ROI and SEO | How SEO affects your business
“... You can evaluate the effectiveness of your content in attracting and advancing the users through your sales funnel, and you can measure what they do, and what they don't do, on your website and beyond. By attaching real dollars and cents to those actions that began with a simple search, you'll be able to truly measure the return on investment from your SEO Channel…”
If you're a business, there are some very real and very specific benefits to having a consistent, ongoing Search Engine Optimization strategy. For the first time in the history of marketing, users are offering up their actual intent through the words they type into search engines, and more than ever before you can measure the results of your SEO efforts as a marketing channel. While search engines don't charge you for listing your web pages, planning and implementing SEO in your organization is certainly not free. You'll need to spend the time, the money, and the resources to do this the right way.
The good news is that this can help you obtain a tremendous marketing reach, attract more targeted visitors, and measure the impact of your efforts in terms of a return on your investment. More and more content appears on the web every second of every day, and your customers need search engines to help make sense of it all. In fact, the bigger the web gets, the more search engine usage keeps growing year after year. People search to find answers to their questions, to buy products, to find a place to eat, to book travel, to get news, just about everything we do online starts with a search.
And it's not just done around the family PC anymore. The explosion of connected mobile and tablet devices means that we have access to search just about anywhere in the world. What people search for says a lot about their intentions, or what actions they intend to take at a specific moment in time. And this has traditionally been the holy grail of market research. If somebody searches for hiking trails in California, or where to buy a digital camera, it's very easy as a marketer to understand and react to what they're looking for.
The role of search engines is to match those user search queries to pages that match the topic, and if you sell cameras, well, what that means to you is that you can create relevant content that meets the needs of the searcher at exactly the right moment. Good SEO can essentially provide you a stream of some of the most targeted intentional traffic you could possibly ask for. But more than that, one of the biggest benefits of Search Engine Optimization is the ability to actually measure your results. You can use your website analytics data to find out exactly how successful you are in acquiring search engine users, and you can see if those users' actions are in line with your business goals.
You can evaluate the effectiveness of your content in attracting and advancing the users through your sales funnel, and you can measure what they do, and what they don't do, on your website and beyond. By attaching real dollars and cents to those actions that began with a simple search, you'll be able to truly measure the return on investment from your SEO Channel.
