How to Build ROI – While Working On SEO Strategies

Building ROI is the main goal when someone starts his business or spends money. Here we will focus more on Building ROI with SEO strategies- when discussing pain points with prospective clients – see a remarkable number of SEO strategies that are, at best, decoupled from business performance, and, at worst, totally unengaged with wider business performance.

Failing to employ a framework “See Think Do Care” (STDC) framework – or indeed, Google’s Micro-moment mobile variation, which explicitly uses the STDC framework for KPI measurement – is surely not planning for success in 2017.

So how can we, as marketers, do better for our clients? I have my own framework for mapping SEO strategy down to hard £ (or $) impact.

Start With The Growth: Kill brand!

Before thinking about attribution or STDC, let’s consider SEO fundamentals. If we include brand terms in our assessment of performance, we are looping in all sorts of other marketing activities which we should not be taking credit for. So: filter out brand.

How do we achieve that in practical terms? Google Search Console allows you to quickly and simply filter based on terms or partial terms, like a simple REGEX function. So, great! We can simply run exclusions based on the simplest version of our brand term, and we are done.

We only have 90 days data from Google right now. So, either we use a handy TARDIS to go back in time and collect the last year’s worth of data to do a year-on-year comparison to smooth out growth variation due to market seasonality… or, we accept we can’t run year-on-year with brand filtering until this time next year (or more precisely, in 360-90=270 days time). Of course, this is assuming we consistently export and stash Search Console data for our own analysis.

By the way, if you need a hand with that part, I’ve written about exporting Search Console data before.

Even with no TARDIS-delivered historic data, we can at least take the last 90 days percentage brand rate and remove an equivalent percentage from the organic traffic coming into our website as a starting point for the current generic performance delivery.

From there, we can measure the improvement in total click volume from generics over time and apportion that across ongoing organic traffic performance. This will essentially measure incremental improvement from our start date that is delivered by generic term performance improvement.