The SEO & ROI relationship
Search marketing has made ROI (return on investment) a ubiquitous term amongst marketers, something hitherto not as closely associated with marketers who have traditionally been seen as cost centers.
With the array of sophisticated web analytics available today, there is considerably greater emphasis on measuring ROI. This is particularly true with paid search marketing campaigns; measuring ROI with natural search engine optimization (SEO) is relatively marginalized. This could be due to the fact that SEO efforts take much longer to yield results; thus, they may get sidetracked from the measurement radar.
However, that could be a great folly as ignoring SEO may have a significant impact on a company’s overall marketing effort. MarketingSherpa’s 2006-2007 search marketing benchmark guide (excerpts available for download), which is based on a survey of over 3500 search marketers (both client-side and search marketing agencies), shows that a significantly higher percentage of marketers acknowledged that they got better ROI from SEO for both lead generation purposes as well as for product sales on an e-commerce site. In fact, the difference in those claiming a better ROI for product sales with SEO is quite stark (about 15 percentage points).
Benefits of outsourcing SEO
The other interesting aspect of this year’s study is the benefit of outsourcing SEO and PPC campaigns to agencies. While companies seem to generally bring in natural search efforts in-house, statistics show that companies would be better off by outsourcing this work to the specialists. Excerpts from the report say: “… marketers who outsourced SEO saw a 110% lift in overall site traffic within six months, where as marketers who handled SEO in-house saw a 73% lift.” As one can see, the differential is too wide to ignore.
May be, large companies with the financial muscle and capabilities to build their own resource pool for SEO feel that they do not need external services. Or, it could be that they are wary of losing control of their websites by letting agencies work on them. Another study by MarketingSherpa for the above mentioned report, which evaluated 44 of the largest software companies in the United States, showed that many of these companies lacked natural search ranking visibility for keywords extremely relevant to their business.
This is a great reminder that even the biggest companies could do with external perspective and expertise to manage and improve their SEO efforts.
Search results page heat maps: How can companies ignore SEO?
Here is the irony with SEO. Almost anyone who does any amount of online marketing acknowledges that being found in the top few results of a search results page is very important to their success. However, if we compare the amount being spent on SEO efforts by companies, vis-à-vis their paid search marketing efforts, the former accounts for only about 10% of the total spend on search marketing.
This stark differential could either be because of undercounting of SEO efforts by companies or that they are not consciously investing money into SEO in the hope that their websites will begin showing up in the results. If that is their thinking, they couldn’t be farther from the truth, because SEO is indeed a specialized marketing activity. The results of SEO can be achieved only by the rigorous and sustained execution of a process comprising specialized techniques.
A look at one of the heat maps – a visual depicting the eye movements of a search engine user and the actions taken by the search user—clearly shows the likely consequence of not being found in the top few results. No worthwhile traffic.
Wouldn’t it make sense to put in a concerted effort to be in the line of fire ie. the user’s eyeball?
PPC obviously seems to work for companies (and we agree that it does, if planned, executed and monitored well—else it could just be draining away precious money in useless clicks).
However, considering only the small fraction of users who are actually seeing the ad since user’s eyes seldom fall on the right column instinctively (a fact clearly shown by numerous heat maps), it is amazing to think of what could be achieved with a more proportional allocation of spend for professional SEO services.
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