What is the ROI of Search Engine Optimisation?

Search engine optimisation (SEO) is a key digital marketing service we provide to our clients right across Australia. Whether you operate in Sydney, Melbourne, Perth, Adelaide, Darwin or Brisbane, SEO services are vital to the success of your business. It’s a long-term strategy aimed at providing ongoing, sustainable, and cost-effective results.

However, it’s not always easy to calculate your return on investment (ROI). Business owners can become confused and frustrated if they don’t understand their reports and data, and don’t look at the full picture. Of course, this isn’t their fault — the SEO company needs to step up and make sure their clients understand how the service works, and set expectations early.

The basic function of SEO is to increase traffic to your website and, by extension, increase leads/sales (conversions). So it’s easy to get caught up in looking at the raw traffic volume, but SEO also influences other sources of revenue and it’s not always easy to see how. Some of the more abstract benefits of SEO are outlined below:

1. SEO helps target the right audience (it’s not a scattergun approach)
2. SEO reduces bounce rates (receive more of the right type of visitors)
3. SEO increases conversions (convert more visitors into leads)
4. SEO increases touch points (the customer may find you via SEO but convert elsewhere)
5. SEO optimises ad campaigns (the quality of the website improves your ad visibility)

Let’s look at why it’s not always so easy to calculate the ROI of SEO, by using a simple example. 

There is a substantial amount of research indicating that 65% of consumers start their buying journey on their smartphones, switching to another device to actually complete their purchase. If we take this at face value, then for every 100 mobile visitors brought in by your SEO services in Brisbane, 65 of them will return to your website on another device and make a purchase.

Given this scenario, it’s extremely difficult (if not impossible) to track these 65 mobile users from device to device and through to completing their purchase. Even when we track online sales, we would need to add the 35% of visitors who arrived via organic sources to have any hope of evaluating the revenue from your SEO services — and this figure obviously varies between websites, industries, etc. To complicate matters further, sales don’t always come directly from a visitor’s first visit to your website.

From this example, you can appreciate the problems inherent in trying to quantify the ROI of SEO services. At this point, it does bear repeating that the function of SEO is to increase a website’s traffic (which is easy to quantify) and to some extent, increase the conversion rate of this traffic (also easy to quantify, but with complications as outlined above).

Costs of Brisbane SEO services

If we are discussing revenue, we need to look at the other end of this equation and focus on costs. The costs of SEO are easier to quantify, because generally, the more you invest in SEO, the greater the revenue. For example, if you pay $1000 per month for SEO services and your competitor invests three times as much, all things being equal, generally they will receive more revenue from SEO than you will.

However, even with costs, the waters are fairly muddy, because a competitor may be paying more than you, but receiving less revenue or paying less than you, but receive the same or better results. These outcomes can be based on the length of time they have been investing in SEO and the cost of these previous investments, or on something entirely different.

The take home message is that Brisbane SEO services are one of the best ways, if not the best way, to increase your revenue, whether online or in-store.  And if you want better or faster results, you may simply need to increase your investment, so that more time can be invested in increasing your website’s online visibility. But ultimately, it’s going to come down to your ROI.