How to Discuss ROI With Your SEO Clients 

Possibly the most common question we receive from SEO and local search advertisers is, “How are you going to accurately track the ROI of my SEO campaign?” This is a question every advertiser should ask of their SEO provider, and the too-often illusive answer is one of the biggest hurdles preventing SMBs from committing to a time and labor-intensive SEO strategy. SMBs tend to have smaller marketing budgets than large national or multinational corporations. They are risking more when they trust a digital marketing agency to generate enough organic traffic to justify the expenditure.
With a properly run and tracked PPC and Facebook Ads campaign, the dollars spent are easily tracked and advertisers can clearly see where and how their funds are being spent and the leads generated. Showing SEO results can take a bit more digging and critical thinking.
Pro Tip for Agencies and SEO Sellers: Make sure you and your SEO clients are on the same page about what constitutes a conversion (as you would with paid ads), such as calls, form fills or directions. It’s vitally important to future client satisfaction that both parties are in agreement about campaign goals and at least the broad strokes of how results will be achieved.
Below are some the most effective ways we have found to communicate SEO value to our clients. Enjoy!
Two Simple Ways to Prove ROI for SEO

1. Leverage Google My Business Insights
   
2. Include DNI (Dynamic Number Insertion) for Organic Traffic
   

Google My Business Insights Google My Business provides detailed insights on how searchers are interacting with business listings. Today we will be looking at one of our current SEO clients and dissecting their prospective customers’ search queries and the actions those searchers took.

Above you will see the top five search queries our SEO client’s listing is showing for and how many unique users typed in the queries. These terms or phrases are being tracked and we will be able to clearly and concisely report on the increase in performance for these terms. Like our friends at MOZ stated , stay away from showing ranking trackers and instead provide a before and after screenshot of the performance. Visuals are a lot easier for advertisers to digest and you won’t get any questions around why a keyword dropped three positions two days ago!
Our search query conversation will segue us into customer actions. If you have assigned values for your conversions or actions this is where you will keep your clients happy. If you haven’t, Marketing Charts provides good rules of thumb for CPLs based on company size. We are working with a local paving company, so for confidentially reasons we will simply assume a CPL of $146.94, as the paving company has 2 to 50 employees.

Customer actions are broken into three different KPIs: calls, directions and website visits. Here is where we explain to advertisers that the better the tracked queries perform the more visible their listing will be, resulting in more actions taken, i.e. leads.

For this example, we wanted to focus on calls. Based on our client’s CPL goal of $146.94 and the cost of our local SEO package, we would need our efforts to help generate at least seven qualified leads a month for the client to break even. As you can see, we have generated $4,261.26 worth of leads for the monthjust based on calls alone. Tracking Calls Via Organic Channels Using DNI (Dynamic Number Insertion)
We’ve been leveraging CallRail for the past few months and have been impressed with their contribution to our SEO performance tracking. The best parts about utilizing CallRail are:

• Integration capabilities with Google Analytics
  
• Being able to prove to clients that the pages we optimized are generating X number of calls
• Being able to source calls that come in through organic channels

Setting up DNI for tracking calls from organic traffic takes a bit of extra effort, but once it is done, your reporting calls will be 100% smoother because the value of your optimization efforts will be easier to prove. What Have We Learned About Proving SEO ROI?
We strongly encourage digital marketing agencies to change their way of thinking about SEO reporting if all they’ve been doing is providing generic analytics reports. Our SEO team has been there before, and we know from experience that these reports are rarely compelling reading for clients. Structure your reporting in a way that makes sense to business owners and their bottom dollar and we promise you will begin to see improved reactions from your clients when the topic of SEO ROI comes up!