How to Communicate & Interpret Value of SEO Services

How to Show the Value of SEO Services

One of the biggest challenges for both digital marketing agencies and their clients is developing a process to properly analyze and show the value of the agency’s search engine optimization (SEO) work. Clients want to see proof that the SEO services they’re paying for are working, while agencies may struggle to effectively show these results to the clients.

A lot of SEO work happens that is very visible to the digital marketing specialists performing the work, but far less visible to the client than other types of digital marketing, such as digital ads. Continue reading if you’d like to learn how to better show the results of your SEO efforts to your clients.

Making SEO Work More Tangible to the Client

One of the most important ways to analyze the value of SEO services is by looking at a company’s search rankings. There are some digital marketing professionals who strongly believe that holistic metrics are more important than search rankings, but that doesn’t mean rankings should be disregarded.

After all, the end goal of SEO work is to drive more search traffic to a business’s website, and seeing improved search rankings for specific terms is proof that these efforts are yielding results. As such, while there’s more to a digital marketing campaign than showing up higher in Google Searches, improved search rankings are proof of successful SEO which should be readily presented to a client.

Of course, there’s a much bigger picture than just rankings. It’s also vital to make sure that the terms a business is ranking for are actually relevant to the services they provide. To do this, one must analyze how growth in rankings is improving organic search traffic to a website. This can be most easily accomplished using Google Analytics.

Within a Google Analytics account, filtering by organic keywords or organic traffic can show a growth in traffic as a result of SEO services. These results can then be cross referenced with rankings growth to ensure that traffic is improving as a direct result of search rankings improving. This can show a client that your agency is focusing on keywords that have enough volume to generate more clicks on a search result for your site.

This can be taken a step further by examining how search traffic is generating ROI for a client’s business. Ideally, you’ll be able to show that new traffic coming to a site is directly resulting from SEO work. However, this does take time to show, so if your agency has just started a new SEO campaign for a client, don’t expect these types of results in a few days or even weeks. But once you’ve been engaged in SEO work for six months to a year, you should be able to show growth and conversions from that work. This is arguably the best way to show SEO value to a client.

One more way to show the value of SEO work is to directly compare the cost of traffic growth through SEO to the cost of traffic growth through Google Ads. As an example, let’s say SEO efforts are driving one hundred new visitors per month to a website and the average cost per click of Google Ads for the same website is $8. This means that SEO is driving $800 worth of traffic to a website per month. Comparing the cost of your SEO services to how much it would cost to replicate the same results with Google Ads can be a great way to show your SEO value to your clients.

NorthWing Can Help You Understand SEO Value

Whether you’re a business owner who’s uncertain about the value of search engine optimization or a digital marketing professional struggling to show how your SEO efforts are helping a client, NorthWing Digital would be happy to offer you further advice. Get in touch with us today to learn more about the value of SEO and how to make that value visible.