SEO ROI is a ratio used by businesses to define the return on investment of how much you invest in SEO to how much you earn by improving site SEO. Although driving more organic traffic to your Wix website is important, measuring the ROI of SEO should be what you need to focus on.
In this article, we will be guiding you to learn how to measure the ROI of SEO step by step.
What Is SEO?
Search engine optimization (SEO) is a marketing approach that aims to increase sales by attracting organic traffic from search engines like Google and Yahoo. Countless businesses invest in SEO to enhance their website's visibility in search engine result pages (SERPs).
When it comes to conversion rates, the impact of SEO is undeniable. The higher your website ranks in search results, the greater the likelihood that users will click on your page link (with a potential CTR of 40%). Given the crucial role SEO plays in connecting your business with customers, it's worth investing in.
What Is the SEO ROI?
Measuring the return on investment for all SEO strategies is what the ROI of SEO means. While it takes time to calculate this crucial KPI (key performance indicator), it allows you to grasp what is essential for your SEO endeavors.
Have you ever wondered about the true Return on Investment (ROI) of Search Engine Optimization (SEO)? Consider this scenario: You write a blog post for an eCommerce website and get paid $100 for it. Through SEO efforts, that post drives $500 in sales to the store. In this case, the SEO ROI is 4.
We will deep dive into how to measure the ROI of SEO later in this post. Till that time, let us try to understand why SEO ROI matters.
The Importance of SEO ROI
Did you know that over 50% of website traffic comes from organic search results? The key to a successful SEO campaign is converting that traffic into sales. It's crucial to invest in effective strategies that generate financial value for your business and determine which ones work best.
So, measuring the ROI is the key performance indicator for that business's profitability.
You can optimize your site for better SEO ROI by following these tips:
Build meaningful site structure: Improving user experience has an influence over both search engines and users since it contributes to search ranking potential.
Search for keywords: Find unique and relevant keywords for what you are trying to optimize.
Establish authority: Be a trustworthy source with high-quality content and gain backlinks from other websites.
Analyze results: Try to find the problematic parts for further improvements.
How to Measure the ROI of SEO?
ROI in reality is just a simple value obtained by dividing the SEO profit by the SEO costs. The formula for the ROI of SEO is as follows:
SEO ROI = (conversions in total - expenses for SEO) / expenses for SEO
Calculating SEO Investments
How much money have you put towards SEO in total? Start by summing up your SEO investments.
Some of the SEO investments you can make are:
Subscribing SEO tools
Buying links
Paying for the website (or monthly maintenance)
Calculating The Value of Conversions through Organic Traffic
In order to estimate the monthly value of organic traffic conversions, you can use another simple formula.
Monthly value = Monthly searches * click-through rate * value per visit
Let us make a calculation for SEO ROI with a couple of assumptions.
In a month, your SEO campaign generated $50000 and you paid $5000 for SEO works. Put these values into the first formula.
($50000 - $5000) / $5000 = 9
So, for every $1 you invest in SEO, you generated $9 in value. In other words, you boosted 900% in return.
How Long Does It Take to See the Results of SEO ROI?
SEO cannot be considered as a form of advertising where you can simply pay to have your website ranked as the top result. It requires a minimum of 3-6 months to witness the ROI of SEO. Additionally, there are various factors that influence the ROI of SEO that need to be taken into consideration.
New vs. Old Website
Websites that have been around for a while tend to get backlinks and generate financial success more quickly after SEO. This is because Google is more likely to crawl pages with more relevant keywords and give preference to sites with a strong, established authority.
The Competition
SEO is not a stable competition. While you are optimizing your site for SEO, your competitors also work on how to optimize their pages for SEO. The more competitors in a field, the less the likelihood of ranking your pages for keywords similar to those used by your competitors.
Targeting highly competitive keywords is something like fighting against an army equipped with advanced technology backed by the most advanced countries.
Recommendation: Target keywords relevant to the main keyword with less than 20 keyword difficulty (20 out of 100).
Resources
In order to get faster results in SEO, you should invest more in hiring SEO content writers to let them create high-quality content for you.
Before getting started with the competition, make sure you complete the short-list SEO checklist:
Fix broken links: Redirect broken page links by using 301 redirects
Optimize images: Add alt text to images and reduce the file sizes for light-speed page loading
Build internal links: Connect relevant articles with another one.
How to Measure the ROI of SEO in Wix?
Tracking and growing the ROI of SEO is not a clear path to follow as easily as you can do in paid ads. But we might somehow decide rough rates for SEO ROI by simply tracking the website traffic sources, organic traffic per page, and sales reports for a certain time interval in Wix.
For example, you are the owner of an eCommerce business in clothing. You agreed with a Wix SEO expert to boost your sales by increasing the organic traffic coming through search engine results by 40% in 90 days. This was a deal worth $5000.
It is clear that no one can guarantee something about SEO optimization in Wix but these terms are accounted as the estimated outcomes in the contract.
An expert in Wix SEO optimized various pages with Wix SEO tools including category pages, product pages, blog pages, and static pages. They made on-page SEO changes, created links, and performed other necessary tasks.
The experts were able to track the sales by adding query parameters to the links redirected from blog posts, which resulted in impressive improvements in the posts.
You received a sales report from Wix after a 90-day period, which highlighted the most popular items sold in your store.
The overall increase in sales for the products that relevant blog posts were redirected to in the last 90 days will be the positive side of the formula. The amount you invested in SEO will be subtracted from the amount of increase in the last 90 days, then the results will be divided by that amount of investment.
ROI = ( $40000 in sales - $5000 of investment ) / $5000 of investment = 7
How can we confirm that the rise in sales is a direct outcome of the tasks executed by SEO specialists? Is it true that the sales have skyrocketed by 700%?
Measuring ROI of SEO through Wix Analytics
Wix Analytics is a valuable tool for monitoring and evaluating website performance in areas such as sales, conversions, marketing, traffic, SEO, and customer behavior metrics. The tool provides reports that present the most significant data points for a chosen time period, either in summary form or with a more detailed analysis.
To verify the accuracy of the reports provided by the SEO specialist, begin by examining the website's traffic performance over a period of 90 days. Then, review each report individually in the following order:
Top traffic sources by sessions
New Vs returning visitors
Top pages by sessions
Site sessions
Afterward, review the sales reports to determine if there has been a significant surge in sales within the last 90 days. You can examine each report individually:
Total sales
Sales over time
Sales by traffic source
New Vs returning visitors
Sales by coupons
Note: If you sell something not through the Wix store app, visit other reports for associated apps.
You can also create a custom report in Wix Analytics if you are a premium user.
Forecasting the real amount you made in sales through SEO efforts might be challenging.
Here are some reasons to consider:
The lack of data: You cannot track any visitor who does not accept cookie consent.
Abandoned carts: Visitors might interact with your site but end up without completing the purchase
SEO impact: SEO efforts might take months to get results from so they might not affect the interval you track for sales
Paid ads: Although SEO efforts are valuable, ads are in the place where visitors will first interact in.
We will be simplifying the parameters to estimate a rough number for the ROI of SEO.
Now, make a simple calculation with the data from these reports for further investigation. Remember the formula previously introduced in this article.
Monthly value = Monthly searches * click-through rate * value per visit
***We will take "monthly searches*click-through rate" as one session later.
Take notes of the following data points from reports:
The amount you made in sales that came from organic search results in the last 90 days (x1)
The amount you made in sales that came from organic search results in the previous 90 days (90 days before the last 90 days) (x2)
Site sessions in the last 90 days (x3)
Site sessions in the previous 90 days (90 days before the last 90 days) (x4)
Also, take the investment cost as a parameter, x6.
Here is the updated formula with the parameters.
Value in the last 90 days = (x1 - x2) / (x3 - x4) = x5
SEO ROI = (x5 - x6) / x6
Last but not least, put the real data into this formulation to calculate the value SEO efforts added to the business in the last 90 days (a simple task for you).
Conclusion
SEO ROI is a way to simply estimate the value that SEO efforts generate over time. Although forecasting the value it adds is a challenging task, investing in SEO still matters since half of the website traffic comes through organic search results.
If you have more suggestions, please leave it as a comment.