You know that moment on Dragons Den where the entrepreneur is asked for their numbers? And they don’t know them. Digital marketing can be just like that.
Take ROI for example. Do you know yours?
ROI – Return On Investment – is the profit earned on each marketing initiative. If you make more money from a campaign than you have spent on it, you have a positive ROI. But if the campaign loses you money, it’s a negative ROI.
However, there is one core element of your business that is often overlooked in terms of ROI, and that is your website. Having a website is not only an operational necessity for your business; it is the front door through which most of your customers will enter. But is it performing as well as it could, or are there things that you can do to maximise its potential?
In this article we look at what level of ROI you can reasonably expect to achieve from your website, and how to use SEO effectively to increase your current level of ROI.
What is a good level of ROI for your website?
The generally accepted level of ROI in the digital marketing landscape is 5:1. This means that every £1 invested in your website has returned £5, which represents a growth of 500%.
If your ROI falls as low as 2:1 (200% growth) it means that you are making very little profit, once fixed business costs are taken into account. And ROI of anything towards 10:1 (1000% growth) is considered exceptional.
How can you measure the level of ROI for your website?
A simple way to calculate a percentage ROI for any aspect of your digital marketing is:
(net profit / total cost) * 100
But how can you work out these numbers for your website?
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Total cost
The total cost of your website is relatively straightforward. You can work out the annual or monthly cost of your website by including the following amounts:
- The cost of creating the website divided by the expected lifespan of the website;
- Hosting and maintenance costs;
- Content marketing costs, for example page updates, blogs, new media such as videos.
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Net profit
Calculating the net profit of your website is a little more tricky, but you should be able to get a reasonably accurate figure by combining the following information:
- Your website traffic ie the number of visitors to your site;
- The conversion rate ie the percentage of visitors who purchase through your website;
- The revenue from the above conversions.
The above information is available from tools such as Google Analytics. You can also fine tune analytical tools to provide more specific information such as excluding internal website traffic from your own company, and measuring custom goals for specific content, ads, links or contact form submission.
There are also many different types of proprietary ROI-tracking software on the market which could be worth looking into to gain even more accuracy in measuring ROI.
How to use SEO to improve the level of ROI
Once you have a good idea of the ROI of your website, there may well be improvements that you want to make. This is where SEO can help. It’s essential that you rank well in search results, to be able to attract sufficient traffic to generate a healthy ROI.
Here are five ways you can use SEO to improve the level of ROI for your website:
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Ensure your site is fast and mobile-friendly
Page speed and mobile-friendliness are essential factors in determining where your site ranks in search results. If your site is slow to load or doesn’t either display or function fully on mobile devices it will inevitably attract lower rankings and traffic.
Ten tips on how to speed up your website and ensure it is mobile-friendly are:
- Test your page load speed;
- Reduce the size of the page;
- Optimise images;
- Use CSS sprites;
- Browser caching;
- Minify your code;
- Implement AMP;
- Reduce redirects;
- Reduce server response time;
- Use a content distribution network.
Our article How to improve page load speed covers the above bullet points in more detail.
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Use long-tail keywords
Effective SEO centres around using relevant keywords that searchers are likely to use, and featuring these keywords in your website content and meta tag. The most effective keywords to use are long-tail keywords of between three to four words. These are more likely to pinpoint specific searcher intent, rather than short-tail keywords of one or two words.
The more accurately you can define and capture searcher intent, the higher quality traffic you will attract to your website, and the more leads, conversions, sales, and revenue you will gain.
For a fun look at recent trends in searching, and how people now approach searching, take a look at our article How searching has changed over the past decade.
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Harness the power of local SEO
Local SEO helps your business to be more visible in local search results on Google. Even if you are not solely delivering products or services to your locality your business can benefit from local SEO, because it helps you be discovered by more users.
If you show up in local search results, searchers will be given your website, opening hours and phone number, all of which can sow the seed of interest in your company and ensure that a growing number of potential future customers are aware of your existence.
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Create content for users and search engines
A key component of your website’s success and positive ROI is that content is regularly created and updated. It is essential that your content remains current, relevant, authoritative and valuable.
Engaging content is critical to good SEO rankings. Google values quality content very highly, as reflected in its recent Helpful Content update. Read more in our Helpful Content article here. But high quality, original and relevant content also attracts visitors to your site and enables potential leads and customers to become familiar with your business and your brand. So you should continually be producing fresh content such as product pages, blog posts and videos.
Also ensure that you have a good stock of evergreen content on your site, such as guides, and answers to FAQs. It’s important to check evergreen content regularly to make sure that it is still completely accurate and up to date, and features the most current long tail keywords.
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Set up appropriate internal links and backlinks
Another important element of SEO is links within your website. Let’s take a quick look at internal links and backlinks:
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Internal links
Once a consumer lands on your website, you need to do all that you can to keep them there. A great way to do this is to feature plentiful internal links in your website content. So, particularly on the pages that attract the most incoming traffic, ensure that there is content to attract them to other parts of your site, and the links to help them get there.
When using links, check them regularly to make sure that they work, and also that the page crawl depth – the number of clicks needed to reach the webpage specified – is not too high. Ideally you need to feature direct internal links to as many deeper pages as possible, making them much more accessible.
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Backlinks
As well as featuring internal links within your website, it’s extremely valuable to engender endorsement from other authoritative and relevant websites by having them set up incoming links to your website. This can give your website not just additional visibility but also authority in the eyes of users of the other website that is linking to you.
One way to generate backlinks is to network and build relationships with companies relevant to your product and service. Another way is to offer something in return, for example perhaps offer to create a guest blog for their website which links to relevant resources on your website.
There is a variety of proprietary site audit software on the market which can help you to more easily identify and update internal links and backlinks on a regular basis, and – in terms of backlinks – analyse and compare the backlink profiles of up to five of your immediate competitors.
We hope that this article has provided some useful information and ideas on how to improve ROI using SEO. Why not also take a look at our Case Study page to see examples of how Xcite has helped many different clients improve ROI as part of their digital marketing strategy.
And remember to check back here with us soon for more helpful tips on SEO and digital marketing.