Measuring ROI from SEO with Website Analytics

I recently did a post on the importance of website analytics. I’d like to follow on from this by demonstrating how you can determine your ROI from SEO activities. Search engine optimisation, much like social media, is often questioned with regards to the ROI generated from activities. As a marketing manager, your CEO is often concerned with spending X amount of dollars that doesn’t directly associate with any form of advertising.

Key metrics for measuring ROI from SEO

The following metrics should be used to determine the success of your campaigns:

• Keyword Rankings – Monitor the ranking improvements for your target keywords. Seeing improved rankings is the direct benefit that will deliver more traffic, exposure in search engines and completed goals or transactions.
• Visits from non-paid search – Monitoring non-paid traffic volume from search engines demonstrates the direct impact from SEO activities.
• Goals or Transactions completed from non-paid search visits – Once you have implemented your goals or ecommerce tracking correctly, as per our post on website analytics, you can associate these goals and/or transactions directly with website traffic from search engines.

It is important that you have implemented your website analytics correctly, once you have done so, then you can measure your ROI from search engine optimisation right down to the product purchased. If it is simply a goal that you are trying to convert, then associate a dollar value with this so that you can measure your return on investment.