Posts Tagged ‘justify’

So you are sure your site could get more traffic if you could do some Search Engine Optimization (SEO) on your website, but the boss asks you to justify the project with hard numbers and provide a business case. However, it can be tough to predict how much return an SEO project will have — how do you provide solid estimates when SEO is so unpredictable?  Fortunately, there are some simple techniques you can use to get an idea of traffic improvements and create an estimate of financial return.

At a high level, you need to do four things:

1. Assess your state of your site for SEO — what needs to be improved to gain rankings,
2. Estimate how much you could increase traffic if you were to do search engine optimization on your site,
3. Estimate the value of that traffic to your business (usually a monthly run rate), and
4. Estimate the cost of the SEO project(s) needed to gain that much traffic.

With this information, you can easily construct a cost/benefit model, which hopefully will justify the SEO project (and impress the boss with your analytical skills!).

Step one is to assess your current site. If you have some experience in SEO, you may be able to do this yourself. You could also ask an SEO firm to conduct a quick, low cost analysis of your site to identify key areas that could be improved.  Look at all factors that impact SEO, including site content, website structure and inbound link popularity.  You can also look at your competitors who show well for search terms — what are they doing right and could you do the same.  You might build a high level list of issues and opportunities.

Step two is to estimate how much traffic could be increased if you optimized your site for search.  There is no one technique to do this, and it is hard to estimate with much accuracy, but here are some things to factor into an estimate:

1. What are your current search positions for target keywords?  How do they compare to your competitors?
2. What is your current traffic from organic search, and specifically for target keywords?  Look at your web analytics data.
3. Assess how bad your current site is optimized for your target keywords.
4. Compare your current site to competing sites that rank well, and assess which sites you think you could beat.  Consider factors like page rank, inbound links, age of the site, website content, internal linking and all other factors that go into good SEO.  Ask yourself which sites you think you could beat, and that gives you an idea of where you could rank.
5. Based on where you are in current rankings (which may be nowhere), and where you think you could be, estimate traffic opportunity.  If you have some baseline data, you can do a rough estimate by figuring traffic will double from page 1 to page 2 of search results, double again to bottom of page 1, and increase 10% for each position you increase on page 1 (with larger increases as you go to the top).  If you don’t have a baseline with current traffic, you may have to rely on keyword research tools to estimate overall volume.

Step three is to estimate the value of the traffic to your business.  You could draw on a number of things to create this estimate.  Here are some ideas:

1.  Look at your PPC data.  Hopefully you are tracking costs, sales, revenue and margin on your paid search (if not, you may need help with SEM services, or a new agency if they are not measuring and optimizing this!).  Your PPC performance per visitor is a good proxy for SEO performance.
2. If you are doing brand advertising online, consider the value of an impression.  Having your site show up in SEO results is a brand impression, even if only 1% click on the search result.
3. While it is hard to assign a dollar amount, there is value in displacing competitors.  If you are doing other marketing spends that target competitors, consider the value of displacing a competitor in the search results.
4. You may be in an industry where you recruit partners, employees,distributors, affiliates, etc.  Consider the value of being prominent in the search engines, and how this can greatly improve your sales/registration/signup/etc rates.  Imagine talking to a prospect, and telling them to search a high value term on Google to see your site high in the results, and asking if they want to be a part of that success.  This can work really well.

The final step is to estimate the cost of projects to optimize your website.  This will be based on what you found in step one.

With the results of these four steps, you should be able to construct a model that shows cost/benefit for your SEO projects.  Give some factors will be rough estimates, you might assign a range to certain assumptions to get “best”, “worst” and “likely” scenarios.

Armed with your data and model (and assuming it shows a positive ROI!), you can confidently go to your boss and show how your SEO project can be justified.

John Erickson
LeadQual