What is the value of Search Engine Optimisation

If you have a website and are engaging in a website optimisation campaign it is important to know the value of your campaign. This is something people often forget to monitor however it is just as important to work out your return on investment for your search engine optimisation as it is for any other marketing campaign.

This can be particularly difficult if you do your own search engine optimisation because most people will see this as free marketing. However you need to give some cost to your time. If you weren't doing search engine optimisation what other business activities would you be doing that would generate money for your business. It is one of the biggest mistakes people make because your time should always be priced into the work done.

So to start off with you need to work out what the hourly cost of your work is worth to your business. You then need to work out how many hours you will be spending on your search engine optimisation on a monthly basis. This will give you the monthly cost for your search engine optimisation efforts. Remember to price in any activities that you need to pay for as well to get the total cost. You will then have your investment and we now need to work out the return on this investment.

So you then need to work out how many visitors you will get on average on a monthly basis from being in the top 3 results for your search term. The best way to do this is to look up how many people search for a particular phrase on a monthly basis. To do this you are best to put that term into the Google keyword tool, however you should also have done this when selecting your keywords. You also need to remember that not every person that searches will click on your link. As a good estimate use 40% - 50% of the people that search for your term and the visitors you will get.

So now you know how many people you will get to your site per month and what it will cost you to get this. You now need to know what the monetary value of each of your visitors is worth. The best way to look at this is through the history of your site. We would recommend you have Google analytics installed on your website so that you can see the average monthly visitors you get. You can then also work out the average amount that you take through your website on a monthly basis. If you divide the average amount taken by the average number of visitors you will get the average value per visitor.

Now that you have the average value per visitor you will need to multiply this by the average monthly visitors you will get through your search engine optimisation visitors. This will give you the complete monthly value of your search engine optimisation efforts. So you will now be able to calculate your expected return on investment for your campaign.

The reason we have taken you through this is because you need to make sure your time and money is being invested in the right place. You will probably also find that the return on investment for SEO will be higher than any other form of advertising which will confirm to you that this is your best form of marketing.