In BIG corporations, of the Exxon/Mobile, GE, Proctor & Gamble stature, SEO is managed very differently than small business. Typically, small businesses use a qualified reseller for SEO management. The big guys have internal MBA managed teams; whole staffs dedicated to SEO by product, product line, and brand. It’s a different world.
Consequently, SEO is measured differently too. While small business resellers use the tools provided by their SEO vendor, big business makes SEM conform to the measures established by upper management. In many cases, this is a love affair with ROI.
In big companies SEO will be a piece of a much larger marketing group. The group will be organized around an annual budget that comes down from above. The heads of the marketing departments have to fight to defend their budgets, their spending and their requests for increases. Upper management wants results and the easiest way to show results is with ROI. Returns are the standard that runs throughout the entire company. Think of ROI as the metric system that allows you to convert liquid measurements into mass or volume. ROI is the essential business benchmark.
The conflict
Decision makers, the folks in upper management that approve budgets, don’t know SEO from shinola. That’s not their job, but they do understand results. They look at the ROI for PPC and get it: “We spent X and returned Y”. But that happy equation doesn’t work with organics. Even when the percentage of organic clicks is much higher than paid, the ROI of PPC is far easier to grasp.
Can a reseller offer big-business style ROI data to their customers?
Probably, but it’s not easy. First, there are numerous calculations to be made by you and your customer to determine the PPC value. Together, you establish the cost-per-click (CPC), the cost-per-conversion (CPA) and then project an overall ROI. Once you have established these protocols you can begin the process to establish the equations for organic clicks. From there you can project an ROI for SEO.
It’s beyond the scope of this blog to explain how this is done but our friends at Search Engine Watch have published an excellent article “7 Steps to Measure SEO Like Paid Search” that describes it in detail. ( https://searchenginewatch.com/article/2156615/7-Steps-to-Measure-SEO-Like-Paid-Search )
Is there an easier way?
Most smaller companies, the one’s that our resellers service, probably don’t require such specific metrics. In almost all cases, data that compares the customer’s SEO results with those of his/her competitors is both more enlightening and more useful. It’s certainly faster. While a nice ROI equation might convince senior management to budget $10,000 more a month for internal SEO, your dry cleaner would likely prefer a clean, comprehensible chart showing where they stand.
Website Grader
Providing you and your client with clear, digestible, competitive results is what our Website Grader is all about. It’s easy to use, produces information quickly and the graphics makes it easy to explain and understand. Use of the Website Grader is free! Even better, we now offer it as a white-label component to all our resellers. You can provide clear competitive data to your customers under your own banner.
If you haven’t yet used our Website Grader give it a spin. We think you and you customers will appreciate the results