Calculating the ROI on SEO, How to Know if it’s Worth It

ROI Of SEO

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We’ve all heard people talk about how amazing SEO is and that you need to partner with a digital marketing agency to capitalize on all of the fantastic benefits, but how do you really know if it’s worth it. The pandemic has brought many unwelcome challenges to people around the world, and while the common man or woman for that matter may be struggling the most, businesses are also suffering. Firms in the Los Angeles area and around the globe have been put into a dreadfully difficult position.

In today’s market, every decision counts and must be made with the utmost precision if a firm is to survive the chaotic blitz of the modern business environment. As a business owner or decision-maker who is pondering the potential benefits of investing in SEO by partnering with a digital marketing agency, you need the facts. Here you will find all of the information you could possibly require to make the best decision in weighing the ROI on SEO. Every business person knows that each investment requires a return, so let’s take a look at how to go about calculating the ROI on SEO.

What Can SEO Do For You?

So what is SEO anyway? While it has become increasingly difficult to find people who haven’t at least heard of SEO at one time or another, it is even harder to find people who fully understand it. Let’s start you off easy, SEO stands for, search engine optimization. If that didn’t help you out much, here’s a breakdown of SEO in a nutshell.

Deep down, most of you know what SEO is, you just haven’t associated the phenomenon with the definition. The reason why many of your competitors are ranking higher on search engines and coming up ahead of you in search results is that your competitors have a better understanding of SEO. This is actually good news because it means that this is a problem that you can fix, with a little help from a savvy digital marketing agency. 

You know that blog you started? The one that you’ve been pouring your heart and soul into, staying up late on weekends to crank out blog posts for your business in hopes of giving your business a boost? You should know that even if you are producing exceptionally written content, it won’t do you a lick of good unless that content is laced with effective keywords.

Finding the right keywords to use and using them well is part of the magic behind SEO and how it works. That said, if you think that playing with keywords is all you need to do to leverage SEO in your favor, you’d be mistaken. There’s a lot more to it than that and if you really want to get the most value out of SEO, you’ll need to partner with a digital marketing agency like AlchemyLeads.

When you work with someone who really knows how to leverage it, SEO can revolutionize your business, bring in new customers, help you retain more long-term customers, and bury competitors under the search results.

How to Calculate the ROI on SEO

In concept, calculating the ROI on SEO is remarkably similar to calculating the ROI on any other type of investment. Although there are certainly many factors to consider when executing such calculations, it all comes down to running the cost of your investment against the amount of money you gained from the investment.

In order to get a clear picture of just how much SEO can benefit your business and how much money it has contributed, you’ll need to use data analytics tools. If you want to get the most accurate depiction of your ROI on SEO as possible, you’ll have to take a look at how many visitors to your site you were getting before investing in SEO and how those views have affected your sales.

Once you compare these results against how many visitors you’re getting after investing in SEO and how much more money you’re making from those visitors, you will have a number to work with.

Keep in mind, this number alone will not give you a complete accounting of the ROI on your investment in SEO after starting to work with a digital marketing agency. This will be the first number you have to work with. You will need to run the same calculation each month and compare the numbers until you get an average over several months. This will give you more valuable data.

Ideally, you should enter this data into a program that can turn it into a chart so that you can visualize how much better your company has been doing since partnering with digital marketing agencies like AlchemyLeads.  

Calculating the ROI on Specific SEO-related Goals

There are other ways to calculate the ROI on the kinds of SEO services that digital marketing agencies provide. Sometimes businesses are more interested in achieving specific goals rather than simply comparing site views and sales figures. 

Savvy businesses know that in order to jump ahead of the competition, you can’t just try to sell everything in equal amounts. When you invest the same amount of advertising money on every single product and service you offer, you won’t sell much of anything and even if you do, you won’t make much on it because your advertising costs are so high. Likewise, you can’t just throw money at one thing and expect your business to suddenly rank higher on everything across the board.

Talented digital marketing agencies like AlchemyLeads know how to help companies get ahead by identifying and achieving specific SEO-related goals. Start small, go big, when it comes to SEO, everything is interconnected. If you start off intending to outrank your competitor on one of their flagship products, you can gain the upper hand. It’s like Jenga, when you find the right block and pull it out, the whole thing comes down, that’s how you can outperform your competitors without spending a fortune on advertising.

For example, if your website sells clothing, you can focus your SEO on outranking local competitors on the sale of a specific item such as expensive sweaters. From an SEO perspective, the goal looks like this; you want to rank 1st in your area for expensive sweaters. 

Is it Worth it?

Returning to our example using the goal of jumping to the top of the search results for expensive sweaters, consider this. If you find that you have achieved that goal after working with a digital marketing agency, it’s safe to say that the ROI was worth it! Or was it? Keep in mind, just because your investment in SEO helped you achieve your goal doesn’t mean that you made a profit.

To get a better idea of how much you’re really getting back on your investment, you have to take a closer look at the costs. One thing to watch out for is the cost of finding the right keywords. Many of the online tools that businesses use to find their keywords are much more expensive than they should be.

There are many individual factors that you’ll have to collect and incorporate into your analysis in order to get an accurate determination on just how much investing in SEO has helped you. You’ll have to look at click-through rates, bounce rates, and many more indicators.

Click-through rates refer to a calculation representing the number of people who came to your website by clicking on a specific post of advertisement. This figure can help you determine the efficacy of each individual post or online ad. Click-through rates relate to your ROI on SEO in that when your click-through rates go up, so does your ROI!

Bounce rates are also important indicators. Your bounce rate is the number of people who leave your website after viewing only one single page. One could say that the bounce rate is a decent indicator of how effective your content is. One could also say that bounce rates can be used to determine whether a recent spike in the number of page views was artificial.

At the end of the day, there’s only one major indicator that can show whether your investment in SEO is worth it or not. The real value is in how many customers your SEO investment brought in and how many of those customers are long-term. If working on your SEO with a digital marketing agency brought in a lot of new and repeat business, you’ve got it made. Customers are the lifeblood of any business irrespective of size or specialty. Without customers, businesses deflate and implode invariably.

A digital marketing agency that can help you achieve specific SEO goals and bring in more long-term customers is the kind of secret weapon you’ve been looking for, or maybe it’s more like the secret formula. No one knows this better than the distinguished clientele of AlchemyLeads, one of the most highly effective and innovative digital marketing firms in the Los Angeles area.

Make SEO a Breeze with AlchemyLeads

Most business owners don’t have time to mess around learning the ins and outs of SEO and all of the secrets that make the magic happen. That’s where the digital marketing and SEO experts at AlchemyLeads come in, we’ve mastered SEO so that you don’t have to! Not every digital marketing agency can give you the same ROI on SEO as AlchemyLeads. The reason for that is multifaceted, is it because of our years of experience or world-class expertise? Or do we really have a secret formula after all? It’s a win-win for our customers either way.

For those of you who want the highest possible ROI on SEO, AlchemyLeads has the talent and the manpower to do it all, pick up the phone and give us a call!

author avatar
Sean Chaudhary Founder & CEO
Sean Chaudhary is the Founder and CEO of AlchemyLeads, a specialized, revenue-first SEO and content marketing agency in the Los Angeles area (Calabasas, California). He founded the agency in 2017 on a simple principle: measure SEO by revenue, not vanity metrics. Over 15+ years in search marketing, Sean developed the Good SEO® framework and has led organic growth programs for B2B and ecommerce brands, with a focus on technical SEO, content strategy, and link building. He writes regularly on SEO and content marketing, with bylines on platforms including Zapier and GoDaddy. Connect with Sean on LinkedIn to follow his work on SEO, GEO, and AI-era search.

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