Comments on: SEM, ROI and the million dollar question http://www.e-gain.co.uk/blog/sem-roi-and-the-million-dollar-question/2007/10/26/ Not just another UK SEO blog but one with more about SEO, PPC and Affiliate Marketing Thu, 20 Nov 2008 22:09:51 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.0.4 by: Will - Connectpoint SEO http://www.e-gain.co.uk/blog/sem-roi-and-the-million-dollar-question/2007/10/26/#comment-24084 Fri, 26 Oct 2007 12:28:44 +0000 http://www.e-gain.co.uk/blog/sem-roi-and-the-million-dollar-question/2007/10/26/#comment-24084 Totally agree that ROI needs to be given more importance within the whole SEO spectrum. I was just reading a post this morning from a UK SEO who stated the only metric In Search Engine Optimisation worth considering is your site position within the SERPs for a given keyword. To be fair, the article was aimed at newcomers to the SEO industry and their obsession with PageRank. But this still highlights how the focus during an SEO campaign is still often on rankings and traffic rather than conversion and ROI. Last year I worked with a £multi-million turnover company, with several e-commerce sites in their network, who were not tracking customer routes through to sale completion. Due to a technical usability fault with the site they had a 78% drop-off at the penultimate stage of the checkout process, which they were not aware of. After this was identified and fixed using the Goal feature in Google Analytics, conversion rates from the sites shot up and further targeted traffic could be driven. If a client wants to double sales from its site, you can either double the amount of traffic or double the conversion rate. If the site has had no previous usability or conversion analysis, often the latter proves to be the quickest, easiest and cheapest, and will increase the ROI from all further SEO and PPC spend. Totally agree that ROI needs to be given more importance within the whole SEO spectrum. I was just reading a post this morning from a UK SEO who stated the only metric In Search Engine Optimisation worth considering is your site position within the SERPs for a given keyword. To be fair, the article was aimed at newcomers to the SEO industry and their obsession with PageRank. But this still highlights how the focus during an SEO campaign is still often on rankings and traffic rather than conversion and ROI.

Last year I worked with a £multi-million turnover company, with several e-commerce sites in their network, who were not tracking customer routes through to sale completion. Due to a technical usability fault with the site they had a 78% drop-off at the penultimate stage of the checkout process, which they were not aware of. After this was identified and fixed using the Goal feature in Google Analytics, conversion rates from the sites shot up and further targeted traffic could be driven.

If a client wants to double sales from its site, you can either double the amount of traffic or double the conversion rate. If the site has had no previous usability or conversion analysis, often the latter proves to be the quickest, easiest and cheapest, and will increase the ROI from all further SEO and PPC spend.

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