The Uncertainty of SEO Results
One of the hardest things for most SEO clients to deal with is the uncertainty of future results from search engine optimization.
How much faith should you have in vague promises that SEO will pay off for you? And since it takes a while for search engines to fully reward SEO efforts, often months, what you're paying for this month is always based completely on faith.
Why is it so hard to give guarantees on search engine results?
Fundamentally, it is difficult because it's a moving target with many complex factors and there are huge numbers of players in the competition. And it's also difficult because our available means of estimating future traffic are clumsy at best.
Fortunately we can make ballpark estimates of results, and that is where effective SEO always starts. Currently available tools are good enough to paint a "go" or "no go" picture.
Often people are surprised to learn that ROI Web Solutions turns down at least half of the people who come to us for SEO services. It takes a relatively high dollar value per customer to justify paying someone to optimize your site. If a sale nets you $35 then it's unlikely you will see a positive ROI on SEO before two to five years. We will discourage you from paying anyone to do SEO if that's your outlook.
Another reason we may reject your request for SEO services is if no one searches on your keywords. What's the point in ranking #1 on every search engine for a keyword nobody will ever search for? (Sadly, most SEO companies will be glad to take your money, though. See "SEO Tough Love")
One excellent reason to veto SEO is if every keyword that someone would use to find you has two billion sites competing for it. There is no question that pay-per-click is the Search Engine Marketing method of choice for these cases (again assuming that the value of a customer is relatively high).
But let's say you have workable keywords and a pretty high value per customer and you'd just like to know what you will get for your investment in organic search engine optimization.
We have two answers to that question. The first is in terms of how things are now. The second addresses how things are going to change.
Calculating SEO Results: The Way Things Are Now
Calculating SEO results consists mainly of analyzing the top ten competitors and getting traffic estimates from WordTracker or Overture. The sum of this data paints a general picture, but the way things are now, that perspective is fundamentally flawed.
- WordTracker's estimates of traffic volume are not actually taken from Google, Yahoo or MSN searches. They are merely approximations factored from data obtained from other relatively obscure search engines. That data can be skewed by different demographics and even by spamming. Consequently the numbers from WordTracker are frequently quite unreliable. Overture's data is typically even worse.
- Traffic estimates are calculated world-wide. If your business is limited to a geographical area then the effective traffic you can actually benefit from may be a small percentage of the full estimated number of searches WordTracker reports.
- The estimates of traffic we get from WordTracker represents the searches themselves. But what happens after search results are obtained? The person scans the list of results and chooses based on perceived relevance. Even if you are #1 you will not get a clickthrough from 100% of the searches. If you rank lower, your share of clickthroughs goes down exponentially.
Nevertheless, we get a gross ballpark sense from doing keyword research, and the result is general clarity on whether or not the ROI will be positive. How positive and how soon is tough to fine-tune.
But it gets easier. Once an initial set of SEO enhancements is in place it's best to back off for a spell, and do no more than minor tweaks and adding pages at a slow but steady rate for a while. Give the search engines time to react to the initial onslaught of enhancements.
MSN will typically give immediate stellar ranking and then plummet for up to a month. Then it comes back to the initial high levels and remains flat for a long time. We've seen this over and over.
Yahoo gradually adds rank over two or three months even if the site stays static during that time.
Google just wants quality content and normal site growth and rewards that in a slow but steady way.
We will take periodic measurements of your rankings and your actual traffic over this period. After some time elapses we'll take a look at what we have measured for the perspective it can provide. It will tell a story about what works and what doesn't, given your unique body of text content and your target keywords.
At that point trends will have emerged in your actual results that allow a closer gut feel on the ballpark estimate of what a next phase of SEO might yield.
How Things Are Going To Change
But we said things are going to change. Yes, they are, and we're going to be the ones to change them. We are working on creating a mathematical model that will compare actual search engine traffic (from warehoused data we are collecting now) to WordTracker's estimates for Google, Yahoo and MSN. Our objective is to winnow out real perspective on the key factors that affect actual results such as demographics, geographic considerations, variety in relevance, individual search engine choice, and ranking position.
To that we will add a plethora of quantifiable factors from top ten analysis.
We will crunch all that data into a simple graph that shows the relative SEO "Effort Magnitude" and realistic traffic potential for each of your keywords, all in an intuitive format that allows you to compare and contrast your choices, costs and projected ROI from search engine optimization.
Such a graph should provide a far sharper picture of what you can expect than the industry's current crystal balls yield. In addition, we hope to be able to provide you with an ROI modeling tool that will project a month by month ROI analysis covering a time period up to five years. With a tool like that we can put you in the driver's seat of SEO.
