SEO is becoming more and more difficult and positions are constantly changing. We even hear gurus mention that SEO is dead, and that it is no longer worth what it was a few years earlier. Several questions then arise, how can you really prove the Value of SEO to your prospects, your current customers, your CEO or anyone else who wants to invest in SEO?
Prove it Value of SEO depends on your goals and what you need to do to reach them. Yes, let's be honest with ourselves, some natural positions are unattainable, regardless of the budget. Whether it's for natural referencing, of the local search, from optimizing positions in the App Store as well as on an online directory, you must be aware of the efforts that must be made to obtain better results. You will need to put in the effort and funding to improve your performance, regardless of the situation. Based on our experience, some of the best ways to prove Value of SEO are from:
The ROI model is one of the best models for showing additional gains in visibility, traffic, and turnover.The best way to do this is to use a spreadsheet like Excel, Numbers, or Airtable and aggregate all the data for all keywords that lead to your site or online store.In this model, you should use keyword conversions to determine which ones bring the most value to your organic traffic. You should use the data for each keyword to see if a change in conversions has occurred due to the improvement of a keyword, a new set of keywords, featured snippets, or other measures. The purpose of a analysis using keywords is to identify the keywords that generate the most value (keywords with high conversions from the first 3 pages visited). Once you have identified these keywords, you need to create large categories of content in order to simplify the creation of new content, and thus improve the ranking of these main categories.The use of paid search data makes it possible to estimate or evaluate the real conversion potential of one or more keywords, this is how you will have better visibility on the potential of your SEO.Potential data sources include:
If you want to get revenue projections thanks to SEO, you will have to multiply the monthly SEO volume of potential clicks x the conversion rate x the conversion rate x the signature rate x the average basket of your customers. For example, a company that maintains Apple computer fleets in the professional environment to an average basket 15,000 euros excluding VAT. It generally converts 6% of their visitors into leads, and has a conversion rate of 1%. With the ROI model, you project 1,000 clicks per month. To calculate the value of SEO in this specific case, you will have to do this calculation: 1,000 (clicks) x 6% x 1% x €15,000 = €9,000 per month.In this specific case, SEO has a potential per month of €9,000 excluding VAT compared to the keywords taken to count these 1000 clicks. If the budgetary and human efforts are less than this amount, you should invest more in SEO.
Another way to Prove the value of SEO is to compare it to the cost of obtaining paid search with Google Ads. Indeed, each keyword has a target CPC, from there, you are able to know the value of all keywords.It can be interesting to position yourself on expensive keywords at SEO level because if the CPC budget is too high, you will make significant savings later. But is the path to positioning yourself on it too complex? You will need to do additional research such as:
If the competition is too intense, you will potentially have to Turn to SEA with search engines like Google Ads, Bing Ads, etc. The investment is sometimes more substantial and immediate, but you will get returns more quickly. Thinking that SEO is feasible on all keyword categories is utopian, sometimes you have to use other channels when all the major players share coveted seats.
Another way to prove the Value of natural referencing is to start with a low budget in order to reap slight results. The relevance of a SEO strategy often depends on how all this is done, but even without being a SEO expert, it is possible to achieve results. Running a pilot project can show that you will get results even with a small budget. The natural referencing is not immediate, and it takes time to get results. A good way to run the SEO test would be to get 5 high quality links (backlinks) to an existing optimized page that has no external links. Be sure to measure the results before and after ranking 3 to 6 months later. If links are the only thing you've done on this page, then you could show that the links have a positive impact on visibility and, hopefully, the traffic to your site or online store. You can also do other tests with content techniques And Off-site SEO techniques in order to show the increase in the number of keywords and other performance measures over the months. For example, you can improve the content of a page by increasing the number of keywords, the answers to potential questions possible, and making the page as useful as possible. Once this is done, a few months later, you will be able to observe improvements in impressions, clicks, and requests to your site. To get this data, Google's console should be your best SEO tool.
The numbers don't lie.
Graphically displaying improved clicks, impressions, and positions in Google Search Console is a first way to prove that your SEO improves over time.Another way to get more accurate reports is to ask your SEO agency to provide you with data on the evolution of positions in tools like Ahrefs or SEMrush with historical data for a better comparison. You can also build graphs that show the number of keywords that you have now versus the one you had 3 and 6 months ago. Since the keyword is a gateway to the site, the more you have, the more opportunities you have toget qualified traffic to your website. Once your site's positioning starts to improve, you can expect to get more traffic and hopefully conversions once you get on the Google first page.The improvement of conversion rate is also a good measure to take into account. Recall that it is better to know how to convert 10 people out of 150 rather than 500 out of 1000.If you have access to analytics, be sure to show all improvement of organic traffic and to link this increase to conversions, whether they are major or minor conversions (downloading brochures, registering for newsletters, requesting demos, MQL, SQL, sales, etc.). This will not only show your CEO that you know what you are doing, but also that you can get much better results and improve sales performance over time. thanks to SEO.
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The last way to show the Value of SEO is to show the competitors who beat you in the results of search engines like Google, Bing, Qwant, etc.Use the tools that agencies have to find out if your competitors are investing significantly SEO budgets. You can easily get this data with tools like Ahrefs, SEMrush, or Yooda.Like everyone else, no one likes to see their main competitor implement new strategies before yourself. That's why you need to make sure they don't get ahead of the content created, answers provided in Google, featured snippets earned, local searches, etc.If you get relevant data and estimate the number of possible conversions based on your own conversion rate, you should quickly know if the SEO is useful or not in your field.
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We all know that the natural referencing is not immediate and that it takes time to see the results. But designing potential forecasts for visibility and the impact on conversions is a good way to show the real value of your SEO efforts.