Like all marketing efforts whether its print ads, paid search or SEO, the numbers have to make sense to your bottom line. The specific numbers and potential will be different for every business, but in short you need to generate more money than you’ll need to invest in your SEO for it to be profitable.
The primary goal of SEO is not just to rank in search engines like Google to generate traffic, but to get targeted and relevant traffic to produce leads and profitable sales! If you want it to serve your business long term, it must be a valuable investment.
Compared to traffic creation methods like paid search advertising, SEO is a long-term play, and it typically takes a few months to see results. However, these results tend to be less expensive overall and serve your business far longer than most other marketing channels.
So what are the important numbers to track?
Number of searches for your target keywords (found using Google’s Keyword Planner Tool)
Estimated click-through rate (Based on Google Organic CTR Study)
Estimated conversion rate from visitor to customer
Total revenue per customer
Please keep in mind your numbers, click-through rates, conversion rates and Avg revenue per customer will vary. This example is simply to illustrate how to calculate the potential value from each keyword using SEO.
Based on 1,500 total searches per month and a click-through rate of 30% you could potentially get 450 visits to your website each month and convert 9 (2.0%) of them into paying customers at $400 each equals $3600 per month in total revenue from SEO.
