Since content marketing and SEO require some initial investment, it is important to understand how to measure the ROI to make good spending decisions. It’s not always easy to tell if the work you’ve put into SEO is paying off or not. So what do I need to consider when measuring ROI? And how long do I need to wait before SEO starts paying off?
If you’re a SaaS marketer who’s wondering how to measure the ROI of your organic search channel, you’re not alone. You’ve covered the initial marketing cost, and you need to know the best way to track ROI. Here at Demandwell, one of our goals is to help you understand everything you need to know about SEO so that you can achieve your goals.
When it comes to the ROI of SEO and a content marketing framework, there are many things to consider, but the most important metric is the revenue earned from closed deals. We treat the organic search funnel just like any other marketing funnel. The goal of SEO is to drive more traffic through organic search, generate leads and build out your sales pipeline, and ultimately lead to new customers and new revenue for your business. This means the success of your organic channel is tied closely to how well organic leads perform in your sales funnel.
That being said, you need to be mindful of the sales cycle when measuring the ROI of content marketing and SEO. Since the sales cycle for SaaS companies can oftentimes be 3-6 months, this means that you shouldn’t expect to see much of an ROI in less than the amount of time it should take organic leads to finish one sales cycle. First, you will have to wait for the organic channel to start producing leads, then you will have to wait until leads have gotten a chance to be nurtured down the sales funnel. To get a more accurate picture of when to start measuring ROI, ensure that you have waited for enough time for at least one full sales cycle to be completed after you start getting leads from organic search.
In SEO, there are many metrics you could fall in love with to track the ROI of content marketing and SEO. You can spend time tracking leads, demo requests, content downloads, or other SEO performance metrics. Although these metrics can be valuable in other contexts, true ROI can only be determined for SEO once you can attribute closed deals to leads generated from organic search traffic. This is where you get the good ROI story that you can use to power more investment in SEO which can, in turn, capture even more demand.
At Demandwell, we like to joke that we’re not “rank-well” or “SEO-well”, we’re Demandwell. Our SEO strategy focuses on capitalizing on the high-intent keywords with commercial intent and building out more SEO performance content to capture a wider audience. Our goal is to get more customers to see your site, enter your sales funnel, and ultimately do business with you.
