All posts tagged Search Engine Optimization

Normally, you can measure the return on an investment (ROI) by taking the gain generated by the investment and subtracting its cost. Sounds simple enough, right? Well, in the search engine optimization (SEO) world, it’s a bit less straightforward.

That’s because it can be hard to pinpoint exactly how much of your sales or leads are generated by SEO alone. It’s also hard to track exactly which costs have gone into designing and implementing your SEO strategy.

Given this difficulty, I’ve gone ahead and outlined my formula for calculating and monitoring the ROI of an SEO campaign. As the owner of two full-service digital marketing agencies, I’ve tracked SEO performance across countless client campaigns for over a decade. After years of success in the field, I thought I’d share my basic strategy for SEO analytics and monitoring.

Where ROI Meets SEO For E-Commerce

For those who specialize in e-commerce, there are specific ways you can track and manage your SEO performance. Thanks to Google Analytics (yes, including the free version), you can do this fairly simply. Below, I’ve outlined the basic steps involved.

First, open your Google Analytics account and navigate to the “ADMIN” panel within the left-hand sidebar. From there, navigate to the “VIEW” tab and select “e-Commerce settings” and finally “Enable Enhanced e-Commerce Reporting.”

Whether you use Shopify or WooCommerce, your next step is to initialize tracking on these platforms so the data can be communicated to Google Analytics. Here’s a thorough guide on how to do that. Once complete, you’ll be able to view a variety of key metrics, such as:

Read more: How To Check The Return On Investment Of Your Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has become a buzz word over the last few years. Many areas of online business have been implementing solid SEO strategies for a while, but ecommerce is still slow to join the rest. Ecommerce stores have been trained to use paid methods, like Google Shopping Ads, Facebook Ads and other social media ads to get people to click through to their store. However, with the ever-increasing cost it takes to acquire new customers, ecommerce store owners should get on board with SEO and develop a solid content strategy for long-term growth and reduce their cost to acquire new potential customers.

The one-legged stool

As I mentioned earlier, the cost of bringing new customers to your ecommerce store is going to keep increasing. If your store is solely reliant on paid traffic, let’s say from Google Shopping, and Google decides you violated one of the many advertising policies, all your traffic dries up and you’re out of business. No traffic means no sales and no sales means you’re out of business by the end of the month.

Relying solely on paid traffic channels is like having a one-legged stool. It’s a lot more secure for the health and longevity of your business to have more legs under the stool, in case one leg gets taken away from you. SEO is one of those legs you need to apply. Not only is it free traffic, but as long as you provide valuable information for the readers, there’s no risk of being removed in the same way paid channels can shut you out.

The results of a well-executed SEO and content strategy take time. Often, an ecommerce store won’t see significant organic traffic for 6 to 12 months after publishing those first pieces of content. But if you keep implementing and producing solid, helpful content, the effects compound over time.

I got banned from Google and Facebook

I share all this from my own experience as an ecommerce store owner. I relied solely on Google and Facebook ads to get traffic and for some unknown reason back in early 2019 both platforms decided I had violated a policy. After that point, I couldn’t get back in their good books.

Read more: After Getting Banned From Google and Facebook, I Learned Why Every Ecommerce Store Should Focus on SEO

In our connected world, almost every organization has an online presence they rely on heavily to support the bottom line. Amid the ongoing crisis, that hasn’t been more true than now. While the web can streamline endpoint processes like sales, it also functions as a critical gateway for customer engagement. That’s why companies need to place increased emphasis on their online presence for brand building – and where SEO tools can make all the difference.

SEO has always been a critical tool for optimizing a company’s brand online in order to drive leads into the sales funnel. However, in light of recent events that have made brands’ online presence the main channel of customer engagement, we need to ensure we are pivoting and shifting strategies to meet consumer needs in this new reality. With a crowded landscape and more content competing for consumer attention than ever, it’s vital that brands leverage SEO technology to ensure they’re maximizing brand awareness online in order to continue generating revenue by converting leads into loyal customers. Here’s how:

Encourage new customer recruitment and acquisition

Building a brand starts with converting audiences from being “new visitors” – checking out a website to learn about the company – to a “brand visitor” – visiting the webpage because of what they know about the company. This means increasing the volume of non-brand-traffic, which can be done by leveraging SEO insights to understand what consumers are searching for and finding the best route to exposure to rank high in their searches. And the more familiar consumers are, the more likely they are to keep coming back – a recent study from Econsultancy found 82% of consumers click on brands they are familiar with first before looking at other options. With exponentially more brand options to turn to than ever, a sense of familiarity and consistency will help you create an engaged and loyal customer base.

Read more: The Wild Web: How SEO Can Attract, Engage and Retain Consumers for Brand Building