Every business in the world is concerned about ROI—and rightfully so. In business terms, ROI translates into getting maximum returns for minimal investment.
Calculating ROI against SEO investment is simple enough.
Let’s say you’re spending $5,000 every month on PPC ad campaigns. Let’s also assume that your PPC campaigns are helping you generate $10,000 in additional revenue beyond what you usually make.
The ratio you need to be looking at here is ‘returns: investment,’ which in your (fictional) case, is $2 for every $1 spent. That’s a successful PPC campaign, good SEO, and commendable ROI.
While there are more complicated issues that arise with regard to sales attribution and measurement, this is a great starting point.
Higher ROI indicates that your business’s strategies are going down well—and much of that has to do with SEO strategies.
Also, read The 2019 Local SEO Roadmap to Success for B2C Websites
Does SEO Really Produce High ROI?
While it’s easy to understand how much you’re making from a physical business location, digital investments like SEO can be difficult to track, as alluded to above.
There is, however, one way of overcoming this dilemma. It all boils down to knowing exactly how SEO helps you generate ROI. Once you understand this, you’ll have a clearer idea of the ROI your SEO spending is directly responsible for:
1. SEO Brings in Traffic:
Since SEO strategies are all about diverting traffic to your website—through backlinks and other strategies—they lead to more conversions. A greater number of people visiting your website means that you’ll be far more visible online and that you have a greater shot at selling your products. The traffic on any business’s website is indicative of how well that business is doing.
2. SEO Gets You the Right Audience: Every product or service is targeted toward a particular niche or a target audience. SEO is highly effective in making you known to the people who might be interested in what you’re selling.
This, again, helps drive conversions—an opportunity not many businesses have without SEO since there are simply too many small businesses around.
3. SEO Boosts User Experience
When laypeople think of SEO, they usually don’t think beyond keywords.
But SEO is concerned with everything about your website—from interactive design to easy navigation, a user-friendly interface, and readability. And everything that SEO is concerned with has a direct link to how well your website sits with your audience.
The better users’ experiences are, the more chances you have of selling to them.
Viewers who have a good experience on your website—such as a useful conversation with a chatbot—might even go ahead and “try” something. This could turn into a repeat purchase later.
The Big Question: Local SEO or Regular SEO?
This is a tough one.
They’re practically the same in some ways but radically depart in others. They also generate distinct results.
Both regular and local SEO ensures your visibility in the digital arena. This means that you’ll stand out from the competition, and will have a better shot at generating traffic to your website.
Greater traffic means greater conversions, and greater conversions mean a greater number of potential customers.
All of this leads to a better bottom line.
While both kinds of SEO lead to similar results, the difference lies in the audience they target.
Regular SEO isn’t concerned with the people living in a certain area, nor is the content optimized for a certain region.
Local SEO focuses on certain regions to ensure that potential customers from that region are visiting your website.
So Which Option Should You Go With?
Let’s look at it this way:
- Does your business have a physical location or not?
- Do you have an online business that ships nationwide?
- Or are you located somewhere very particular, such as in the City of Townsville or in the Middle of Nowhere?
Online stores with countrywide shipping are better suited to regular SEO. This will make them more visible and will allow them to advertise their product holistically to as many people as possible.
Businesses that have a physical location—such as a cosmetic dentistry clinic—have no business advertising to “as many people as possible.”
What good is it if a Texan finds your cosmetic dentistry when you’re located in Hawaii?
For businesses that offer services to people in a certain location, local SEO works best. Local SEO is optimized for and advertised to people who could potentially be future customers—people from around Hawaii for example, in this case.
Remember, your concern is getting maximum returns for minimum investment.
Investing in regular SEO if your business has a physical location might get you great traffic from around the country, but will it get great ROI?
Will you have higher sales?
Probably not, and that’s why it’s probably not a good idea.
More on Getting Great ROI through SEO
Whether you’ve selected local or regular SEO services for your business marketing campaign (depending on your business model), here are a few things that will ensure your returns are always higher than your initial investment:
- Keep an eye on search queries. Is the traffic that’s being generated due to search queries? What’s driving these queries? Are you using high ranking keywords? Use a keyword tool to help you make a pool of potential long-tail keywords to use—and if you’re employing a local SEO strategy, make sure you’re optimizing content for the region you’re advertising in. Google Trends and Keyword Surfer are great for this purpose.
- Monitor your rankings constantly. Even the slightest dip needs to be taken seriously. Troubleshoot what’s wrong and see if you’re ranking for your targeted keywords. If you aren’t, change those keywords.
- Use Google Analytics Dashboards to keep track of your ads, brands, spending, and more.
And last but not least, invest in a good SEO company. Imagine spending all that money on a sub-par SEO services provider and losing money on top of that.
