Enhancing Marketing ROI with SEO

Effective SEO strategies can help you increase website traffic, but they can also do so much more. With a robust SEO plan in place, you’ll see a long-term improvement in your digital marketing ROI. This starts with tailoring your content to align with user intent. It continues with continual SEO adjustments that take into account your organization’s KPIs, bringing you benefits that include higher levels of trust with your customers and significant growth in your brand’s awareness. Overall, SEO can help you boost your customers’ journeys and get the results you deserve.

Key Points:

The importance of measuring SEO ROI: Assess the impact of your SEO marketing efforts on revenue generation and overall business goals.
Strategies for connecting ROI to SEO: The right methodologies and strategies can help you measure the ROI from your SEO campaigns
How to improve your SEO ROI methods: Testing, measurement, and more methods for optimizing your SEO ROI methods.

What is SEO ROI?

SEO ROI is a standard metric that evaluates the effectiveness of SEO activities in generating revenue compared to their expenses. This specific metric directly links marketing efforts to tangible business outcomes. Typically, metrics used to calculate SEO ROI include leads generated, increased revenue, and cost savings achieved through optimized organic search performance. A positive SEO ROI proves the value and profitability of investing in SEO best practices.

Measuring SEO ROI

Measuring SEO ROI helps you assess the impact of your SEO marketing efforts on revenue generation and overall business goals. Tracking different SEO performance indicators that demonstrate a positive ROI provides C-suite executives with concrete evidence of your strategy’s profitability. These measurements not only validate the effectiveness of your strategies but also make it easier to gain support from stakeholders and decision-makers for future projects.

However, as a marketing professional, you should be aware of some common challenges and misconceptions surrounding ROI analysis. One is viewing ROI analysis solely through a financial lens. ROI should encompass both financial returns and non-financial benefits such as improved brand reputation and customer satisfaction. As you measure ROI, try to include a holistic approach beyond profit margins.

A robust SEO strategy can establish your brand’s credibility and bolster your online presence in ways that will have positive outcomes in the long-term. While intangibles like these can be difficult to measure, at Silverback we look for multiple KPIs that we know will ultimately impact your organization’s bottom line. Whenever we can, we recommend pushing beyond just traffic or conversions to connect your SEO investment dollars to real revenue. This sometimes requires a deep dive into CRMs and advanced analytics support but can make your ROI analysis 10x easier.

Another challenge is the perception that ROI analysis is a one-time calculation. Experienced marketers know that effective ROI analysis is an ongoing process. They continuously track and update fluctuations that reflect changing market dynamics and business goals. This approach allows for more accurate decision-making and adaptation.

Furthermore, the misconception that ROI analysis is exclusive to large projects can limit its potential impact. Applying ROI analysis to all of your projects, no matter the size, allows for more efficient resource allocation and optimization across your entire marketing spectrum.

For example, a large-scale project like a site migration might benefit from an analysis of visibility loss or optimized user experience. However, a small-scale project might include optimizing your company’s Google Business Profile based on the latest Google updates, as measured by an increase in customer inquiries. Over time, these smaller projects and implementations, often considered “regular maintenance,” are what will drive some of the most sustainable improvements to your site year in and year out. As the saying goes, if you improve by 1% every day, you’ll end up thirty-seven times better off than had you done nothing.

Strategies for Proving SEO ROI

When used effectively, the right methodologies and strategies can help you measure the ROI from your SEO campaigns. These measurements will come in handy when you prepare reports for managers, CFOs, and other stakeholders.

Utilizing Advanced Analytics

To utilize advanced analytics for proving SEO ROI, focus on tracking KPIs that directly link SEO efforts to quantifiable business outcomes. This starts with defining and monitoring the specific metrics that matter most to you, such as organic traffic, conversion rate, keyword rankings, and user engagement over time. When you use analytics tools effectively, you gain insights into website performance and can identify more optimization opportunities.

Conversion Tracking

Proper conversion tracking allows businesses to determine the ROI of their marketing campaigns by tracking revenue generated and comparing it with campaign costs. By identifying the most profitable marketing channels and optimizing landing pages based on conversion data, businesses can allocate resources more effectively. They’ll also be able to refine their marketing strategies and ultimately increase conversion rates and revenue.

Linking SEO to Revenue

Attributing revenue gains directly to SEO efforts requires a strategic approach, especially considering the complexity of the digital marketing ecosystem. Attribution modeling can help understand the value of organic traffic by mapping a user’s journey to conversion across various touchpoints such as organic search, social media, and email marketing. This type of modeling isolates and quantifies the impact of SEO within the conversion path, providing valuable insights into your SEO effort’s contribution to revenue generation over time.

As a marketer, you can help your organization recognize that SEO is a long-term investment. Consistent tracking of keyword rankings and site visibility can amplify the ROI of SEO efforts and drive positive, meaningful results for your business.

With paid efforts, you invest in a campaign while it’s running, but once it’s shut off, the benefit dies with it. With SEO, once you invest in a page, an optimization, or a technical fix, your investment keeps working, and all you have to do is maintain it. Day or night, June or December, it’s driving traffic and generating leads. Over time, a well-executed SEO strategy can significantly reduce customer acquisition costs, providing a valuable and measurable tool for your overall marketing strategy.

Case Studies and Success Stories

SEO helps companies increase their ROI. Here are three real-world examples of how that worked for companies who partnered with Silverback Strategies.

B2B SEO Success

Hyper Vigilance is a cyber security and compliance management solutions provider that helps defense contractors stay compliant and secure contracts. The founders came to us because they didn’t have time for marketing, and any new hires were needed to service accounts. To make matters worse, Hyper Vigilance’s services were complex and niche.

Silverback’s editorial plan identified keywords to educate global professionals on the Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification (CMMC) and other topics. We then created bespoke content to simplify these complex topics. Functional SEO keyword research focused on search terms with high purchase intent and generated qualified search traffic.

The result was a gross revenue growth of 150% from 2019 to 2020.

E-commerce SEO Impact

eCornell is Cornell University’s online learning platform and the provider of dozens of professional certificate programs. As the online education space grew, eCornell met this demand by introducing new certificate programs every month. However, such rapid production of new website content proved challenging as eCornell was faced with building a more proactive approach to SEO.

Silverback’s search-friendly content helped them boost rankings of underperforming keywords, resulting in higher rankings and stronger domain authority. We helped them with keyword research that uncovered new, high-volume search terms to drive traffic to pages highlighting new certificate programs.

The result? From 2017 to 2018, eCornell saw a 48% increase in organic enrollments, a 43% increase in organic web traffic, and a 30% increase in domain authority.

Small Business SEO Transformation

Since 1945, Long Roofing has been helping families in the DC, Maryland, and Virginia regions improve and update their homes. In 2017, they decided to expand into the New England market. However, they didn’t have the same presence in New England as they did around Washington, DC. They needed more leads and, ultimately, more sales. In the past, Long Roofing had worked with other agencies that focused on marketing metrics, like clickthrough rates, rather than revenue and sales. These agencies didn’t understand Long’s audience or how to effectively connect campaigns to revenue.

We strengthened Long Roofing’s website and researched specific keywords to capture new search opportunities with compelling, educational content. Our SEO team worked with Long Roofing to assess and update Long’s website and build out the new local listing for market expansion. We also collaborated to create new local pages and educational content based on long-tail keyword research to capture relevant audiences in the new market.

With our help, Long saw a 242% revenue increase from 2017 to 2018 and an amazing 429% increase in online leads.

Optimizing SEO Strategies for Better ROI

Keep these important considerations in mind when you’re ready to optimize your SEO strategies to improve ROI. As you work on improving your SEO game, note that these are designed to support long-term goals over short-term gains.

Testing and Measuring

Testing and measuring your strategies help maximize performance in a lower-risk environment than with paid advertising alone.

In addition to the usual KPIs like bounce rates and time on page, you can measure metrics such as:

Form fills
Downloads
Traffic
Unique page views

These offer valuable insights into how your audience is interacting with your newly optimized website.

Testing also helps you improve your SEO strategies. You can create hypotheses about your audience and how they’ll react, then analyze your measurements to see if your ideas are working. If not, you’ll know it’s time to pivot to a different approach.

Ongoing SEO Maintenance

Ongoing SEO maintenance safeguards your SEO investment by preventing a decline in relevance and protecting against competitors vying for organic positioning. Continuing SEO efforts allow you to consistently improve your content and website structure, contributing to your domain authority and alignment with dynamic search engine algorithms. With regular monitoring and timely adjustments, you can optimize existing pages to keep up with demand as well as better position high-converting pages that result in improved conversions. You’ll soon notice improved user experience and search engine rankings through targeted keyword usage.

Tailoring Content to User Intent

Your content strategy should always align with user intent to boost SEO performance and ROI. When web users find relevant search results, they’re more likely to engage and take desired actions that move them through your funnel. Some ways you can track user intent include:

Social listening to find out the “why” and “how” of customer drivers
Google’s “People Also Ask” section
Engaging with customers in real-time via social media
Keyword research
Review mining

Content tailored to user intent also establishes brand authority and builds trust among your users. This helps strengthen the overall effectiveness of your SEO efforts, ultimately leading to greater ROI.

Reporting and Communicating SEO Value

Marketing professionals can help stakeholders understand the value of your SEO efforts on ROI. SEO reports provide invaluable insights into organic traffic, conversions, rankings, and more, offering a comprehensive view of your online performance. Start with a consistent data-pulling process to ensure accuracy and reliability in your reports. The trends you analyze should identify challenges and opportunities for overall strategic decision-making. Use your storytelling abilities as a marketer to engage clients and stakeholders by making data meaningful and actionable.

Remember, as with any other marketing campaign, your reports should prove that your product–in this case, SEO–is worth the time and investment, especially in the long-term.

Get Real SEO Results With Silverback Strategies

Take control of your SEO with Silverback Strategies. Our experts will help you create and execute a working SEO strategy, giving you real results in conversions and ROI that you can measure and track.