One of the most important , if not, the most important answer that businesses want when it comes to making an investment is “What is going to be the ROI?” That’s what the end game is when a business takes a risk investing in something that may or may not pay dividends.
As a business owner, you’ll review a product or a service for weeks, months before finally deciding to purchase said product or service. Of course, as with any purchasing decision, you want this product or service to be of maximum value and bring you results. Also, you ask yourself if said product or service will bring in immediate results, and if not, what’s the projected timeline you’d see a return? Will the return be worth the risk? All of these, and more, are rushing through each of our heads when we decided to invest in something that we hope helps our business grow to reach our goal
As we’re dealing with SEO, it’s an even more difficult task to prove that an investment using SEO services is worth the uncertainty. How is it we prove a tangible return on an industry that’s highly volatile and extremely reliant on search engines?
We hope we haven’t scared you off with all these questions we’re asking because doubt can definitely creep into your mind before you even consider SEO. Do not fear, there’s plenty of SEO help for small businesses and large businesses.
Define ROI
Before anything, you need to define what ROI means for your company. If we break it down to its simplest form, we can gain a better understanding of what an SEO company may need to prove. The product or service needs to earn more than it costs. As we are evaluating SEO, we should view it as a long-term investment with implications for both the near and distant future. Discover your target keywords and which pages you value the most to jump into the initiative. The team should always look for the best seo for small business owners, or all business owners for that matter.
SEO Short Term Initiatives
The first thing an SEO team should be able to take action in is clean up the entire site – removing or replacing broken links and pages and monitoring/updating any redirects – is where the majority of the immediate value is seen. By cleaning up your website you’re improving the user experience by fixing technical issues, deleting duplicate content, and making sure each link and web page is working properly.
After completing the short term issues, it’s time to create a new site map with all the new changes and submit it to relevant search engines. By doing so, you’re helping increase the site speed. Improvements like these help both the search engines and users navigate the site, which can lead to better positioning in the search engine results pages. These are just small ways that you’re proving immediate SEO return on investment that can lead to be a great SEO return on investment when the ball gets rolling in SEO. There’s a domino effect in SEO that one change leads to more and more changes that help a website rank higher in SERPs.
SEO Long-Term Goals
So, your SEO team has completed the first initiative and all your new updated pages have been indexed. They’ll want to constantly monitor and build out more new content. Users and search engines will always value fresh new content on a website.
Tracking the SEO return on investment means tracking that you’re on par with the SEO goals. Tracking links and status codes for important pages is mandatory, but identifying new keywords to target and building new pages with quality content gets you ahead.
Keep documenting any content changes so progress can always be tracked. This plan of action is especially helpful when parts of a project is segmented into different groups. By keeping data and evaluating it at the group level can allow you to get a better view of a cause and effect analysis, which results in better decision-making based on actual results and data. Tracking your SEO ROI can pay dividends in the decision-making process for your team and your company.
Final Thoughts
Understand that an SEO return on investment isn’t immediate and isn’t always immediately quantifiable. An SEO ROI is shown through more efficient use of time, more qualifying leads, lower costs per lead, and more, but being able to measure and evaluate it is where we can know if we’re getting closer to our goals.
The traditional SEO return on investment thought model of: content change, link building, and technical SEO improvements can lead to rank improvement, which in turn leads to increased traffic and increased revenue. The traditional model is a long-term goal that takes time and patience. Constantly repeating the process and always tracking the measurable data will ensure an accurate SEO return on investment.
