Tracking and data collection allows better measurement and analysis of the value of all types of marketing efforts. When it comes to SEO, it is sometimes difficult to calculate the exact value of the work done without the right tools or instruments. In this blog post we will present how we have made a calculation of how much we save by working with SEO.
Counting the value of SEO
In this example, we have calculated the value of SEO work by comparing it to the opportunity cost of buying clicks on the same searches through Google Ads*. For example, if we appear on the search "blog post" and get 10 clicks, you can calculate what the cost would have been if we had advertised on the search "blog post" and paid for 10 clicks.
*We have not taken into account whether the conversion rate for Google Ads or organic search is different, but assume that the conversion rate is the same.
The easiest way to calculate the value of your SEO work is always to count the total business that comes in through organic search. However, this is not an effective way to compare from business to business as the size of the business and buying patterns differ between businesses.
If you work in B2B and have long sales processes and want to get the exact value out of your digital marketing efforts, Offline Conversion Tracking is a great way to go. You can read more about Offline Conversion Tracking here.
How we calculated that we save 250 000 SEK per year by using SEO
We used the method described above where we found out what the cost of a click is through Google Ads on the keywords we get clicks on organically.
The first thing we did was to go to Google Search Console and export all the collected searches where contitude.com/en-se/blog appeared and got clicks. We filtered out all the searches that were not in Sweden to get rid of the searches that we didn't think we would get clicks on. We also limited this to only looking at the blog pages that we primarily use for SEO purposes.
We chose the period from the first to the last of October 2020 to narrow down the data set.
From the 1000+ search phrases where contitude.com/en-se/blog appears, we removed all the search phrases that didn't yield any clicks. Then we copied all the search terms and calculated an estimated cost per click on these search phrases using the SEO tool KWfinder.
Once both the number of clicks on a search term and the estimated cost per click for that search term are in place, it's easy to add up what the cost would have been for all those clicks on those search terms.See the image below for a small excerpt of our calculation:
Here you can also see that there are terms that have no cost per click. These terms KWfinder cannot find an estimated CPC on. This does not mean that it is free to advertise on these keywords but it is likely to be really cheap and we keep these without calculating any value.
For Contitude, we were able to derive 775 clicks on these open search terms, during October, at an estimated cost of just over $1,540. This corresponds to a saving over a month of about 13 700 USD (at today's exchange rate). The reason we get it to just US dollars is that KWfinder provides estimated cost per click in USD.
In October, Contitude received a total of 1646 clicks from Google Search according to Google Search Console.
Where did the other 871 clicks come from?
Google does not share all the data, but some search terms are under-searched and too specific for Google to want to share. But of course we will also calculate a value for them.
We then reasoned as follows:
The average cost per click on the search terms we were able to secure was about 2 USD per click. As the less frequent searches and the longer search phrases do not tend to cost as much as the big popular searches, we did not want to use the same average cost per click. We assumed that some of the searches cost and estimated the average cost per click to be USD 1 per click, which is half the value we calculated earlier.
Then we can value the last 871 clicks at 871 USD.
If we add up the USD 871 and USD 1540, we get a total of USD 2 411, which corresponds to about SEK 21 500, which in one year is SEK 258 000 that it would have cost us if we had bought these clicks via Google Ads.
The long term with SEO
The great thing about SEO is that it's long-term and we'll continue to get clicks on these keywords for a long time to come. At least as long as your content is evergreen, i.e. not about a fad that is only relevant for a short period of time and then interest in it wanes.
The downside is of course that it takes time to succeed with SEO. Since its inception, Contitude has written a total of 127 blog posts over a period of 5 years. The majority have been written in the last 24 months.
ROI on SEO
With the calculation we made, it is also possible to estimate a return on investment for our SEO work. We know that even the very first blog post we wrote continues to get clicks and drive traffic to our website and it was written about 5 years ago. In fact, they are actually driving more traffic today compared to 2 years ago. This gives an indication that good content will perform over time.
If we play with the idea that content lasts only 5 years, we would save over 1.25 MSEK on the 127 blog posts published so far on contitude.com/en-se/blog. This compares to the cost of writing 127 blog posts.If an average blog post of 800 words costs SEK 3,000, the total investment of 127 blog posts is SEK 381,000 and gives an ROI of over 300%. We consider this to be a good return on investment.
Summary
At Contitude, by creating relevant content, we have been able to save over 250,000 SEK per year. SEO is really profitable in the long run compared to Google ads.
Want help getting started or accelerating your SEO efforts? We'd love to help!Then book a meeting with us today!
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