As a business owner, your SEO content marketing ROI can take some time, but it’s necessary in an oversaturated digital market. Depending on various factors like content quality, output, and competitive landscape, seeing the ROI of SEO can take four months to one year on average.
However, it can become your brand’s highest ROI driver over time with consistent content creation and performance monitoring.
Learn why investing in content marketing is crucial for your bottom line and why it’s worth keeping your SEO ship sailing.
Content Marketing ROI: Why Creating Unique SEO Content Matters for Your Bottom Line
SEO content marketing is more than just blogs. It also includes website copy, like your home page, product/service category pages, and Google Business Profile. Business owners often understand the importance of SEO content. However, they commonly make mistakes when creating it, like repeating the same content without added value or proper optimization.
Here’s why creating unique content is essential to maximize your SEO ROI and how to optimize it for better results.
Unique SEO Content Optimizes Your Online Visibility
As mentioned above, companies create SEO content because they know they must do it to remain competitive. But it’s not uncommon to find them repeating the same information already out there—leading to lower SERP rankings and SEO ROI because they’re not providing additional value.
To increase your content marketing ROI, you must create unique content to stand out in the SERPs. Even if you’re covering the same topic, use your expertise to add a different perspective or create new media your competitors aren’t doing, like industry expert quotes from your podcast or creating custom infographics that visualize your information.
High-Quality SEO Content Builds Your Brand’s Credibility
You’ve likely heard of the term “high-quality content.” But, what does that mean exactly, and how does it apply to SEO? High-quality content must follow Google’s E-E-A-T guidelines to achieve optimal SEO results.
E-E-A-T stands for Expertise, Experience, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. It’s Google’s content framework designed to provide more relevant results when users search for information online.
Low-quality content like no external links, lengthy paragraphs, and disorganized heading structures negatively impacts your SEO. Remember, you’re still writing for humans, not just search engines. If your content is hard to read, over-optimizes keywords unnaturally, or repeats the same information as your competitors, it’ll hinder your SEO performance.
Creating E-E-A-T content helps establish your company as an authority in your niche—which, in return, builds brand credibility and trust. It shows your brand invests in quality SEO content and prioritizes being a valuable resource for users to reference.
When 81% of consumers nowadays need to trust a brand before they buy from them, it’s critical to earn that to maximize your content marketing ROI.
High-Performing SEO Content Generates Website Leads & Conversions
A recent Forbes study found that 74% of companies boosted their lead generation from content marketing alone. They also reported businesses can increase their conversion rate six times higher than their competitors with content marketing.
In addition to creating quality E-E-A-T content, it should also be actionable. Encouraging users to take action on your content can generate more website leads and conversions, not just organic traffic—which can promote the highest ROI!
How Do You Measure SEO Content Marketing Success?
Measuring SEO content success depends on your company’s goals and investments. You may have different KPIs, like expanding your market reach as a startup or driving more sales as an e-commerce brand.
Additionally, you’re probably investing in SEO platforms, analytics software, graphic design services, and content management systems (CMS) that impact your ROI calculations.
Regardless of your business objectives and SEO tools, below are the top metrics used to measure the ROI of content marketing and how to optimize your content for them.
Organic Website Traffic
Generating organic website traffic is one of the main purposes of SEO content marketing. It measures your content’s success by demonstrating how many people came to your site because of it. It’s a primary source to get more users to your site through various pages.
Ways to optimize your SEO content for organic traffic include:
- Use the right keyword search intent to provide valuable, relevant content (Ex: transactional intent for product pages and informational for blogs)
- Optimize your content’s metadata for Google to crawl/index easier and promote audience discovery when they search with relevant search queries (Ex: target keywords in meta descriptions, headings, page URL, etc.)
- Design high-quality infographics for comprehensive subject matter to strengthen your content’s readability and brand recognition
Leads Generated
The number of leads generated from your content measures how influential it was in encouraging users to take action. Whether it’s downloading your free guides or submitting a contact form on your service page, increasing your content’s engagement attracts more potential customers.
Ways to optimize your SEO content for lead generation include:
- Implement different linkbuilding strategies beyond cold emailing to boost your site’s Domain Authority and brand credibility (Ex: social media shoutouts, guest bloggers, email newsletter mentions after industry conventions)
- Cross-promote your content on social media and Google Business Profile to capture leads in multiple locations
- Send non-spammy email newsletters of your content to loyal and past customers who find your brand valuable
Conversion Rate
Generating organic traffic and leads with your content won’t matter with a declining conversion rate—especially when striving for a profitable SEO ROI. It measures how effectively your content attracts visitors and converts them into customers.
Ways to optimize your SEO content for conversions include:
- Add valuable CTA buttons, like free consultations or software demos, throughout your content sparingly to prevent over-spamming
- Use relevant minimal pop-ups to help guide users along their buyer’s journey without being too aggressive
- Link to your email newsletter sign-ups to capture strong lead contacts and nurture them into conversions
Bounce Rate
Bounce rate measures your SEO content’s ROI by how long it takes them to leave. If users aren’t reading or viewing your content because they’re leaving your site quickly, you can optimize it to encourage them to stay.
Optimizing your SEO content to reduce bounce rates is by making it more engaging and easy to navigate. You can embed how-to assembly product videos or write long-form content, so users spend more time on your page.
But one of the top reasons brands see their website’s bounce rate so high is poor user experience (UX). If your website has a slow page loading speed or is hard to view on mobile devices like small text, it will negatively impact your content performance from users bouncing because it’s difficult to navigate.
You can strengthen your content’s UX by compressing large file images that are slowing your page load speed and optimizing it for mobile with responsive website design layouts to adjust how it looks on any device.
Sales/Revenue
Your SEO ROI is technically calculated by the profit or your sales/revenue after your content marketing expenses:
(Return – Content Investment) / Content Investment x 100 = ROI %
This formula measures content marketing success because it calculates if your ROI is profitable. If content ROI isn’t profitable, double-check if you’re maximizing your SEO software platforms. You may have multiple tools that can be consolidated or aren’t utilizing offered features to the fullest, like content and keyword gap analysis from your competitors.
There are multiple ways to optimize your SEO content for revenue generation:
- Aligning SEO and SEM Marketing: Boost sales by generating paid search traffic and ranking for transactional keywords for audiences who are ready to buy
- Customer Testimonials Web Page: Embed your Google Business Profile reviews or Instagram feed’s social proof to build your brand’s credibility with stronger reputation management
- Free Trial CTAs: Offer something valuable that doesn’t require much of your audience in return to motivate them to submit their contact information
Maximize Your Content Marketing ROI with an SEO Digital Marketing Agency
Creating valuable SEO content that supports your bottom line effectively is a consistent process and takes time. As a business owner, you have plenty on your plate already, with managing your company and being an expert in your niche. If your brand invests in SEO content marketing, you can better maximize your budget with expert marketers.
At Reach Marketing Pro, our team has extensive experience in SEO content marketing for various verticals. From developing keyword-research-driven strategies to conducting competitor SERP analysis for content opportunities and creating custom visuals to strengthen its performance, we can do it all.
We’ll also provide in-depth monthly reporting to measure your SEO content strategy’s success and ensure they generate profitable ROI for your revenue goals.
Don’t create content for the sake of doing it. Get optimal results with your investment instead.
Learn more about our SEO content marketing services or contact us today!
