How To Determine The ROI of SEO (For Non-Ecommerce Businesses)
If you’re investing in search engine optimisation (SEO), you’ll want to know whether it’s paying off. Assessing the return on investment (ROI) of SEO sheds light on the success of your strategies and their overall impact on your business.
However, calculating the ROI of SEO is not always straightforward, and it can depend on various factors, such as your business model, goals, the metrics you track, and the tools you use.
In this post, I’ll share a couple of methods you can use to calculate the ROI of SEO, specifically for non-ecommerce websites, where in my experience, this starts to get tricky.
How to measure the ROI of SEO?
Calculating the ROI of SEO is relatively straightforward. You can use the same formula for calculating the ROI of any investment by subtracting the costs from the revenue generated and dividing the result by the costs.
ROI of SEO = (Revenue Generated from SEO activities — Cost of SEO) / Cost of SEO × 100
For example, if your revenue generated from SEO is $50,000, and your SEO costs are $10,000, your ROI would be ($50,000 — $10,000) / $10,000 x 100 = 400%.
Calculating the Costs of SEO
To calculate the costs of SEO, start by identifying the different expenses associated with your SEO campaign. These may include:
- Agency fees or staff salaries
- Developer time
- Software and tools
- Content creators
- Link building
- Other expenses related to SEO
If you’re working with an SEO agency, the costs may be straightforward to track.
However, accurately measuring the costs may be more challenging if you manage SEO in-house. For example, developers may have a range of priorities not limited to SEO.
In this case, you should track the time and resources spent on SEO activities and assign a cost value to each.
Once you’ve identified all the expenses, you can estimate the total cost of your SEO initiatives.
It’s important to include all the costs associated with your SEO initiatives in your calculations to get an accurate picture of your ROI. By tracking your expenses, you can identify areas where you may be overspending or could allocate more resources to get better results.
Calculating Revenue Generated from SEO
Here is where it starts getting tricky. Calculating the ROI of SEO can be more challenging for non-ecommerce businesses, as these websites may not have a direct revenue or sales impact.
Compared to e-commerce websites, which can track revenue directly from online transactions, non-ecommerce sites may have more complex conversion paths that are harder to attribute to specific SEO efforts. For example, these websites may generate leads through form submissions, phone calls, or in-person interactions, making it more challenging to measure the impact of SEO on those conversions.
Attributing conversions can become even more complicated when users interact with multiple marketing channels before converting. For instance, consider the scenario where users initially discover your website organically through SEO but do not convert at that time. Later, they may see a retargeting/remarketing ad and click on it to convert. In such cases, without a proper attribution model, SEO may not receive credit for these conversions, and the value of the SEO efforts may be underestimated.
I’ll share with you three methods you can use to better grasp how much revenue you’re generating from SEO for these websites.
Method 1: Google Analytics
Implementation: Easy
Google Analytics serves as a valuable resource for website owners and marketers, enabling them to monitor, analyse, and comprehend user behavior across their digital platforms.
By configuring conversion events in Google Analytics, you can collect data on specific user actions that correspond with your business objectives, such as signing up for a newsletter or submitting a contact form.
Next, assign a monetary value to these conversion events, considering your Sales Qualified Lead (SQL) closing rate and the Lifetime Value (LTV) of a customer or average deal size.
For instance, imagine the following scenario for a consulting firm:
- Organic search-driven users who complete a contact form: 10
- SQL Closing rate: 50%
- LTV of a customer: $10,000
To calculate the potential revenue generated from organic search, use this formula:
Organic website conversions × SQL closing rate × customer LTV
10 × 50% × $10,000 = $50,000
In this example, the consulting firm’s organic search efforts have yielded an estimated $50,000 in potential revenue. This simplified approach, utilizing Google Analytics, provides a foundation for understanding the ROI of SEO initiatives.
Pros of Using Google Analytics to Calculate ROI of SEO:
- Simplicity: This method offers a straightforward approach to calculating the ROI, making it easy for marketers and website owners to understand and implement.
- Free to use: Google Analytics allows businesses of all sizes to access valuable data without incurring additional costs.
- Integration: Google Analytics integrates seamlessly with other digital marketing tools and platforms, enabling more comprehensive insights and analysis.
- Customisable: You can create custom goals and conversion events, tailoring the tracking and analysis to your business objectives and priorities.
- Real-time data: Google Analytics provides real-time data and insights, allowing you to make data-driven decisions and promptly adjust your strategies.
Cons of Using Google Analytics to Calculate ROI of SEO:
- Limited scope: This method primarily focuses on conversions and may overlook other important metrics, such as brand awareness or user engagement, which can contribute to long-term SEO success.
- Inaccurate value assignment: Assigning monetary values to conversions can be subjective and may not accurately reflect the actual ROI, especially if the values are not updated regularly or based on comprehensive data.
- Attribution challenges: Google Analytics may not always accurately attribute conversions to specific marketing channels, leading to an incomplete understanding of your SEO ROI.
- Data privacy: With increasing privacy regulations and the rise of cookie-blocking technologies, Google Analytics may not capture all user data, potentially affecting the accuracy of your ROI calculations.
Method 2: UTMs
Implementation: Medium
Utilising UTMs (Urchin Tracking Modules) is an effective method to unlock valuable insights into your revenue sources from various marketing channels. Although UTMs can’t be directly applied to organic search listings for SEO, they work wonders for tracking non-SEO channels like paid ads, email campaigns, and social media promotions. By weaving these tracking parameters into all your external URLs, you can gauge each channel’s performance and discover which generates the most traffic and conversions.
When it’s time to determine the revenue driven by your SEO efforts, sift through your CRM (Customer Relationship Management) data and filter out any deals tied to UTMs. The remaining revenue, which comes from sources without UTMs, offers an indirect yet valuable glimpse into the impact of your SEO campaigns.
Pros of using UTMs to indirectly calculate revenue from SEO
- Cost-effective: Since UTMs are free to use, this method offers an affordable way to gain insights into your SEO performance without investing in specialised SEO tracking tools.
- Uncovered insights: By filtering out other marketing channels with UTMs, you can identify revenue not attributed to those channels, indirectly shedding light on the revenue generated by SEO efforts.
- Holistic view: This method encourages tracking and monitoring all marketing channels, not just SEO, which can better understand overall marketing performance and help you allocate resources more effectively.
Cons of using UTMs to indirectly calculate revenue from SEO
- Indirect measurement: This approach doesn’t directly measure SEO revenue, which may lead to less accurate results. It assumes that the remaining untracked revenue is primarily from organic search listings.
- Potential overlaps: Other non-tracked channels (e.g., direct traffic or referrals) may contribute to the remaining revenue, which might overestimate the revenue from SEO.
- Incomplete data: If UTMs are not applied consistently across all non-SEO marketing channels or if certain channels are overlooked, it may impact the accuracy of the calculated SEO revenue.
- UTM Overwrite: If a user discovers your website organically in their first session and arrives again later from a UTM-tagged session (remarketing, social media) and converts, the original session will be overwritten with the UTM values in most cases.
Method 3: Dig into your Marketing Automation & CRM data
Implementation: Hard
Tools like Marketo and HubSpot are incredibly adept at recognizing and identifying anonymous users on your website, providing valuable insights into their browsing behavior from the moment they land on your site. These platforms use cookies, tracking pixels, and unique visitor IDs to monitor and record the actions of anonymous visitors.
As users interact with your website, their browsing activities, such as the pages they visit and the content they engage with, are tracked and stored. When these anonymous users eventually convert by filling out a form or subscribing to a newsletter, their contact information is captured, and their browsing history is associated with their newly created profile.
This seamless matching process enables businesses to comprehensively understand the user journey from initial interaction to eventual identification.
Your marketing automation tools should record the entry page and source of all users on your website. Focusing on each lead’s entry page (first touch point) is a critical data point when analysing user behavior on your website. This will also filter out the user’s secondary touches from other marketing channels that led to the conversion event that’s taking credit away from your SEO efforts.
For instance, if you’re leveraging blogs to drive the majority of your organic traffic, you’ll want to filter leads where the entry page contained “/blog” and the original source was from organic search. This would include all users who discovered your blog page from SEO first, even if they converted from a retargeting/remarketing ad in a later session.
Then you’ll want to join this data with your CRM using a common key, such as account ID, which enables you to measure the impact of your blog pages on revenue generation through organic search.
Integrating this information with your CRM lets you gain valuable insights into how effectively your blog content drives user engagement and contributes to your bottom line. This method works best when you have a well-defined site architecture or content groups and a clear understanding of which pages are optimised for SEO.
By filtering for these specific pages, you can better analyse their performance, refine your content strategy, and maximise the return on your SEO efforts, ensuring that your website continues to attract and convert high-quality leads from organic search.
Here’s an example of how this could look in SQL:
SELECT SUM(SalesforceOpportunity.Amount) as TotalAmountConverted
FROM SalesforceOpportunity
INNER JOIN MarketoLeads ON SalesforceOpportunity.AccountId = MarketoLeads.AccountId
WHERE MarketoLeads.OriginalSource = 'Organic Search' AND MarketoLeads.EntryPage LIKE '%/blog%';
This method overcomes the attribution and insight limitations encountered in the first two methods. Utilising data from powerful marketing automation tools and combining it with your CRM enables you to attribute revenue to distinct marketing channels and entry pages precisely. Furthermore, it allows you to concentrate on specific pages or content categories, ensuring the collection of the most pertinent data for your SEO strategy. This method yields a more in-depth understanding of the user journey from their initial website interaction to conversion, ultimately providing a clearer view of your SEO efforts’ performance.
Note: You can technically replicate this method in Google Analytics instead of using a marketing automation tool if you configure user-id. Using data upload or the measurement protocol, you can integrate your CRM data with Google Analytics. However, this gets complicated to set up, and I prefer working with marketing automation data for this case.
Pros of using marketing automation & CRM data to calculate the ROI of SEO
- Comprehensive insights: Marketing automation tools like Marketo and HubSpot offer a wealth of data on user behavior, allowing you to gain a deeper understanding of the user journey from initial interaction to conversion.
- Accurate attribution: These tools can help you accurately attribute revenue to specific marketing channels and first touch points, enabling you to assess better the impact of your SEO efforts on your overall revenue.
- Seamless integration: Marketing automation platforms often integrate easily with your CRM, allowing for streamlined data analysis and better insights into the performance of your SEO efforts.
- Customization: These tools allow you to tailor your tracking and analysis to focus on specific pages or content types, ensuring you capture the most relevant data for your SEO strategy.
- Continuous optimization: With real-time data and insights, you can make data-driven decisions and adjust your strategies as needed to improve the performance of your SEO efforts.
Cons of using marketing automation & CRM data to calculate the ROI of SEO:
- Cost: Marketing automation platforms can be expensive, especially for small businesses or those with limited budgets.
- Learning curve: There may be a learning curve associated with using these tools effectively, and it may take time to familiarise yourself with their features and capabilities.
- Resource-intensive: Analyzing data from marketing automation tools and integrating it with your CRM can be time-consuming and may require dedicated resources.
- Potential data discrepancies: As with any tracking tool, there’s a possibility of data discrepancies or inconsistencies, which could impact the accuracy of your ROI calculations.
- Privacy concerns: With the rise of privacy regulations and cookie-blocking technologies, some user data may not be captured, potentially affecting the accuracy and comprehensiveness of your insights.
Bonus Method: Path & Funnel Analysis in GA4
If you’re already using Google Analytics 4 (GA4) and looking for additional ways to determine the ROI of your SEO efforts, consider diving into Path Analysis, and Funnel Analysis reports. These tools can help you understand how organic search contributes to user engagement and conversions.
Path Analysis: Visualizing User Journeys
Path Analysis lets you map out user journeys across various touchpoints and channels, including organic search. By examining the paths users take on your website, you can gain valuable insights into how your SEO efforts drive traffic and influence user behavior. This knowledge can help refine your content strategy and improve your website’s user experience.
Funnel Analysis: Measuring SEO Effectiveness at Each Step
Funnel Analysis enables you to create custom conversion funnels that break down user interactions into distinct stages. By assessing the performance of your SEO efforts at each step of the user journey, you can identify areas where improvements can be made. This data-driven approach allows you to optimise your SEO tactics and maximise your return on investment.
Although GA4 doesn’t have a direct equivalent of the Multi-Channel Funnels feature found in Universal Analytics, you can still leverage its advanced analysis capabilities to understand the ROI of SEO. Using Path Analysis and Funnel Analysis reports, you can better understand how your organic search efforts contribute to your website’s success and make data-driven decisions to optimise your strategy.
Final Thoughts
Determining the ROI of SEO for non-ecommerce websites can be challenging due to complex conversion paths and attribution obstacles. However, we’ve presented three effective methods to help you navigate this complexity: using Google Analytics, employing UTMs indirectly, and leveraging marketing automation and CRM data.
By understanding the performance of your SEO efforts, you can make informed decisions about resource allocation and continually optimize your SEO strategy for sustained success. Each method has its advantages and limitations, so choose the one that best aligns with your business objectives, available resources, and overall marketing strategy. Ultimately, embracing data-driven decision-making will empower you to achieve your goals and excel in your industry.