Online marketing is one of the most important strategies implemented by competitive business organizations. In northern Arizona, it’s an effective method of netting a bigger share of the market and increasing sales for revenue growth.

Under the big umbrella of online marketing are various tactics that target very specific business goals. Among these tactics is search engine optimization or SEO. The main objective of SEO is to ensure that the official online presence of a business organization is found easily on Google and other search engine search results pages. SEO is composed of an assortment of efforts; there’s link building, posting videos, tying up with social media, content creation, and many others.

A successful SEO campaign can meet many online marketing goals, which is why it’s of utmost importance to execute it in the most strategic manner. It’s not cheap either, so evaluating its performance is a must. Part of evaluating its performance is calculating the return on investment or ROI. According to a North Arizona SEO company, the ROI is one of the gauges of how effective SEO efforts are in generating traffic and creating revenue for the business.

The easiest way to calculate ROI for SEO is through this formula: SEO ROI = (Total Revenue from SEO – Total Cost of SEO Campaign) / Total Cost of SEO Campaign. The numbers you get from this formula will clearly indicate whether you ended up with more money than you released for the campaign, you just broke even, or the investment failed and resulted in a costly loss for your company.

It’s important to note, though, that the revenue generated from SEO is not the only metric of success. Traffic or page views, conversions (subscriptions to mailing lists), a strong brand reputation because of SEO efforts are forms of ROI in their own right.

In evaluating the performance of SEO in boosting these other metrics, you can use special tools. One is the Visual Website Optimizer; this can help with A/B testing to compare old efforts with new ones and see which are more effective in yielding target results. Another would be Google Analytics. There are also ROI calculators for SEO available online.

SEO experts say that seeing ROI from SEO efforts requires patience. You can’t have a short-term investment mentality with SEO that if things don’t appear to be picking up after a few months, you should count your losses and move on. True success with SEO is secured by persistence; even if you don’t get a good ROI right away, you should continue to invest in the strategy until your target goal is achieved.