What’s The ROI Of SEO? And 3 Case Studies

What comes to mind when you read SEO ROI?

How about a system to consistently acquire new customers and grow your business exponentially for years.

A marketing strategy where prospects ask, sometimes beg, to hand over their money thanks to search engine optimization applied to a website.

That’s what I experience daily.

From my experience with customers and our own business, it’s easy to say SEO is the best possible investment for your company. Let’s discover why.

What Is Search Engine Optimization?

(If you’re already familiar with SEO, skip this section for the next one.)

The websites listed on the first page of Google attract the lion’s share of Google clicks, leads, and sales. Search engine optimization is the process of getting your website to rank higher on Google so your business prospers.

Here’s the step-by-step breakdown.

• What are prospects looking for? Your core products or services.
• Where do they go to find them? Google search.
• Where do they click? The websites ranking on Google’s first page so they can learn more and purchase.

The best way to define search engine optimization (SEO) is to think about what you, friends, and family do every day. When looking for information, a product, or service, you go to Google.com and search a phrase.

Say you live in LA, your air conditioner isn’t working, and you need it looked at immediately. You’re going to Google “Los Angeles HVAC company”.

The HVAC sites appearing at the top of the first page are best optimized for Google’s search engine (because of their strong content and high-authority backlinks). So they’re going to get the super majority of service calls, HVAC repairs, and new installments across the city.

This happens millions of times per day. People searching for solutions to their problems, and Google connecting them with relevant websites. (Speaking of, if you’re looking to turn your site into a conversion machine, check out our sales-focused web design services.)

Why Invest In SEO?

1. SEO Drives Sales

There are fortunes to be made ranking at the top of Google.

For example, say a health insurance provider ranks first on Google for their focus keyword “health insurance”. They receive 50,000 monthly clicks from Google. At a 3% sales conversion rate, these 50,000 clicks lead to 1,500 new customers at $1,333 monthly revenue per customer. The total SEO ROI is $2 million monthly and $24 million annually.

That’s all from one marketing channel. No sales reps, paid ads, conferences, or press relations needed. Pretty good, right?

Ranking in the top ten of Google rankings, especially first, for multiple keywords can easily make companies millions of dollars. Though if you’re a small business owner, you’d be thrilled if SEO brings in an extra $5,000 or $25,000 a month.

For the kicker, inbound leads from SEO convert at 14.6% compared to outbound efforts like cold calls which have a 1.7% close rate. Meaning inbound SEO leads are 8.5 times more likely to become a paying customer.

Higher lead quality produces more sales and often a higher return on investment compared to paid ads. SEO’s ability to scale your sales is reason enough to do it.

The rest of this list is icing on the cake.

2. Cut Costs

Investing in SEO also eliminates many common business expenses.

Off the top of my head, utilizing SEO to get your ideal prospects coming to you to buy, allows you to downsize or eliminate the following in your company.

Sales reps: Whether you’re B2B or B2C, a boom of inbound interest means you may not need sales reps at all. Or, you can downsize your team. Or you can replace your sales team with customer service reps to handle inbound calls. Forget about bloated salaries and rising healthcare costs, your business becomes leaner with search optimization.

According to US News, the average sales rep makes close to $60,000 per year. If you have a team of six reps, that’s $360,000 a year in payroll, plus healthcare and additional expenses. What good could you put those cost savings towards?

Marketing department: There comes a time when you analyze the cost and output of your current marketing team, versus the cost and output of your SEO agency. It often makes sense to let the majority, or your entire team, go because search engine optimization is producing a far greater ROI at a much lower cost.

Google Ads: Why pay for Google ads when you’re ranking 1st on the organic results? This becomes not necessary, and potentially wasteful, when you’re already driving home major organic traffic. The law of diminishing returns applies here. No matter how you slice it, this is more cost savings.

Social media marketing: Again, you don’t need Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube ads when you’re already driving hundreds of thousands of visitors to your site organically. While they can help you double down, if you’re trying to be lean, SEO is all you need to drive new business.

Press relations: The purpose of PR is to generate press and awareness. SEO accomplishes both of these as a side benefit. It honestly does it all.

3. Ongoing Long Term Results

Have you heard the phrase, “The best offense is a good defense, and the best defense is a good offense”? This phrase is spot on when talking SEO.

Because Google corners around 90% of all searches and it’s a fact your ideal customers search daily for a business like yours, when you’re not ranking on Google, then these prospects are going directly to your competitors.

The good news is, each time you rank higher for keywords, you’re getting more clicks to your site (offense) and decreasing the clicks to your competitors (defense). That’s winning.

And when you can continue to take organic traffic from your competitors’ sites to yours, the ongoing long term results will be staggering.

Eventually, you can rank first for every relevant keyword. This will attract more customers, referrals, repeat business, and larger purchases. Your market share will explode.

And once you’ve conquered SEO for a few years, it’s often not necessary to continue to spend time and money on SEO. After all, there’s only so many keywords to rank.

Then, though you’ve cut your SEO expenses, Google continues to send prospects and customers your way for the next five years, or more. Compounding results feel so good.

4. Measurable SEO ROI

If you’re inexperienced, then you’ll believe it’s hard to measure SEO results. That couldn’t be farther from the truth.

You can track and analyze every component of a search engine optimization campaign.

For example, monthly I track the following SEO metrics in a spreadsheet:

• Google rankings
• Total traffic
• Organic traffic
• Leads
• Sales
• Revenue

Like pay-per-click ads, SEO results are quantifiable.

Now other advertising channels — TV, radio, and print — can’t make it over that hurdle. A radio station will tell you that 130,000 people heard your ad. Ok?

That’s only the beginning of the equation. They have no idea how many people took action to visit their site, how many become leads, the total purchases, and ROI generated. It’s bad information.

There’s no need to fly blind when search engine marketing provides concrete, measurable ROI data.

Here’s how to easily calculate the ROI of SEO.

How To Calculate SEO ROI

You can calculate the return of SEO using two different approaches.

Calculation Method One

The first method determines the revenue generated by SEO for an accounting period (month, quarter, year), and then compares the revenue to the amount of money spent on SEO during the same period.

Most businesses use the following basic formula to calculate this figure.

Revenue from investment minus (-) cost of investment, divided by (/) cost of investment.

What are the levels of return measured by businesses? We’ve seen the following in our experience.

• Campaign produces 200% to 300% ROI.
• It’s not out of the norm to return 500% to 700% on your investment.
• Sometimes it’s possible to 10x your money with SEO, though that’s often a rare situation in a less competitive niche.

Calculation Method Two

The second method for calculating the ROI of a SEO campaign is to focus on a keyword.

Let’s assume your goal is to rank #1 on Google for the keyword phrase ‘marketing software’. Two-thousand potential customers use the same keyword phrase every month, and if you add slight variations of the keyword phrase, the number jumps to more than 30,000 searches each month.

By ranking first in organic search for the keyword phrase ‘marketing software’, and with a click-through rate of 25%, you should attract 500 visitors to your business website each month. This assumes the same click-through rate and that you continue to use the same keyword phrase.

If your conversion rate — the percentage of people who click to your site, and then purchase an annual subscription— is 3%, you generate 15 customers out of the 500 visitors to your website because of the keyword phrase ‘marketing software’.

When you optimize for many keywords, the rainmaking begins.

Three SEO Case Studies

Liking the advantages that come from SEO? If so, and you consider hiring a SEO company, ask them about their case studies. If you’re not impressed or they refuse to show you, then run away. Here are three of ours.

Case Study #1 – Hellman Clothiers

• 6 figures in revenue added in six months via search engine optimization
• 20 1st page Google keyword rankings
  • 1st, 2nd, and 3rd overall ranking for “Cincinnati menswear store”
  • 1st and 2nd overall ranking for “Cincinnati men’s blazers”
  • 3rd and 6th overall ranking for “men’s suits”
• 1,192 local Organic searches

Case Study #2 – Aynie’s Catering

• 4,673 online purchases generated in their ecommerce store
• 4 1st page buyer intent Google keywords
• “Local caterer”, “corporate caterer” and “company caterer”

Case Study #3 – Take Your Success

• 1.7 million earned traffic views
• 87% earned organic traffic
• 3 Amazon bestselling books, under the name Brian Robben, were produced from this traffic and audience
  Sold this business and domain for a significant financial exit

This is only a glimpse of what is possible through ranking high on Google, driving quality traffic, and letting customers come to you.

How Long Until SEO Produces Returns?

One more question often asked by business owners is, “How long does SEO take to produce returns?”

The standard answer is between nine to 12 months. If you have already developed a stream of website traffic, then it is possible to see returns between three to six months.