Often the value of SEO can be put under scrutiny as, at the end of the day, if you can’t understand the positive impacts that a good SEO campaign can bring to your business – why would you see it as something of value?
Now, if you don’t understand the value of SEO – this isn’t necessarily your fault. The person/agency in charge of your SEO campaign should always be able to show the value and results from what they’re doing in a way that’s meaningful to you and align it with your own business KPIs (Key Performance Indicators).
This article breaks down the ways in which a good SEO campaign can help businesses and answers the common questions we face regarding its value.
Why is SEO valuable to my business?
A very good question. In short, SEO is valuable to any business that has some sort of online operation as it makes your website more visible in Search Engines – arguably the most popular modern day marketplace. This brings more relevant traffic to your website and ultimately leads to increased revenue on your bottom line.
As well as this, SEO can help improve a user’s experience once they are on your website, which increases conversions (i.e. a transaction or lead generated).
Below is more detail on the main ways that SEO brings value to your business:
Increased Rankings
The ultimate goal for any SEO campaign is to increase revenue for your business.
The main way in which we do this is by making your website more visible in Search Engines to drive more traffic. This is done by establishing a list of keywords that your customers will use in search engines and working to increase the ranking positions of them. This leads to more visibility and more clicks, which leads to more revenue.
In a broad sense, we achieve this by ensuring your website has a strong Technical grounding, well written and relevant Content and a healthy and authoritative Backlink profile. We go in to more detail for this on our SEO page.
Improving Click-through Rates
A key part of any SEO campaign is something called Meta Optimisation. This involves editing your web pages’ titles and meta descriptions.
The reason we optimise Page Titles is to increase that page’s ranking for any relevant search terms. However, meta descriptions serve a different purpose as they don’t contribute to a page’s ranking position at all.
Instead, we re-write them to be as enticing as possible to increase click-through rate from the Search Engine Results Page. This contributes to increased levels of traffic to the website and an increase in conversions from the “Organic” search results.
Better User Experience
As you may or may not be aware, Page Speed has been listed as one of the highest priority ranking factors by Google and as time goes on this only becomes more important.
The reason? Well, a Search Engine’s goal is not only to answer a user’s search query, but to provide the answer in the best way possible. Therefore, ensuring your website loads quickly and doesn’t leave the user frustrated is paramount as a search engine will know if your website is slow and decrease your ranking potential as a result.
However, ranking positions aren’t the only considerations you should have in regards to Page Speed. By negatively impacting a user’s experience, you also deter them from wanting to stay on your website, as the below probability figures demonstrate.
In this context, a “Bounce” means the user leaves your website and you lose their business.
You can test your website’s page loading speed across Mobile and Desktop devices use Google’s Page Speed Insights tool and, if you’re in the red or behind your competitors’ websites, this should be a primary consideration of any SEO campaign.
As well as this, you should consider the “Mobile” version of your website a priority as Google is now prioritising this over your “Desktop” version since the rapid increase of Mobile browsing.
Demonstrating The Value of SEO
Yes, it’s all well and good having an SEO campaign – but can you show its impact? Why, of course you can!
There’s plenty of resources out there that allow you to measure the performance of the “Organic” channel (the traffic that SEO directly impacts) and align it with your business targets. I’ve listed a few below:
Google Analytics
Definitely the most popular website analytics platform available. If you’re concerned about pricing then don’t worry – it’s completely free to install and use.
This powerful piece of software works by using a snippet of code on each of your website’s pages to track an array of different metrics for the users who visit. You can find out information such as how many total users have visited a particular page over any given time or how long the average user spends on your website before leaving.
But most importantly, you can track how people landed on your website. Whether that be through a Social Media post, an Email Marketing campaign or the Organic search results. If set up correctly, you can also measure the Organic channel’s direct result on transactions or lead generation actions (i.e. the customer filling in a form).
The graph below shows a breakdown of every channel that’s visited the website over a period of time, what percentage they make up of overall website traffic and a graph which shows the daily number of unique visitors.
As a result, you’re able to accurately measure the performance and ultimately the value of an SEO campaign. Try it here!
SERanking
This is a fantastic tool which allows you to upload a list of keywords and track your website’s daily ranking positions for them. Better yet, you can do this across multiple search engines and for Desktop and Mobile devices (they will rank differently).
The below graph is taken from SERanking and demonstrates the daily average ranking position across one of our client’s total number of tracked keywords.
As Organic ranking positions are directly impacted by an SEO campaign, it’s paramount to continually track them to ensure you’re going in the right direction and making progress.
The pricing for this software is ultimately dependent on the number of domains you’ll be tracking and the amount of keywords you’ll be uploading. Regardless, for the price it’s an invaluable piece of kit to have.
SEMRush
SEMRush is a huge, multi-purpose marketing analytics software. For SEO, we’ve found that it proves invaluable for keyword research and measuring a domain’s Organic performance.
My favourite area of SEMRush is the Domain Overview segment. This allows you take a retrospective look at any domain’s Organic visibility in Search Engines and the total number of keywords that it’s ranked for over time.
The below graph is a demonstration of a retrospective look at a domain’s number of total ranking keywords.
As you can see, they’ve had a significant increase in the total number of ranking keywords over time – not to toot our own horn.
There is a free version of SEMRush available, which has limited access to some searches and there’s also paid variants which vary in price depending on your circumstances. Check them out here!
Well, that about does it.
I hope I’ve given a clear overview of how SEO can benefit businesses and the ways in which you can prove its worth.
If you have any questions at all, please feel free to get in touch here or if you’d like to take advantage of our free SEO audits, click here!
Cheerio.
