“We need to rank on page one to show SEO ROI for [insert your favorite service’s name] as soon as possible.”
“We want to start generating leads within the first month.”
“We want to start cold calling people and generating leads using our content as sales collateral next week.”
“Can we get to page one by next week?”
These are all things actual JCI Marketing clients have asked when entering The JCI Process. With so much misinformation across LinkedIn and the generalized confusion between lead generation versus demand generation, it can certainly feel like you should start getting leads almost immediately. But the majority of search engine optimization (SEO) services are designed to work faster across a business-to-consumer (B2C) retail space, where you have the natural benefit of driving traffic with the old “near me” modifier in search engines. Brick-and-mortar locations with a tangible, transactional product to sell work SEO wonders in B2C circles, but what about business-to-business (B2B) marketing? The answer lies in understanding that SEO is a long-game process. In turn, you have to think more broadly about what the real ROI of SEO is, when it will come, and what you can do to prove your SEO marketing value while you wait on it to work.
The exact ROI of SEO will always depend on how quickly you make it to the upper echelons of search results, your call-to-action (CTA) placement, and the value your content brings to readers based on the intent of what you target. There isn’t a hard and fast rule for how quickly you will achieve a positive ROI in SEO, nor its exact value. It also depends on the source of the information. For instance, MOZ reports that the average ROI for SEO for an e-commerce company is 275%. Yet, others may cite a figure ranging from 550% to 1200%. It’s all dependent on what exactly you’re doing in the background.
Let’s consider another fact: SEO costs may also vary, such as paying $1,000 for a single backlink, something which you’d hope occurs naturally, but if it takes 20 hours of back and forth with a publisher before they accept your request to add a backlink, then, you have an associated indirect cost of building that backlink. Those costs are typically passed along in the form of a higher price point per project, and you most certainly don’t want to run out and start buying backlinks for $20 a pop. This is a disastrous idea and will inevitably damage your domain reputation (DR).
Instead, you want to focus on the organic side of things, making it so that those backlinks come naturally over time, even if they don’t arrive for 12 months or more. You can also position your content more strongly by focusing on search terms with a lower keyword difficulty. Ergo, you can rank more easily and organically, resulting in natural referrals, i.e., backlinks, down the line.
After considering the indirect costs associated with an SEO project, you’ll have a true cost of SEO. Now, let’s get to the meat of the conversation: time to ROI and how to calculate it for SEO efforts.
Deriving a positive return on SEO efforts means your total revenue attributed to optimization improvements has exceeded the investment costs thus far. As a result, the exact time to ROI will vary based on a variety of factors, including your industry, competition, product value, and demand.
For instance, it’s possible to achieve a faster ROI on local SEO efforts focusing on bringing local traffic into your establishment. Local SEO is a vital step on the road to meaningful improvement of your digital presence, but it’s not always applicable to many in the B2B world.
Thus, the total time to ROI will always be much longer for those targeting a B2B market. Yet, the total ROI, once it begins working, will also depend on your average offer cost. If your typical contract is valued at six digits or more, it’s entirely plausible to see a positive ROI after one to two leads from organic search become customers. You see, SEO is part of a larger picture-demand generation. The right strategy in SEO is about building demand and creating content that aligns with your buyer at the just-right stage. Thus, they come to you, in a not a so different fashion as what described in referencing backlinks. In this scenario, the time to ROI also necessitates a strong degree of patience as you could see leads come in sporadically, at month seven or even month 17. The difference comes from how well-rounded your SEO strategy is and whether you are crossing enough t’s and dotting enough i’s to drive conversions once the SEO side of attracting traffic works.
For example, let’s consider the below breakdown of potential marketing budget allocation between PPC, social media, and SEO, which will also affect your expected SEO ROI:
The spread between parts of your marketing strategy is significant but worth reviewing. You will need to plan and account for the delay between creating and optimizing content and seeing it derive traffic and thus leads.
Let’s break it down to a few well-known questions we ask clients at JCI Marketing to understand if they’re applying this principle to generate short-term gains while waiting.
Are you prioritizing content distribution via social media to drive traffic? Have you repurposed your existing SEO content to drive conversions through high-touch assets, and are you tracking the data? Of course, there are many metrics and ways to define exactly what success looks like. Superficially, SEO is about traffic, but all the traffic in the world lacks value if it doesn’t lead to conversions and meaningful conversations. If those answers are not yes, we make them part of our plan.
At JCI Marketing, we always advise our clients that SEO results take six months at a minimum to even make it page one, and that’s assuming the stars align perfectly. In highly competitive spaces, such as SaaS, you will be looking at a moving target. So, you might see leads start coming in around month 7 for the work completed in month two, but even the other changes occurring in months two through six will have a compounding effect to support month two. Therefore, it’s impractical and unethical (in our opinion) to offer a “guarantee” for page 1 ranking at any specific date.
Like all things in marketing, you’ll want to benchmark your results. Fortunately, there is a specific formula you can use to calculate the SEO ROI for your project. You’ll need to decide how you’ll derive the value for the first variable, whether you will include both direct and indirect cost of SEO, too. Then, you’ll use a typical ROI formula.
The formula is as follows:
SEO ROI = [(Revenue From SEO – Cost of SEO) / Cost of SEO] * 100
If you spend $30,000 total on an SEO project, and you generate a lead in month 7 that creates $40,000 in revenue in total for your company, you will see a positive ROI.
[($40,000-$30,000) / $30,000] * 100 = $10,000/$30,000 or 0.33
0.33 * 100 = 33%.
Let’s broaden this example a bit to focus on how this becomes extended beyond the basic calculation when working with JCI Marketing. But first, think back to a time you invested in SEO. Consider your costs and the results, then give our SEO ROI Calculator a spin below to see your actual ROI. Plus, you could even try a few different values, such as investing $30,000 with our brand in the hopes of getting a set ACV result after a period of time.
Remember, we don’t deal in guarantees, but we do know what works. Feel free to experiment and find what you hope to achieve. As another of thumb, try to aim for an ROI of near 10-20% in the first year, especially if you don’t have any existing optimized content in place. This will help you understand your baseline. Or skip the confusion by connecting with a JCI Marketing growth specialist now.