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The most important question to ask about any type of marketing is, quite simply, “Is it worth what I’m paying for it?” In other words, what’s the return on investment (ROI)?

SEO is no different, except that in many ways the ROI is harder to calculate than, for example, pay-per-click advertising. This is because SEO is very much a long-term strategy, so short-term measurements don’t always tell the whole story. So how can you best calculate your ROI on your SEO campaign?

Why is Measuring Your SEO Important?

It’s calculated that, for an average business, around 53% of web traffic comes from organic search — and it’s the quality of the website’s SEO that determines how effective that organic search will be.

SEO isn’t free, though, whether or not you keep it in house. Costs may include a proportion of personnel salaries, costs of outsourcing to an agency and cost of tools and software. Clearly, you need to be able to demonstrate that this is money well spent, and you can’t do that without knowing what rate of ROI you’re getting from the SEO.

How Do You Measure Your SEO’s Effectiveness?

The easiest do-it-yourself method of measuring the effectiveness of your SEO is to use Google Analytics to measure your conversion rate. You then estimate the average value of each conversion and multiply the two figures together. Finally, you divide the figure by the costs to get the ROI.

For example, suppose you achieve 20 conversions over the period you’re measuring, and you’ve estimated the average value of a conversion is £1,000, while you’ve spent £5,000 on SEO. The calculation would be (20 x 1,000)/5,000 = 4 — making your ROI 400%.

How to calculate SEO ROI

This isn’t too difficult to estimate if you have an ecommerce site, but for other types of websites there are a number of problems. For one thing, the decision to visit your website may have been the result of seeing your brand multiple times, while similarly a customer may visit your site several times before converting. The calculations can become extremely complex.

DIY or Use an Expert?

Suppose your car needs maintenance — what do you do? Do you dig out the manual, open the bonnet and try to fix it yourself? Or do you take it to a garage?

Well, that might depend on your interests and your level of expertise. If you love tinkering with engines and you have a good idea of what you’re doing, you might decide to do it yourself. But even then you almost certainly won’t get as good a result as if you left it to a professional mechanic with both extensive experience and access to the latest diagnostic software.

In the same way, you can learn to do your own SEO and even (if you’re anything like us) find you enjoy doing it. On the other hand, you’re likely to get a better ROI by spending a little extra on the services of experts. Not to mention having access to cutting-edge ways of measuring what that ROI actually is.

If you use Yeseo, you’ll be able to see the results at a glance. Instead of a mass of impenetrable figures, we’ll send you a monthly report about your traffic, written in Human, not in Jargon, with a simple executive summary that tells it to you straight.

Give us a shout to find out more about how you can not only improve the ROI for your SEO expenses, but also always have the results at your fingertips.

Most of our clients get what SEO is all about — that’s why they come to us for it. Now and then, though, we come across someone who really doesn’t get it. Perhaps they want instant results. Perhaps they assume that, once they’ve established what they’re going to do, they can just carry on doing exactly the same thing and get exactly the same results.

They think SEO is like a three-minute pop song — simple, predictable and over before you know it. But it’s actually more like a prog-rock guitar solo —a really long and inventive one.

More Than Just Three Minutes

If you’re into three-minute pop songs, you know what you’re getting. You’ll enjoy it, then it’ll be over, and you don’t have to think about it till you hear it again. If SEO were like that, it would just be a matter of creating a list of keywords that you could use indefinitely, and watch your website instantly shoot to the top of the charts — sorry, I mean, the Google rankings.

Of course, SEO doesn’t really work like that. For one thing, there’s no reason why the keywords you identify now will still be the best in six months’ time. For another, it’s a lot more complex than just sticking keywords in. And that’s where the prog-rock guitarist takes over.

Guitar Solo — Invention and Discovery

A prog-rock guitar solo is usually anything but predictable. OK, we’ve all heard third-rate examples where the guitarist seems to have run out of ideas after four bars, but in the hands of an expert the solo will be a voyage of invention and discovery.

Done properly, SEO is just like that. The business world is an ever-changing environment, whether you’re looking in the widest sense or at your specific sector, and SEO has to reflect that and adapt. Just as the guitarist will be sensitive to the complex rhythms from the rest of the band, the SEO expert will navigate the environment and use its requirements to create a campaign to keep the audience’s attention.

The SEO Journey

At Yeseo, we’re not the kind of company that will promise top spot on Google within weeks of signing up with us. Just as the guitar solo has to develop, so the SEO campaign we design for you will need to be constantly tweaked, in reaction to what’s going on outside. Real organic SEO, as opposed to the short-term tricks some companies use, takes a while for the cumulative effect to build up.

Then we’ll be constantly reviewing the strategy. Perhaps something has happened in the world around us that’s prompted people to search Google in a slightly different way. Perhaps the whole way your audience reacts to websites is changing. The campaign will need to incorporate it all, and the skill of SEO planning is to catch that before interest starts to decline.

Three-minute pop songs have their place — perhaps a short-term, time-limited campaign. For a real SEO strategy, though, that will keep your website high up the rankings, give Yeseo a call and come and jam with us.

What is SEO?

If you know just one thing about digital marketing, it’ll be that you have to get the SEO right. Of course, you probably know more than one thing, but even so, do you really know what SEO is?

If I put you on the spot and asked, you’d probably say that SEO is the boring, techy stuff that gets your website further up Google. Well, the second part is right, but there’s nothing boring about SEO. It’s the punk-rock of marketing — because, done properly, it can really kick ass.

The Good, the Bad and the Visually Challenged

So what is SEO? Well, the easy answer is that it’s a set of tools for ensuring that Google clearly understands what you offer and why you should rank higher than your competitors. But it’s really all about the good, the bad — and occasionally the ugly.

Good SEO is all about doing something good for the internet. Perhaps you’re providing interesting and useful information for people to read, watch or listen to. Perhaps you’re making it easier for people to find out how you can help them.

Bad SEO, on the other hand, involves trying to pull the wool over Google’s eyes. Trying to convince it that your content is valuable and useful, for instance, when it’s nothing but gobbledygook with the right keywords stuffed in. Or buying backlinks from sources Google knows all about. Because Google isn’t stupid.

And ugly SEO — well, you’ve probably seen websites that fit that description, and left very quickly.

SEO is all about putting good things in and getting good things out. Which is why our website address finishes .io — in/out.

SEO Is for Humans

It’s easy to assume that SEO is for the benefit of the Google bots, but that’s looking at it from the wrong way. SEO is first, last and always for humans — it’s just that the Google bots appreciate what’s good for humans.

SEO is all about content, whether that’s written content, images, video or any other type you might use to communicate your message. The crucial thing is that it should be created with an authoritative voice that’s useful for the visitors to your site.

The problem is that Google needs to be able to find your great content, which means arranging your website to make that easy. The technical side of SEO involves structuring the site and connecting it to the Google Search Console. But, after your house is in order, SEO is all about building on that with relevant, authoritative content.

Networking with SEO

You’ve probably never thought of SEO as part of the networking and relationship-building that’s crucial to building your business, but that’s what it is. Besides bringing in people browsing on Google and turning them into prospects, customers and allies, it’s also about getting links to your site from highly admired peers. And that’s genuine links, based on their respect for you, not something off a list you’ve bought.

In the end, SEO is very much the same thing as good business practice, which is why good companies tend to do well on Google. SEO helps you make sure you use your marketing in the most efficient and effective way, making the best use of those limited man-hours.

Get in touch with us to find out more about what SEO really is and what it can do for you. Not a prog-rock keyboard player fiddling with obscure equipment, but a punk-rock band, in your face and telling it like it is. You could almost pogo to it.