Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is one of the most important tools in a business’ digital marketing campaign. Without it, all efforts paid and spent on working on your online platform becomes utterly useless. For a real estate business, proper utilization of all resources is necessary to stay ahead.
Such a competitive market requires more innovative thinking to remain relevant, else your competitors will leave you without any clients to keep your business afloat. It is for this reason that partnering up with the most efficient digital marketing agency that can audit your SEO strategies is necessary.
Search Engine Optimization—Why Is It Important?
Many business owners would often hear that SEO is the key to online sales—but what is it exactly? The basic function of SEO is to make search engines—like Google or Bing—rank your business website higher in search results, thus bringing you closer to the front page.
By utilizing appropriate keywords and matching it with your business’ expertise and authority, your website will be more preferred by search engine spiders—thus increasing the chances of someone searching for related content to enter your domain. As more and more web visitors notice your website, your trust ratings increase—further pushing your rankings upwards.
Digital marketing strategies do prioritize SEO, but other tools—such as Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising or Google My Business listings—can help bring your website to the top. Although these traditional methods are highly effective in increasing your overall visibility, it is still necessary to analyze your digital marketing strategies for the most efficient way to achieve your goals.
Google Analytics: The Best Measure of ROI
Whether you’ve partnered with a digital marketing agency or hired an in-house SEO team to handle your business website, finding a way to track their efficiency is a challenge you have to fulfill. Taking them for their word simply isn’t enough, a proper figure dictated by actual monetary values is the best way to figure out if your expense on them has hit a Return on Investment (ROI).
Thankfully, Google has a web analytics service—aptly named Google Analytics—that can track and report your website traffic. This is highly optimized for e-commerce websites, as they have data from their regular transactions, indicating exactly how much their web sales generate for them. With a simple plug-in of values and several clicks of your mouse button, then information like conversion rate, number of transactions within the website, average order value, and total revenue come up.
For lead-based businesses—or businesses that provide a service, such as real estate businesses—the process of utilizing Google Analytics is a bit more complicated. Since there aren’t any actual “transactions” occurring within your website, a more lengthy approach is required to utilize Google’s web analytics service.
How To Set Up Google Analytics for Lead-based Businesses
Set Your Business “Goals”
Setting “goals” doesn’t mean the goals you give in your regular business strategy meeting when speaking of monthly targets. These goals are the quantifiable actions that a web visitor takes on your website that would qualify them as a sales lead.
This step will help you later on in computing for the “transaction value,” so list as much of these as you can. Take note of what a web visitor can do within your website, like filling out surveys or forms, inputting contact details, subscribing for a newsletter or e-mail list, or even go as simple as the number of pages visited or the amount of time spent within your website.
These actions will be logged in your Google Analytics as your “Goals,” a factor that would later help in the computation of your SEO service’s ROI.
Add a monetary value to your company “goals”
Once the goals have been identified, then the next step is to input the monetary value of each one. While a mere estimate is only what you’re inputting here, declaring a random number based on an arbitrary selection process isn’t advised—there’s a more scientific way of approaching it or doing so.
To paint a better picture for clarity, we’ll use the example of the goal “subscribing to the business e-mail list.” If there are fifty people who subscribed to it, and ten of those fifty actually contracted your business for a service, then the lead conversion rate would be ten percent. Following that example, if those ten people spent $200 each for your service, then we can rate $200 as your average sales value.
Using this information, we can finally determine the value of each lead. This is simply done by adding up your total conversions (10 people multiplied by $200 equals $2,000) and dividing it by your total number of leads (50 people), then you can get the average value per lead ($2,000 / 50 = $40). Through this technique, apply it to all your goals and input them to your Google Analytics’ “goal details.”
Track your conversions
After a month or two, you can finally track your conversions to start analyzing your SEO service’s ROI. A simple conversions report will yield all the data you will need to know about your website’s traffic. If you did the previous steps correctly, then a tab will reveal the number of conversions with its total corresponding values for each search channel.
Compute and Analyze your SEO’s ROI
With the information analyzed from Google Analytics, you can now compute for the ROI. The basic rule of thumb is to compare the amount of money you spent on your SEO service and compare it to the money generated from a particular search channel, for example, your monthly organic searches.
Using this example, let’s say that you received a revenue of $150,000 for the month and you paid your SEO service a total of $25,000 to work on your website’s content within that time frame. This would result in an ROI of $125,000. Depending on what your SEO service did for you, you will have to compare their cost to the appropriate channel.
For a more usable statistic, you can compute for the ROI’s percentage by using the formula: [(Revenue – SEO Investment Cost) / SEO Investment Cost] x 100. Using the above example, it would be [(150,000 – 25,000) / 25,000] x 100 = 500%. This means that your ROI hit a whopping 500%, indicating your SEO services were very effective for your business.
Conclusion
Taking a step back to analyze your SEO’s ROI is important to streamline your efforts for maximum efficiency. If the results aren’t within your scope of success, then this piece of information can save you lots of money in the long-term—allowing you to make adjustments to your digital marketing campaign.
Are you looking for a digital marketing agency in St. Louis, Missouri that utilizes strategic marketing solutions to improve your digital marketing campaign? Get in touch with us and let us streamline your digital marketing efforts to get your business to the top.