Some Clients Ask for an ROI Plan Before They Buy Your SEO Services
Yuan Heard that a lot. We all talked about ROI; if you have proven ROI, then the price does not matter much on Search Engine Optimization (SEO) charge…couple of things, we show the growth on keyword rankings, traffic/visitors, the leads on calls, and from web form submissions. so do you ask or get biz owners their monthly revenue $ to justify the proven ROI? How do you know and how much of the ranks, traffic, and leads becoming real sale $? We manage many eCommerce/online biz with store backend admin access. We can clearly see the ROI on $. for instance, 3M sale within 6 months with 100% profit margin. we can figure out the ROI. however for small/medium businesses (not with online selling/eCommerce), lots of time, business owners do not disclosure their $ number. so what your proven ROI looks like on your SEO work? 1 👍🏽 1 [filtered from 16 💬🗨]📰👈
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Lucas It's different for ever client. I try not to get bogged down too much on the accuracy of numbers in order to prove ROI (unless I can reliably obtain them) and instead focus on educating the client to see the intangibles and understand the ROI is there, with or without the numbers. If the client can see the growth in sales, and the growth in traffic, they naturally correlate the two and they see your value. Obviously, it's great to be able to track exact ROI, especially for your own experience and learning, but it's not always possible. For instance, I did an online reputation management campaign for a local business that had 5 reviews on Google, and after a year they had 190 five star reviews from real clients. And that's just Google. FB and Yelp saw similar results. They quickly overtook all of their competition and are now nationally recognized in their niche as one of the best. People travel from all over the US to work with them because of this. They were able to see an increase in phone calls, consultation requests, and new clients almost immediately after we started this campaign and once they saw the value in the work I was doing, it was a no brainer…But there is absolutely no way for me to prove how much money I made them. The point is, it doesn't matter HOW MUCH, it only matters that they can see the ROI exists.
Yuan » Lucas Thanks. Totally agreed!
Chris Edwards 🎓 I just talk to the client about the current state of affairs, sales from traffic etc average order value. I then ask how much of a difference another 20% of sales or an increase in average order value by xx% would make. NEVER talk SEO to a customer unless it's pure technical SEO fixing a problem. ALWAYS talk in £$ etc because that is a clear number they can understand and evaluate your costs against.
Yuan » Chris Edwards True. Just rankings on page 1 or top are meaningless if no leads and sales.
Petter First off, agree on what Key Performance Indicators (KPI)s to measure, how they should be measured - and sit down with the client to set values for those KPI-events. I strongly advice that you lower the value every time - with the client, because then you most likely did more for their business than what you're measured on (gives goodwill). How to find these KPI's? Phonecalls, emails and form submissions are fairly common. Newsletter subscriptions are also fairly common. Demo's, freebies and trials occurs with some businesses (for a reason). - Most businesses also has a sales-process that can help you identify potential KPI's that the website can contribute towards that might not be present when you start as well which means you can increase the different C2A elements you can apply to different stages of the customer-journey that will be counted towards KPIs and Return on Investment (ROI) on those. Then agree on attribution. Should you report on last-click only - or apply attribution models? And if you go with models - what's your worth if it's not last-click, and what KPI's should be included here? Lastly agree on timeframe for evaluation (this should ideally overlap contract renewal). But you should report on your ROI monthly, and make sure that the client knows that Search Engine Optimization (SEO) isn't like ads - and that in the beginning you should be reporting negative ROI's. You don't deploy SEO and see the results the next few hours (even tho some of the stuff we do is like that now).
Yuan » Petter Great insights thanks. Appears that you got pretty deep on these. Do you one tool or use multiple tools to track and report KPIs? Petter Google Tag Manager (GTM), analytics and DataStudio. As well as insights from Google My Business (GMB) (and other sources if it gets covered).
Ameet If you can't measure, still provides the result and satisfies client expectation, he/she will continue to pay you. If not, there's you miss the client! Yuan Agreed. Some clients do not want to share any sale data. So we can only track some Key Performance Indicators (KPI)s and see their trending Meakin Simple conversation with client "If you don't want to share sales data that's completely fine. But obviously it's going to be harder for me to demonstrate an Return on Investment (ROI)." In either case, have a monthly check-in to discuss progress. This way they will soon let you know if they're not getting an ROI and you can help them troubleshoot. 📰👈
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