Six key challenges in measuring SEO ROI

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You should be aware of these challenges in order to calculate SEO ROI and all other relevant metrics as best as possible. I will provide some suggestions to apply in practice. 1. Marketing attribution is inherently flawed Marketing attribution is one of the topics that sparks a lot of discussion. We have experts in the exact opposite direction. Some say it's almost never worth the resources to try and resolve it properly and you should trust your gut instead. Others believe that appropriate attribution is almost always reasonably achievable. One thing is for sure. Regardless of the attribution model, attributing conversion rates to marketing channels is inherently flawed. Heuristic models like last non-direct click will have more flaws than the new DDA. Customer journeys and touchpoints are often more complex than analytics software makes them appear. Here's a great example of a specific buyer's journey for a SparkToro customer. (SparkToro is the SaaS company of Rand Fishkin , one of the experts on "it's best to trust your gut.") Let’s take a look: Excerpted from Rand's article on attribution . As mentioned above, organic search traffic is a marketing channel that spans the entire customer journey from awareness to retention. Attribution is particularly tricky here, so let's discuss its implications further. DDA is a solid solution that may move many people closer to the "proper attribution is possible" camp. But it still doesn't solve many other problems.

This is a black box that becomes more accurate as traffic and conversions increase. Unless CMS Web Designs you have "higher" hundreds (or ideally thousands) of conversions per month, I'd still take these numbers with a grain of salt. Ultimately, regardless of the attribution model, you still won't see data from sessions where the tracking code wasn't triggered (for example, ad blockers and fast bounces). 2. The relationship between search engine optimization and brand building Let's say you're browsing some YouTube videos and see someone talking about an interesting product. You Google that brand or product, land on the website, and buy it. Organic traffic gets 100% conversion properties. You can think of many other scenarios where the only organic search interaction is through a branded query. SEO gets the credit it deserves. On the other hand, you can have strong SEO with high search visibility on SERPs throughout the entire funnel. It is fully capable of taking many potential customers from start to finish on its own. However, social media ads, display ads, and search ads hinder this shift and contribute more to the shift simply because they are more prominent. DDA in GA4 partially solves this problem, but it still cannot take into account the branding aspect of SEO. Whether it's through your own content production, or through promotion, the brand awareness and prominence you build in your top content is not something we can measure well. It's hard to evaluate all this because there's no way to break down branded and non-branded organic traffic using conversion rate data. 3. We can’t measure the retention impact of SEO Ahrefs is a great example. We produce product-oriented content to continually educate our (potential) clients on all the ways they can use our tools to solve their SEO and marketing problems. Since we neither use GA nor store cookies, I can't support this with data. But I estimate that 2030% of the organic traffic to our blog comes from people who are already Ahrefs customers. In this case, the retention impact of SEO can be divided into two categories: As people learn to figure out more from our toolset, they start using the tool more and more, which leads to lower churn . The content of tools and features included in higher-priced plans has led some people to upgrade their monthly subscriptions. In other words, SEO has the power to increase customer lifetime value because much content also overlaps with the retention and nurture stages of the marketing funnel. However, it is difficult or even impossible to account for this impact when calculating SEO ROI.



4. There is a huge time difference between the “investment” and “payback” periods The variables used to calculate ROI are investment and return over a certain period of time. But when we look at the entire website and business level, it's impossible to tie a specific investment to a specific SEO return. This is where the simplified principle of comparing "investment" and "return" for the same month fails. SEO can take a lot of time to provide a return on investment. Yes, of course you can win quickly . But nothing is guaranteed. A good alternative to choosing an arbitrary time period is to calculate ROI at a more granular level at the category, page, or keyword level. You can measure the "return" on rankings with specific pages, and you can also know the bulk of the "investment" put into them. We still ignore technical SEO and other related costs and efforts that are often applied to the wider scope of the website at once. But these partial costs are unlikely to shift a particular page’s ROI from positive to negative, so for the sake of simplicity, feel free to remove them—as soon as you notice them. Limited SEO testing capabilities One way to better understand the contribution of a marketing channel to overall marketing goals is to temporarily stop running a campaign and see what happens. For example, we did this experiment on a PPC channel: What you’re looking for here is incrementality in marketing—a boost to the channel on the basis that it’s going to produce concrete results no matter what. Let’s say the outcome we want to monitor is conversion rates, then we need to see how many more conversions we can get if we stop a specific campaign. The problem with SEO is that you can’t just turn it off. Or you can. But no sane marketer would use noindex Robot meta tags throughout their website . Organic search is just one of the most important channels for many businesses, and sabotaging your own SEO can have long-term harmful effects. This doesn’t mean you can’t run SEO experiments and tests. sure. SEO testing has grown significantly in recent years and coverage.