Forums Forums White Hat SEO Do You Show Return on Investment In Your Monthly Reporting? Reply To: Do You Show Return on Investment In Your Monthly Reporting?

  • theeastcoastwest

    Guest
    August 15, 2020 at 11:45 pm

    We don’t, but we work mostly with small businesses that don’t really have enough data to offer a robust figure. Certainly, not for the first 12 months anyway.

    There’s some easy win reporting such as increases in form submissions, calls from GMB listings, etc. But those are hard to equate to dollars earned in many cases. For example, I have a client that’s a doctor who offers a myriad of services to patients. Not just primary care, but a specialist.

    The value per new patient isn’t well-defined yet considering the practice is fairly new. You take a number for increases in calls and multiply that by the average patient value and you can come up with a figure, but it’s mostly bullshit in this case because no one really knows what the average patient value is, in terms of dollars spent over x years.

    On the other hand, if you have a client that’s doing a single product ecom store and you know that all new traffic converts at exactly 2% then it’s pretty damn easy to offer up an ROI estimate given keyword improvements.

    Since we deal with clients from any number of professions is really hard to bake ROI into monthly reporting. In most cases, we resigned to just percentage increases and basic estimates on traffic value. In other words, an estimated traffic value of organic keyword positions before SEO and a monthly update on estimated traffic, on a holistic level.

    Honestly, as broad of an estimate as that is I can’t say for sure that it’s any less accurate than a lot of the more granular estimations we’ve done when there’s not enough data to really know what an average customer value or new site visitor value actually is.

    TLDR; we personally find it to be more of a hassle than it’s worth, and difficult to offer any accuracy, for monthly ROI reporting. Basic estimations are where we draw the line unless we get a specific request in which case we’ll hammer things down.