Investing in your website’s SEO shouldn’t be a hard decision like other marketing expenditures. It is a must, to say the least.
Calculating your site’s ROI stemming from SEO may be more complex when compared to your other advertising channels.
Why? Because we are not dealing with instant gratification or overnight results like you have in pay-per-click. However, with SEO you can estimate your ROI doing focusing on other metrics over time.
Before investing in SEO, you ought to consider the potential payoff just like any other endeavor. If there’s not much upside, there’s no reason to make an investment.
Estimating what you will get out of it in the end – gives you the trust in yourself to invest more and more.
Some of the initial questions you should be asking yourself is what does your revenue attribution model look like? What channels are bringing in the most revenue for your company?
Odds are, the most revenue is PPC, and it should be – you are paying for each click.
Now – look at your attribution channels on a macro level and see how your overall organic channels are performing. Good? Bad? Typically small businesses answer the ladder.
This is why the implementation of SEO – regardless of the lack in initial ROI – as Stephen Covey once stated “think with the end goal in mind”.
The first step is to locate what keywords are performing the best and work on optimizing these efforts as much as you can.
When it comes to selecting new keywords and phrases to write about – shoot for realistic goals.
You are not going to rank quickly on a term that receives more than 10,000 monthly clicks right away without building up some credibility with the search engines.
You may get a higher CTR and better rankings on Google if you target a term with 100-500 monthly searches.
Tip: Get on top of trending topics fast – Google snippets are a gold mine for traffic
Ultimately, you’ll have to tackle the most problematic aspect of the ROI calculation. Estimating the traffic volume, following their pathway via Google Analytics, and seeing their LTV (lifetime value).
Pay-per-click promotions are one of the most immediate methods online to appear at the top of Google.
This is an excellent place to start depending on your targeted keywords and paid advertising knowledge.
When it comes to testing the waters with Google Ads (or any ad platform) you should get a good sense of how performance is doing after spending your first few hundred dollars.
Again, the goal here is to go after low-hanging fruit. Keywords that have lower levels of competition. These are not only cheaper but let you see data relatively quickly.
Generally speaking, paid methods get expensive in the long run if your goal is awareness.
As a business, you need to make money. So as long as your revenue per user (RPS/RPU) remains higher than your cost-per-click (CPC) you can spend as much money on Google Ads.
Couple this with a concrete and foolproof website, updated with the latest optimization ideas in SEO will set your website up for absolutely anything.
So why shouldn’t I just focus on Google Ads? To be brief – users are getting smarter. They are beginning to lose trust in the top paid search ad rankings.
That is why it is crucial more now than ever to fix any errors, warnings, or issues found on your website. Don’t be held back by something silly you could have fixed in a few months.
For those that are serious about SEO – working with an experienced SEO consultant and/or agency is highly recommended.
For starters – hear me out
You have a lot going on, hiring another employee is going to be more expensive first of all but who knows if they can do the job, and now what? You’re stuck with a new guy who probably needs to work with a consultant anyway.
*Enters consultants* – You can work on your own terms and cancel whenever you fill “ready” to maintain it yourself.
With me – I can work to train existing employees on quick things they can check on routinely to ensure your business to running as optimal as possible.
Most of the heavy lifting during SEO is done in the beginning – most agencies, such as myself lessen their fee as the partnership continues (depending on the workload of course).
There are a bunch of ways agencies will charge you, whether it is hourly, a monthly retainer, or by the job.
Most places are willing to work with you if they know you are investing in bettering your site.
Realistically speaking you should expect to work with your first consultant or agency for at least a year.
This gives them enough time to learn about your company as well as time to communicate goals.
When working with me, we will use the first 3-6 months to set the frameworks, get the errors fixed, and grunt work out of the way.
Afterward, we will sit down and discuss long-term goals and routine maintenance either myself or someone on your team can do to keep everything in good standings.
To remain higher on Google’s SERPs it is going to take monthly maintenance.
This seems mundane and annoying but it’s better to kick back and relax on page one than relax for a few months and scramble to claw your way back.
When you really break down the ROI for these efforts, prices at our popular tiers of $250-500/month you would be looking at an investment of $3,000-6,000.
During this time you will be learning so much more about your online audience demographic and endless ways to improve offline efforts.
If you are an entrepreneur or work in a startup where you need to create your own direction.
Investing time into learning SEO is not only a smart move for your website but for yourself – you might be surprised at how much you can learn about a company from doing SEO.
This option grants you the ability to allocate as much time as you deem fit towards optimizing your site’s efforts towards revenue-driving keywords.
Online tools such as SEMrush has everything a beginner needs to know when starting SEO for the first time.
After employing your own learned SEO ideas, you can start to increasingy see ROI from the time and money you invested into training.
Head over to Google and search for SEO boot camps near you – hey who knows, we might offer one soon! Youtube is also a fantastic free resource to get your feet wet.
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