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SEO and the ROI Debacle

Working Against ROI

Successful businesses recognize that reasoned aspects of ROI involve far more components than rankings, traffic and the age-old question: "Did I make more money?"

The search engine optimization ROI debacle doesn't rest squarely on employees, SEO consultants or companies. Yes, some may point to a business and insist that it bears responsibility for its marketing endeavors. Yet, in very practical terms, everyone shoulders the blame for ROI miscues that affect companies and the integrity of the search engine optimization industry.

Businesses and consultants botch up or influence ROI on many fronts. A mistake in most any area can easily ensure failure or at least limit profits. Here are a few marketing, operational, tactical, traffic metric and other considerations that can unlock or shut off a successful ROI:

Defining business goals
Understanding the target market
Keyword selection
Website condition (age, domain name selection, number of pages, location text, etc.)
Page title adjustments
Content updates (type of and timing)
Consistency of measurement and reaction to updates
Number and quality of inbound links
Cost of search engine optimization program
Cost of employees (including training and benefits)
Sales (including product/service margins)
Ability or desire to track conversions
Immediate and long-term value of a customer
Customer service
Not giving sufficient time to adequately implement an SEO program (we recommend a minimum of one year before the iterative efforts of SEO can be adequately measured)

Unfortunately, that's an abbreviated list and doesn't adequately reflect all that needs to be weighed.

Read excerpts from this SEO study online: