If you are wondering what business strategy to use for your site to stand out, we suggest organic search.

But you might be apprehensive given that it takes time to see results, and what if you don’t get a healthy ROI? Such concerns are justified, so let us allay your fears by referring to research from Chitika that showed organic search results receive 83.6% of all clicks on average.

Given how fast the market is changing, you simply can’t ignore organic SEO, and this guide explains why while we also discuss organic ROI measurement for your benefit.

What Is ROI?

When it comes to SEO, Return On Investment (ROI) is a key element since it allows you to judge the financial value of various digital marketing efforts. As a business, you should already be familiar with calculating the ROI for Pay-Per-Click (PPC) ads because you only need to invest a fixed amount for every click.

But calculating ROI for organic SEO is challenging since there is no fixed cost per click. In organic SEO, the goal is to organically increase visibility on search engines like Google, which makes it difficult to track the progress.

Unlike paid digital marketing campaigns, where you decide the time and money you want to invest, the same isn’t possible for organic SEO. To earn a positive ROI on organic SEO efforts, revenue generation must be higher than the investment cost.

The thing to remember is that organic SEO delivers results only in the long run, so forget about overnight success. However, keeping at it will ultimately deliver suitable returns.

What Is Organic SEO?

Organic SEO looks to improve the brand ranking on the SERPs without paying anything, instead focusing on algorithm-driven tactics to increase online visibility. This is the technique many top marketing firms, like Venio.ch, for example, tend to employ in order to improve the ranking of a particular website. Certain techniques for increasing web traffic to a site include:

• Boosting keywords
• Publishing high-quality content
• Generating backlinks

In some cases, even black hat SEO tactics, like link farming or keyword stuffing, can also boost SEO, but it’s best to avoid them since your site can be banned. If you plan on using organic SEO, it’s important to adapt to different situations based on proper research.

To achieve organic SEO, you can:

• Publish relevant content with a focus on page optimization
• Use metatags and other tag attributes
• Space out the links that redirect users to the content

When you have relevant content, the effectiveness of organic SEO increases, so you might see:

• More clicks on organic SEO sites
• Trust among users
• Search engine results last longer
• Affordable, especially compared to shared listings
• Higher rankings
• More revenue generation and sales
• Greater website traffic

According to a HubSpot study, organic SEO accounts for 14.6% more conversions, while paid traffic only converts 2.5% of users.

Why Is Organic SEO Important?

In short, organic SEO ROI is the return on investment a business can expect due to its organic search engine optimization efforts. And compared to other marketing channels, its results are better as it targets users who are already searching for the products or services on your site.

When used right, it increases online visibility and brand awareness by generating more revenue and sales, thanks to higher rankings. But why should you accept everything we say? Where are the facts?

A recent study conducted by Advanced Web Ranking found that organic SEO can generate 6.5 times more revenue than paid search ads. To put things in perspective, organic SEO obtains $0.51 per click, while paid search ads only produce $0.08 per click.

How To Measure ROI?

A BrightEdge study noted that organic SEO could account for 53% of all website traffic, while research published by Conductor showed that it’s responsible for 64% of all website visitors. So, knowing how to measure the ROI is essential for tweaking SEO campaigns accordingly.

1. Calculate All SEO Investments

Organic search is often labeled as a “free-traffic” channel, and for accurate analysis, you need to measure SEO investments in the following areas:

• In-house employees
• SEO tools
• Freelancers and agencies
• Link building
• Content distribution

This will help you calculate the total cost of investments over a fixed time.

2. Value Of Conversions

Use Google Analytics to track conversions and assign a value to them based on the type of business. In some cases, e-commerce sites send a report containing the value of sales conversions, but the same doesn’t hold true for lead generation businesses. You can assign dollar values, in such scenarios, to new sales and marketing leads.

3. Assisted Conversions

To know about the initial organic search contribution, factor in assisted conversions. This is because if customers land on several pages on your site, they may convert only after clicking on a retargeting ad or specific page.

You can solve this problem by shifting to Google Analytics reports since it uses a data-driven attribution model. By going over the reports, you can know about all partial conversions among the total conversion rate.

We suggest researching consumers’ conversion paths and analyzing how various channels contribute to the overall conversion.

What Are The Challenges Of Measuring ROI For Organic SEO?

Some of the common challenges while measuring ROI for organic SEO include:

• Establishing a connection between brand building and SEO
• Flawed market attribution
• Time taking process between investments and returns
• Impossible to calculate the retention impact
• Difficult to forecast future ROI
• There are limits on SEO testing

An easy formula for calculating the ROI is:

Estimated monthly value = Total monthly searches x CTR position x Value per visit, whereby estimated monthly value is the total value of a keyword in dollars for that month. CTR position refers to the Click-Through-Rate for the keyword, depending on its current or target position, while total monthly searches are the overall search volume for that word.

Value per visit determines how much customers get value out of visiting your site. Knowing all these things makes it easy to calculate organic SEO, and SEOmoz found that organic searches account for 70% of all clicks.

So, follow our guide and align your SEO and business goals for the best results.