progress or the scope of improvement if necessary.
