How to Estimate SEO ROI From Content Marketing
How do you measure the value of content marketing?
Well, that’s completely dependent upon your business model. However, if you sell products or services that have high search volume, links are vital to your success.
By creating quality content and then telling people about it, websites will link to your content, thus improving organic rankings. The problem is measuring the worth of those links.
In our quest to helping businesses understand the value of content marketing, particularly from organic search, we took a few months to develop two things:
Each will help you measure the effectiveness of your content marketing with organic search.
1. The ROI Calculator
Content marketing is an investment — particularly for driving organic traffic. It takes time. But after you continuously build the best content in your industry, search revenue from content marketing is the gift that keeps on giving; aggregating thousands, if not millions, of additional dollars each month.
This is what the Content Marketing ROI Calculator helps you discover:
You’ll get a 15-year timeline of data, filled with expense and revenue estimates, total profit to date, an ROI ratio and graphs for each year.
In order to get this data, you’ll need to input nine numbers, which are marked in red on the first tab:
You’ll input numbers based on the following quesitons:
- How many linking root domains (LRDs) are needed for the domain?
- How many LRDs do you average per piece of content?
- How many pieces of content do you create per month?
- How many LRDs do you get per month for all other reasons?
- What is your estimated link attrition rate?
- What are your content marketing expenses per month?
- What are your SEO expenses per month?
- If you’re creating a new web business, how much will the first, fully-completed version of your website cost? (Optional)
- What is your target traffic value, as based on SEMRush’s “Traffic Cost” metric?
This tool was developed for you to experiment with different scenarios and give you a rough idea of what it takes to compete in search.
It’s not 100% accurate because there are several areas you can attribute different costs, and also, profit from search is obviously not a linear path. But to get you thinking and to do our best to get close to the answer, we kept it as simple and useful as possible.
It’s meant to start getting you thinking about bottom line, which may inform a more complex analysis for your own business with the variables discussed in detail in the guide. If we’ve accomplished that, we’ve done our job.
2. The Guide
Without the knowledge how to use this calculator, it won’t be nearly as valuable as it could be.
This is what the guide, How to Estimate Content Marketing ROI From Organic Search, helps you understand. You’ll discover how to:
- Determine the timeline required to reach your desired ROI
- Estimate costs to develop a content marketing budget
- Estimate revenue potential from organic traffic against competitors
Generating ROI from search traffic is an intensive process. No longer can spammy, link-building methods be utilized. Content marketing is the only effective, long-term solution to building ROI from search traffic.
Originally published at www.siegemedia.com on December 11, 2014.
