SEO ROI is the return on investment of search engine optimization: the revenue attributed to organic search, minus the cost of SEO, divided by that cost, usually shown as a percentage.
How is SEO ROI calculated?
The formula is (revenue from SEO − cost of SEO) / cost of SEO. Costs include agency fees or the share of internal salaries, tools, content production and development work. On the revenue side, you count the sales or lead value of organic visits, according to reports often excluding brand searches because those visits would have happened without SEO work. Brand and non-brand queries can be separated with Google Search Console, and conversions come from web analytics.
Attribution is the weak point. SEO measures often take months to show an effect, and visitors tend to use several channels before they buy. Depending on the attribution model, organic search can receive less credit than it contributed. The result is an estimate that changes with the period you look at, so many teams review it over more than one year.
Example
A shop spends €60,000 on SEO in one year, and non-brand organic traffic produces €150,000 in revenue. ROI = (150,000 − 60,000) / 60,000 = 150%. The figures are invented for the calculation.
Sources
- How can you prove the ROI of your SEO efforts? – Siteimprove (secondary)siteimprove.com
- SEO ROI – Semrush Blog (secondary)semrush.com
- SEO ROI – New Media (secondary)newmedia.com
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