Today, SEO has reached a point where you will need to prove your value to your clients. As SEO experts, we invest a lot of time and effort when it comes to searching opportunities for our clients, developing and executing strategies, and also achieving the best results we have planned to achieve.
However, most of our clients will still feel dissatisfied, even after we manage to improve their rankings, increase traffic and conversion rates. This, at times, can feel so deflating as well as overwhelming. But, where is the disconnect?
Here is the value SEO adds in your website
- You don’t need to convince and SEO expert that their work is valuable. It’s important to note that we have been in the industry long enough to know how our skills and work benefit your website in the following ways:
- The time we spent when earning links for our clients gives them the authority they need to gain trust, as well as perform better in SERPs.
- Our attention on indexing and crawling ensures that search engine bots crawl all the important pages in your site, and
make sure that they are not wasting time on any irrelevant pages. This, in turn, will make all your valuable and important pages to be ranked. - Mostly, we spend our time ensuring appropriate language targeting, improving speed, searching for any user experience issues, and ensuring accessibility since we understand the high price that Google has placed on user experience.
- Since we know how GoogleBot and other crawlers function, we are aware of how to make sure that engines will understand your pages the way they are meant to be understood, and also do away with any barriers that prevent your pages from being understood.
- We do keyword research that your prospective customers use when they are searching for solutions whenever they have challenges, and then create content that will satisfy their needs. Google, on the other hand, rewards you with high rankings, which attract more clicks. With time, this ends up reducing your customer acquisition costs.
These are not the only SEO activities that create real and measurable impacts on our clients. We also engage in other activities that will create direct impact, even in a crowded landscape that is receiving a few clicks. Despite these results, we still don’t convince our clients that we are doing a great job.
Traffic, conversions, rankings—what is missing?
First, we need to ask ourselves these three questions:
1.What the worth of a keyword ranking without any clicks?
2. Does organic traffic have any value without conversions?
3. What’s the value of your conversions without singing/booking the lead?
Traffic, rankings, and conversions are essential SEO metrics that you should track if you need to show the success of your SEO efforts. However, you need to understand that the three are all means to an end. At the end of the day, the client care about their ROI (return on investment)—nothing else. What this means is—if the client cannot literally connect between your SEO achievements and their revenue, then the client will not need your services.
So, what should you do?
Here are 10 tips that will assist you in attaching value to your organic success
If you need to assist your clients to have a clearer picture of the value of your SEO efforts, then try some of these methods.
Seek to Know the Highest Value of Your Client’s Job
You need to understand the types of purchases/jobs being prioritized by your client as this assists you to prioritize them too. Some clients will want you to balance their cash flow job (lower value but higher volume) with their big-time jobs (higher value but lower volume. Therefore, you need to pay special attention to conversions and performance of these pages.
Come Up With Goals in Google Analytics
When you understand what creates a conversion on your client’s site, go ahead, and set up an objective or a goal in Google Analytics. If you don’t know how you can do this, refer to Google’s documentation.
Assign Goal Values
It’s always amazing to know that an organic channel created a conversion. However, understanding the estimated value of that particular conversion is much better. For instance, if you know that a client closes around 10% of the leads generated through contact forms, and the average value of their customers is $600, you can assign a value of $60 per each goal completion.
Know What Creates a Conversion
What’s the main objective that your client wants your visitors to do their site? This can be something like make a phone call, fill a form, or perform an on-site purchase. Therefore, it’s essential to make sure that you understand how your client uses his or her site to make money.
Gather All Your Data Together
It’s important to note that how you communicate about the data is much essential, just like the date. Whenever explaining your data, ensure that you use visualizations, as they will assist your client to have a clearer picture of the impact of your SEO activities.
You Should Have an Organic-Only View in Google Analytics
Just for clarity purposes. It can be better if you set up an extra Google Analytics view for the organic traffic generated by your client. Doing that allows you to check organic conversions as well as values whenever you are looking at your goal report.
Determine the Amount You Would Have Paid For the Traffic Generated In 
Google Ads
Some plugins like Keywords Everywhere very important when you are viewing the performance reports on Google Search Console as it gives you a CPC (cost per click) column next to the clicks column. This assists you to determine the amount you would have paid for the clicks you organically generated for your clients.
Know the Close Rate of Your Client
You need to understand the number of leads that you are generating that become customers. This will assist you to assign values to your goals.
Know the Average Customer Value of Your Client
This can be a bit challenging, especially if your client provides different services, which have different values. However, you can opt to combine the average customer value with the close rate so that you can determine the monetary value that you need to attach to each goal.
Consider Using Multi-Channel Funnels
The value of organic search goes beyond the last click. Even if it’s not the channel your client’s customer used, an organic search might have assisted in the conversion process.
Bottom Line
It’s important to note that we have a lot of responsibilities when it comes to proving our value to our clients—and this can be a time-consuming and daunting task. Therefore, you need to be ready for anything when dealing with your clients as this will open up your mind to many possibilities. Here are some other factors that make things complicated when dealing with clients:
- Clients who use multiple methods when acquiring new customers—where each method has its own metrics, reporting, and platform
- Clients with low Search engine optimization maturity
- If the client is somehow disorganized, and does not have a good understanding of factors like close rate and average customer value.