Mediaboss Marketing

The way clients view SEO has evolved and grown-up a lot over recent years. SEO measurement now needs to ensure that the key performance indicators (KPIs) from campaigns are based around return on investment (ROI) and revenue. While previous SEO metrics such as rankings and traffic are still a good indicator of SEO success, they arent a clear measurement of performance at a business level.

The table above highlights what Ive found to be a common issue with reviewing SEO performance; the metrics arent in-line! If key decision makers are looking at business metrics to manage their search marketing budget - we need to understand the value of SEO based on the same goals.

SEO metrics are great indicators to show if a campaign is on track, but its not what a marketing director or CMO really needs to analyze performance or justify budgets and their decision to hire you!

The paid search model has been understood by decision makers for years. Despite the percentage of organic clicks being much higher than paid, the ROI of PPC is much easier to measure making it less of a risk and easier to justify and scale budgets.

Having an agency background, Ive found that client-side SEO is now commonly run by either a search-savvy marketing manager, or in many cases a dedicated search team. Of course, each of these clients will need to justify costs and pitch for SEO campaign budgets from their own board. This means you have to show that if your client increased spend by an extra $10,000 per month on SEO what can they expect to see in return?

Using the PPC model its easy to predict, you can review past performance average cost-per-click (CPC), cost per conversion and overall ROI. But if you analyze what you spend on SEO costs in a similar way, theres no reason why you cant find your SEO CPC, CPA and ROI calculations. Its just harder to predict the uplift in organic traffic generated via SEO activity and to put a long-term value on this - whereas in PPC, when the budget dries up, so does your traffic.

If you assess budgets in a consistent way to the PPC model, you may find that it costs you $1.00 per click on PPC and your equivalent SEO CPC is $0.50. So then you know you should invest more in SEO!

Alternatively, if SEO is more expensive than PPC put your budget where it works better for you in paid search instead. But at least its a balanced analysis.

One of the major problems with SEO budgets is that no one knows how much they should be spending, whereas in PPC we track ROI so closely that we can scale campaigns to the point that youre squeezing as much profit/revenue out of a campaign as possible. With SEO were not quite there yet.

Read more:
7 Steps to Measure SEO Like Paid Search