Is SEO Worth Your Time & Money

Most e-commerce stores these days use SEO to promote their brand. However, there are still a lot of argument to whether SEO can really be beneficial in the promotion and ranking of your site.

To fully understand the potential of SEO and if it is really right for your business, let me discuss with you whether SEO is just a waste of time or if it is really worth your time. This way, you can make a decision on what your next step would be.

Stop Focusing on SEO

This might be hard to do since it is natural for most of us to just aim and get that first page rank on Google. However, your new goal should be to forget about SEO for the time being since there are still a lot of things to do to promote your site. If you stop focusing on SEO for now, you will be able to concentrate on finding more leads, getting calls and closing sales. Keep in mind that SEO is just one part of the puzzle. As an effective digital marketer, you need to find how you can meet your goals and not just focusing your attention on getting SEO.

Are Your Marketing and Advertising Strategies Right?

As a business owner, your aim is to find potential clients and spread your brand at a possible lower cost. This procedure is mostly known as customer acquisition cost or CAC. In most cases, business owners make mistakes when they calculate their CAC as they do not include the cost of addition per channel.

To explain this further, think if you are going to spend $1000 for an advertisement. You might think your CAC is just $1000, but the truth is, it is more than that. Together with the $1000 advertisement is the cost behind it. Once the ad is run, you should get potential calls, those calls can be your potential clients so it is important to track those calls.

So let us say, that ad got you five calls, one of which is a customer. However, you are not the one to receive those calls personally as you have hired someone to take them for you. Together with the calls should be follow-up calls and follow up pitches that may require additional 10 hours of staff time. If your staff is paid $15 an hour, that would mean additional $150 to your customer acquisition cost. In most cases, one client may take two hours to speak with, research and get the job done. Also, your staff is not the only cost you should think about as there are other expenses like tracking for calls etc that you should also consider.

Digital marketing, on the other hand, is different. Instead of having someone to answer your phone and continuously update them if they want to buy something, your website can do it for you. Instead of doing the same things with your client and saying the same pitch over and over again, your website can provide the information they need, thus giving your potential clients what they need. No need to call clients repeatedly which can turn them off eventually. Instead, you can get in touch with them through email marketing. Using a different target and a different method will allow you to reach more potential clients and at a much lower cost.

Determine how much you are spending now just to reach a customer and you might be convinced on how effective SEO can be.

What is Your Client Value

The total profit you gain from a customer is what you call Customer Lifetime Value or CLV. Customer Lifetime Value is the customer’s profitability over time as it is the customer’s aggregate profit to a company over the total time the customer transacts business with it.

How you influence your customer value will still depend on the type of services you offer. For instance, if the services you offer include plumbing or repairing of HVAC, expect to have the same customers to come to you a few times per year. Other services will require for your customers to just buy from you over their lifetime. To determine your CLV make sure to evaluate the services you offer and how many times your customers will need you. This information is important so that your digital marketing firm can create the right campaign for making the right ROI.

Determine your Sales Funnel

Your conversion rates will also help you in deciding whether SEO is worth the investment. Conversion rates will allow a digital marketing firm if your company is a good fit. To get your potential ROI, here is the simple formula that you can use:

Traffic X Click through Rate X Conversion Rate X Average Profit Per Sale

To explain this further, say you want to gain 10 new customers per month while converting 10 percent of your visitors into potential customers. With the given formula, we can determine how many searches must happen and the CTR needed to generate that traffic.

Traffic X Click Through Rate – 1000 X 10% = 100
Site Visits X Conversion Rate – 100 X 10% = 10
Conversions X Average Profit = 10 X 100 = $1000

With the information given above, if you are not able to generate 100 site visits that can convert 10 percent of potential customers for $1000 per month, your campaign may not be as profitable as you may want. Unless you know what the customer LTV is that can help in increasing the CAC allowance.

Although the numbers and the calculations may seem like it is simple, improperly calculating the customer acquisition costs to customer lifetime value may also lead to failure which is why it is important to know how this can be properly done.

Focusing on the Availability of Keywords

So many SEO companies sell cheap packages while still promising that they will be able to rank well for just a couple of keywords. But, as explained earlier, your keywords will not be enough to get you far and generate enough searches and traffic. Once you decide that you also want to try SEO, make sure that your chosen firm can show you potential keyword ideas and search traffic. Allowing them to provide you with ideas will make you see if the keywords have actual value.

After you get the available traffic and you know the conversion rates, review them. Revisit the average profit per sale so that you can assess what you need to do further. If your profit margin is just a couple of dollars per sale, you may need high volume keywords. On the other hand, if your profit margin amounts to thousand of dollars per sale, 1-10 searches can still be profitable.

How To Choose A Company

One of the biggest hurdles for e-commerce businesses is to find a company that can truly deliver. The competence of the company can make or break your needs. If you hire the wrong SEO firm, you might really waste money and time, and worse, your site might get penalized for reasons you don’t even understand. There are no rules and regulation when it comes to the SEO industry so expect to find a lot of low-quality companies lurking to get your attention.

To understand more about our SEO services view what we do here or continue reading some of our other articles in our blog and see what else you can learn.

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