How to prove the value of SEO to your business
The digital marketing world is ever expanding and it doesn’t seem to be slowing down with the boom in AI technology creating an ever changing search landscape. It is becoming increasingly difficult to earn visibility through search engines, and that is a contributing factor for digital marketing channels such as PPC becoming more expensive.
It is also becoming increasingly difficult to earn top positions in search pages through organic means. Now is a key time to understand how digital marketers can prove the value of SEO to your business or clients – which has always been a challenge for the SEO field.
Proving SEO Value:
Unlike PPC, SEO does not have a budget that is spent on the SEO efforts to earn organic visibility. Also, the main goal of SEO is to increase the organic visibility of a website in search engines, not conversions, which could be used to measure the financial return of SEO. Due to this, it is hard to prove ROI in a numerical sense; for SEO you cannot show how much money has been invested and the financial return on that investment.
So to prove that the SEO efforts are not going to waste, the performance of the website should be reported and be used as a measure of success. There are multiple ways this can be done, here are three methods you can use:
1. Comparing to cost of PPC
Search engine result pages are made up of paid ads and organic website listings. The paid ads are placed through strategic bidding for keywords. This can help brands quickly gain visibility in search topics where they are still building their influence, or gain visibility over competitors. This can be an expensive method to earn visibility, and can result in wasted budget if the expected click through rate is not met.
From an organic point of view, using SEO strategies, brands could organically rank for these keywords rather than paying for ads on them. SEO strategies have a more long term focus to earn visibility. If these strategies are in place and top rankings positions are earned for specific keywords, then there is no need to bid on them which saves budget.
Proving your SEO efforts have saved your business/clients some advertising budget is a clear indicator that SEO is a valuable marketing channel that should be invested in. Ultimately, with a successful SEO strategy, it is potentially cheaper to invest further into SEO resources rather than PPC, despite the longer term results.
2. Reporting through data
When it comes to performance, there may be some context but the numbers do not lie. If you are able to demonstrate that SEO metrics such as impressions and clicks have increased, and attribute this due to SEO changes made to a site, will clearly prove the efforts of SEO have been fruitful.
It should be noted that some increases/decreases in metrics such as impressions and clicks can be due to external factors such as breaking news, or search demand seeing a drop. These aspects are out of a digital marketer’s control, so it is key to attribute any changes in performance to specific changes made by the SEO team.
There are many tools which can help track your performance over time. Seeing an increase in impressions and clicks over time can eventually result in more overall traffic and hopefully conversions. This builds a view where SEO is directly bringing traffic to your site and potentially leads to conversions.
3. Compare against competitors
Most brands have their sights set on certain competitors that they’d love to overtake in regards to performance and visibility. By benchmarking your performance from when your SEO efforts begin, you are able to show how much improvement has been made. If this improvement also includes overtaking key competitors for specific keywords/topics, SEO value is clearly being demonstrated.
SEO strategies can earn organic visibility through different rich results and features within search engines such as being the answer for the People Also Asked sections. This shows how SEO is leading to more visibility for the brand and positioning them as the main authority for the topic. This is an important way to demonstrate SEO deserves continued investment from your business/client.
Forecasting:
As mentioned previously, there are things out of a marketers hands which can impact search performance. It is quite a difficult task to forecast how performance could look like in years time for a website. There are some methods around how this can be done but due to the multiple factors involved, including Google releasing new algorithms, it can be difficult to accurately forecast how performance can potentially look.
By taking current performance around keyword ranking, click through rates and clicks, you can adjust what these metrics would look like if the website ranked better for each keyword. Again, this may be inaccurate due to the many factors which could impact the search performance of a site.
In conclusion, it is difficult, but key, to prove the value SEO has for a business. It is a digital marketing channel which could save a business money and result in performing better than competitors, despite the long term results. If SEO impact is not accurately reported, and with the difficulties in proving financial ROI, a case could be built to de-prioritise SEO efforts.
If you need any help with proving your SEO efforts, or any SEO strategies in general, please reach out to the Digital Career team today!