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The ROI of SEO

By: Greg Newell

Traditional advertising constantly seems unpredictable. Most businesses looking at conventional marketing like radio, television, yellow book and other print advertising have to rely on facts that are not necessarily trackable. You're leap of faith is that the newspaper is really receiving that much circulation. That radio station is actually reaching out to the tens if not hundreds of thousands that they state. How do you really know?

The internet really changes the game appreciably. But most businesses may not understand how to play this game. With a fundamental understanding of how to predict results from web based advertising, most business owners will jump at the chance. Not only should you be able to predict your results, you should also be able to track your performance. You will understand very quickly if your promotion is delivering results. You only need two numbers to track progress. The traffic to your site and the number of conversions. But you can assess so much more!

The ROI of search engine optimization is estimated by keyword research. By definition keywords, keyword phrases and search terms are the same thing. On the web, keyword research is market research. There are a number of online keyword research tools including Google's own keyword tool, Word Tracker and some others that will help you to establish search volumes for keywords in your market. None of these predictions matter if you can't get to the first page of the search engine results pages for those keywords. Dealing with a good SEO resource and the appropriate choice of search terms is a formula for success in this arena.

Estimating SEO outcome begins with predicting the growth in visitors that you should be able to generate from your SEO campaign. If you can identify how much revenue your website generates now, that is a huge advantage. Ask yourself, "If 100 visitors go to my site, how many end up as customers?" That answer is your conversion rate! Then ask yourself, "What is the standard value of a customer? If you have that information, you should be able to answer the question, "If I grow the number of visitors to my webpage by 500 visitors, how much cash should that produce for your business?"

Additionally, let's say you know your target. "I want to double the revenue I make from my site", for example. Be careful here. Your business targets should be declared in terms of returns, not traffic (a very common mistake). You can get all the traffic you want but if it's not from visitors who are keenly interested in your business, it won't deliver. With the wrong traffic, instead of making you money, now your website traffic is costing you money in bandwidth and even useless time spent on the phone and emailing back and forth.

With your target clearly established, you and your SEO professional can then go after a search terms that will generate enough traffic to help you attain your goals. Usually, going after keyword targets with the revenue and traffic goals established first will allow you to choose keywords that have a better chance at ranking highly. Choosing keywords with reasonable traffic and relatively low competition will increase significantly your number of searches landing on the first page of Google results. I commonly advise that you take the total number of searches estimated by your keyword set and multiply that total by 0.10. That is an estimate of the traffic you should get from your SEO campaign. If your keywords pepper the first page of results and you get a few first place positions, you'll kill your goal! If your search term selections are not pragmatic, if you select keywords that are too aggressive or not entirely applicable, your probability of success goes down significantly.

Most businesses that go through this process would almost certainly pay a good SEO company between $5,000 and $15,000. That may seem like a lot but if a client value is $500 - $1000 or more, achieving an ROI could be a matter of months. Understand that the progression of SEO is itself rarely an overnight success. It can take the search engines months for your site to start seeing the progress of the SEO hard work. It does take a little bit of knuckle biting and a lot of fortitude. In the end, SEO is one of the best forms and most predictable forms of marketing.

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Working on the web is a wonderful thing. If you've ever done any radio advertising, print ads or billboards, and even yellow pages, you know that you're basically taking a leap of faith. No so with SEO. You can judge the value of a campaign from the beginning. The more you know your customers and your current web results (even if you don't have that much traffic), the more you can predict the value of an SEO campaign you might be considering.

www.buildawebshop.com offers advice and resources to develop ecommerce sites and learn best practices for SEO and web marketing. Through email tutorials and elearning solutions, clients can take ownership of their own results and develop business better and faster than those that just think they "need a website". Put your ecommerce ideas into action with Build A Web Shop Solutions.

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