The Truth About Real SEO ROI
SEO often involves a significant initial investment with a longer ROI than other channels. And once you let SEO slide, the recovery budget can be even more taxing.
However, the ROI of an investment in SEO is generally higher than in other channels.
You know, but your stakeholders?
By showing the right strategic investment in SEO, your brand will come through a period of economic uncertainty in a much stronger position, poised for growth.
I want to help you demonstrate this to stakeholders.
How to show accurately projected results that shareholders and customers can plan for
It is your responsibility as an expert to make sure that SEO is a priority.
This can be done through strategic planning that your customers and stakeholders can trust.
Let’s see two ways to do it:
use SEO forecast to better predict, select and validate your marketing goals, SEO goals and business goals; with this, you can provide valuable information to marketing directors, sales directors or finance directors. Identify hidden or less obvious growth opportunities through organic search and validate them with SEO forecasting. You will show the value of the opportunity and what it means as an investment.
1. Use SEO prediction while building an SEO strategy to validate achievable goals
The first step in building your SEO strategy is choosing your goals and objectives.
These goals should be the North Star that every part of your strategy works towards.
You probably had to answer questions related to business goals such as:
What percentage increase in non-branded organic traffic can we expect with an investment? If we invest, how much additional revenue or leads will we receive from an increase in our organic search traffic? What will our return on investment look like in 12 months if we invest in improving our unbranded organic search traffic?
using SEOmonitor forecastyou will be able to answer these questions and ensure your value as a thought leader.
Plus, you’ll be able to explain those metrics, set expectations, and provide insights on where to best invest your marketing budget.
With the answers to these questions in your pocket, you can start building the foundation of a highly understandable SEO strategy that your prospects will love.
As I’m personally a fan of the ‘SMART goals’ framework, I recommend using it to build your strategy as it forces you to consider whether your goals are actually measurable and achievable.
An example that can guide you might be: “Increase organic non-brand search traffic by X% within 12 months and Y% within 24 months, while improving by Z% the percentage of website conversion for our agreed conversion goals.”
How to validate your SEO goals
Let’s look at an example to understand how forecasting helps create and explain these specific, measurable goals.
In this example, I’m working on a property and real estate website, which I’ll call “Property Search”.
Property Search gets around 5 million organic search sessions per year.
My potential targets are:
Maintain and grow the non-branded organic search traffic the site is already receiving. Increase organic and unbranded search traffic for new areas of opportunity.
What I have to answer below:
What is the percentage increase? How would this affect conversions? What would an ROI look like in 12 months?
Now that you have your questions in mind, you can use SEO forecasting to help ensure that these metrics and goals are truly achievable.
Define your keyword data at a granular level
The more granular you structure your keyword data, the better.
Define your information architecture and group together strategic groups of search phrases.
SEOmonitor provides a folder structure and groupswhich helps you set the level of granularity you need.
Create folders: When setting up my keyword search data for “Property Search”, I will choose to create individual folders to represent a top-level category in the information architecture (eg Office or Retail) .
Create groups: Then, within each folder, I’ll create groups that represent a subcategory (eg For Sale or Rent).
Add keyword groups: In each group, add groups of keyword phrases related to the category or subcategory in question.
Add to SEOmonitor: These search phrases are entered into SEOmonitor via Google Search Console and Google Analytics when setting up your account or manually using your own keyword research methods.
Image from SEOmonitor, September 2022
This level of granularity allows you to create different forecast scenarios based on your selection of specific folders or groups. This is how you can validate relevant metrics with different goals.
In order to forecast metrics for my first goal – “maintain and grow the non-branded organic search traffic the site is already receiving” – I start the forecasting process in SEOmonitor with the folders and groups I’ve structured related to “Property Search’s” current organic search footprint.
Image from SEOmonitor, September 2022
Create and test a reliable SEO strategy scenario
The SEOmonitor forecasting solution provides you with all the key variables you need to create a reliable scenario:
Time period: You can make forecasts for a period of 3, 6 and 12 months.
Speed of progress: Get the flexibility to adjust the speed at which you reach your goal: exponential, linear, or custom.
Volume and interannual trend: Easily consider average monthly volumes and year-over-year search trends.
Classification objective: Set rank position targets at the folder or group level.
Goal opportunity: See how realistic your goal is based on your current and custom organic search footprint keyword difficulty metric for your target website.
A key part of the forecasting process is the ability to adjust the conversion rate in the SEOmonitor forecasting algorithm.
Sometimes when you are familiar with a brand, your experience can help you tailor your forecast to a more accurate prediction.
For example, one problem I’ve encountered in the past is that conversion data from Google Analytics doesn’t match data from internal systems, in some cases by 20-30%. In this case, adjusting the conversion rate you’re forecasting provides much more accurate metrics in the final forecast.
Image from SEOmonitor, September 2022
The resulting forecast scenario provides me with all the data I need to answer the above questions, validate my first objective, and provide valuable insight to my client.
2. Discover new business opportunities with SEO prediction
From this initial forecast scenario, we can now turn our attention to the second goal I outlined: “grow unbranded organic search traffic for new areas of opportunity.”
How to spot gaps in your competitor’s SEO strategy
After extensive research into new areas of opportunity for “Property Search” and identifying clusters of business-related keyword phrases, we identified achievable gaps in the competitor landscape.
We believe that gaps can be reached due to the company’s level of authority in the competitive landscape.
Import keyword phrases and groups: we import them manually to SEOmonitor and create a second forecast scenario for our second goal; this forecast will present different metrics so we can validate the opportunity and our second goal.
Create SMART goals: With both forecast scenarios completed, I have all the metrics we need to create measurable and achievable SMART goals, thus the ability to validate those goals and our primary SEO goal.
Image from SEOmonitor, September 2022
3. Use predicted SEO forecasts to help make business decisions
Working with the Sales Director of “Property Search”, we were able to use data from both scenarios to forecast of income generated by the site based on increased conversions.
Based on the estimated increase in non-branded traffic, we can do that too Consider increasing your display advertising revenue of advertisers on their site.
All of these affect the ability to do so predict better ads and make board-level decisions about the best areas of marketing investment.
As a final note, you might wonder why we didn’t group these two forecast scenarios together, which is a good question.
The reason for this is that the two goals we had required different tactics to achieve success:
Our first goal required more time and investment in technical and on-page SEO. Our second focus was more on content and digital PR.
Being able to assign these goals to specific stakeholders within the ‘Property Search’ team allowed for better accountability and clarity on who was responsible for delivery in each area of our strategy.
Use SEO prediction to show SEO needs across the business
SEO forecasting based on keywords and desired ranking goals allows you to set clear, measurable goals and make a strong business case for:
Leveraging today’s unbranded organic traffic. Identifying new opportunities to grow the business’s non-branded organic traffic.
This further translates into potential business outcomes that customers and stakeholders care about.
It’s how you turn the conversation from SEO as a cost to SEO as an investment.
With SEOmonitor’s forecast, which takes into account all the key variables that influence your keywords and rankings (device targeting, search data including seasonality and year-over-year trends, CTR and conversion rates), you can check all the calculations and trust the data.
Join us if you want to create more value for your customers and stakeholders with more transparency and accuracy.
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