Being an SEO specialist takes a lot of different skills. You need to be a diligent researcher, a keen data analyst, and incredibly persuasive with endless reserves of patience.
If you’ve spent any time in the SEO business, you’ll know one of the hardest parts of the job isn’t tracking down keywords, or watching your site slowly creep up the rankings. Instead, it’s mounting a campaign to convince your boss to invest in SEO in the first place.
People can take some convincing about the need to invest in SEO because ROI is often difficult to measure. That’s why we decided to take an in-depth look at how to track KPIs and metrics, so you can monitor performance and justify the investment.
But first, let’s settle an important question.
What’s the difference between ROI and SEO-sourced revenue?
ROI is about seeing a profit from the investment you made in SEO. So, you put X money in, you got Y out. Profit comes after the payback period of your SEO investment, which can sometimes take up to a year.
SEO sourced revenue, on the other hand, is revenue you can generate before you see a profit from your SEO investment. For instance, from individual customer conversions.
So how do you measure the ROI of SEO?
How to measure ROI of SEO
This is more straightforward for B2C business models than B2B. With ecommerce, for example, it’s a lot easier to track revenue using Google Analytics.
With B2B, there are more touchpoints in the sales cycle. There are low-intent touchpoints like downloading content—whether that gets pushed to an SDR or stays in nurture-sequence limbo complicates things further. Many orgs don’t have a thoughtful attribution strategy in place, and salespeople are not following structured data flow, which complicates matters.
Then, of course, there are all the other touchpoints: Maybe they watched a webinar, listened to a podcast, or saw an ad.
So it starts to get messy and hard to track the exact revenue generated from B2B SEO.
At Flying Cat, we’re working on getting more marketing ops into the way we work but we’ve yet to solve this riddle. Currently, we get around this by tying SEO into micro-conversions. Exactly which depends on a company’s goals and business model. You still need to understand the basic lead flow: ACV, lead to ops conversion rate, ops to win-closed. That way, we know how many leads on average we need to generate for our clients to get a return on their investment.
We optimize for leads, win-close, and then we scale traffic to that.
A lot of people think traffic is the most important metric for SEO. There’s no denying it is key, but it’s not the whole story.
Obviously, if what you’re doing on your site is converting people into leads and revenue, then the more traffic you get, the better.
But if you’re only focusing on traffic and not looking at micro-conversions like free trials or demos booked, whatever your model is, you have no way of knowing whether that traffic is generating revenue or not.
This approach also changes the way you do SEO and write content—the more you optimize for revenue metrics rather than vanity metrics, the more you’ll focus on making sure the topic is appropriate and relevant to potential buyers. Plus, you’ll never forget a CTA.
Of course, you also need to track clicks for important, non-branded keywords, activity in different channels, time on page, and traffic fluctuations as these will affect your conversions. To do all this, you need to know your numbers, work closely with the sales team, have access to the CRM, and understand what’s happening to the traffic you generate.
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How to get your boss on board with SEO
A common complaint from upper management is “SEO is taking too long,” so you need to be ready to manage expectations and explain timelines.
This starts even before you invest in SEO. Know what impact you’re looking for: Is it SEO-driven revenue or ROI? Are you just looking to see the needle move, or are you expecting to be completely profitable within a specific period?
Once you’ve figured that out, you need to build a convincing business case that covers:
- The current problem or opportunity.
- The benefits of investing in SEO, and how it ties in with the organization’s goals and objectives.
- An economic analysis based on ROI and SEO-driven revenue from micro-conversions.
- The risks.
- The costs.
- Realistic timescale.
- Which metrics you will use to measure success.
- The technical tools and resources you’ll need.
It’s also important to be realistic about the impacts you can achieve, and make sure people understand SEO success isn’t an overnight thing.
You’ll also need to address the factors that affect your chances of success.
Set yourself up for SEO success
Sometimes, SEO success is difficult to achieve because SEO experts lack freedom to operate. Often, this is because companies set traffic as a KPI but then constrain their SEO team or agency by demanding to rank for high-volume keywords, in the belief that’s going to bring in the most traffic.
Unfortunately, the opposite is often true: The higher the search volume, the more competition. So the longer it takes and the more difficult it is to rank.
If you want to see impact fast, focus on quick wins with end-of-funnel keywords instead. We’ll go into more detail about this in next week’s post.
At the end of the day, getting higher-ups on board with SEO is a question of having the right attitude. SEO should be seen as an arm of the growth department, not just a box you have to check for your website. Yes, it can be harder to measure than other activities, which means you need to have a long-term vision and take a leap of faith.
Perhaps the best way to “sell” SEO is as an investment in the future, like a fund or pension. You’re putting money in each month that, if invested well, will accrue and generate revenue for you long term.
Present it like that, and you should find it’s a lot easier to get people on board.
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