Think about how you attract customers as a business owner. What’s your most successful lead gen channel? Is it through traditional advertising, word of mouth? Maybe digital channels like a paid advertisement or SEO? After you attract a customer, how do you keep customers coming back after you convert them from potential to paying? It’s likely those successful channels that keep you going as a business. You see the value in them, so you continue to put forth time and effort into successful marketing campaigns to continue to bring in new customers.
But what about those channels that you might not find as much success? Or that success is a lot less noticeable because it takes time to build up. That’s something we get asked a lot at Boostability. How do you know your SEO campaign is working? How do you see the value? Or how do you measure the ROI of it? We know SEO is a great tactic to help people find businesses, however, helping your customers and clients understand the value of it for their business when the authority takes time to build can sometimes be a challenge. We’re here to help you work through that challenge to earn you more business.
How to measure ROI
Unlike other digital marketing methods such as PPC, it’s hard to measure a direct successful result. With a PPC campaign, you see the money spent, the clicks, the direct leads coming in. It’s easy to monitor if your campaign is successful or not. SEO doesn’t have these direct numbers. You can tell over time if your website receives more traffic. If your keywords are increasing their rank. With an SEO campaign, you should be getting more leads and more pageviews.
The best way to measure ROI, is to know what you want to accomplish through an SEO campaign. Do you just want more traffic? Do you want to improve revenue? More keywords ranking on page on? Of course, all are worthy goals, but once you know your key performance indicators (KPIs), it’s much easier to understand how well your campaign performs.
While they’re no main indicator of success of an SEO campaign, you can measure it through several different KPIs, including:
- Keyword rank – the more keywords you see showing up on page one, the better. These include both the main keywords you target in your campaign, and the halo keywords that also raise as a result of the work done.
- Linkbuilding – We’ve written before that links work as digital votes of confidence pointing back to your website. You don’t want to place them just all over the place for the sake of getting links. But strategic links building over time help give your website more authority.
- Increase in organic traffic – More traffic to your website automatically shows that SEO is working. It means that by getting your site higher in the rankings, you have a greater exposure.
- Higher revenue – More exposure means more customers. And more customers should mean more revenue.
What happens when you stop SEO
The simple fact of it is that SEO is never really done. Once you build authority and get on page one, there’s always other keywords to target, more relevance to build, more trust to gain in the eyes of the Google algorithm. It’s understandable to think that it’s a lot to maintain, so why even try. But honestly the first effort to get your website ranking takes a majority of the time, from there, it’s a matter of maintenance and continuing to flex your new digital marketing strategy.
If you decide to stop an SEO campaign cold turkey, you won’t see much of a difference right away. Because it takes six months or more to get your website ranking in the first place, it takes that same amount of time to drop it off. So that’s good news if you need to pause your campaign for a time. But if you stop a campaign it means you’re not going after new keywords or fighting for competitive spots. If you don’t build new pages and blogs, then you lose the chance for new backlinks. You could be impacted by Google’s algorithm updates. And all businesses face competition. If you aren’t improving your website to stay at the top of the rankings, there’s a good chance your competitors are, and after a time, they will overtake your website in the SERPs.
Confidently move forward with an SEO campaign
One of the biggest challenges when understanding the value of SEO is realizing that it takes time. It’s hard to measure results, simply because you have to be patient. We live in a world of “now, now, now”, but SEO is a long-term strategy that builds up over time.
Unlike PPC where you set the budget and wait for it to be gone and hopefully get leads, you put in the work up front with SEO, and continue to bring in leads and traffic over time. You can move forward knowing that by working with an SEO specialist that you can get your website to rank and in turn bring in more leads without paying for individual clicks.
One of the hardest parts of SEO is just understanding the why of it all. But it’s as simple as helping your website provide the best possible answer for your location, your industry, and your specialty. SEO helps a website put its best foot forward. Google is essentially a customer recommendation machine. People trust the top results. Don’t you want to make sure your website shows up there?
