How would you like a guaranteed way to pitch a link-bait idea to your boss and/or clients? As SEOs all know, we know there are a lot of people out there that still don’t understand what SEO is. At first, I thought it was a problem with small cities like mine. I live in a fairly rural part of Northern California, in a city that has only 100,000 people living here. I thought that in bigger cities people would have a better understanding of SEO and what it does. Apparently I was wrong!

I’ve had the privilege of talking with some very well known SEOs from some of the most prominent SEO agencies in the world. I’ve asked some SEOs who live in some of the largest cites in the world about their experience with this! It turns out this is a pretty universal situation. The challenge is that if people (business owners and senior management in particular) still don’t understand the value of SEO, it’s going to be difficult to get approval for link-bait projects. Honestly, I don’t blame the public for not understanding SEO, it’s our job to educate them. The value of our services need to have a tangible monetary value. Instead of talking about how a link bait idea will help your “rankings”, try to focus on how much money you’ll be able to make your boss! Focus on the ROI of your SEO! This SEO ROI Tool will hopefully, help you educate the people in your part of the world about the value of seo.

---

The Organic SEO ROI Tool

---

The goal of the ROI SERP tool is to accurately estimate how much money a “rank” is actually worth. I took the basic principal of ROI (return on investment) and applied it to SEO.

ROI = (V_f-V_i)/V_i

| ROI | return on investment

|V_f | final investment value

|V_i | investment

If you do a search for ROI of SEO, you will see that there are a lot of PPC tools and a lot of people talking about ROI, but there aren’t very many tools out there (much less free ones) that measure the ROI of organic search results. This tool meets the need for SEOs looking for a way to project the ROI of organic SEO. First, let’s talk basics. The formula of ROI is: (Gains-Investment Costs)/Investment Costs as you can see on the screen shot below. To calculate your projected gains I had to include calculations for your average ticket sales, your conversion rate and the average CTR. The tool is dynamic enough for you to easily change any of those metrics.

(The Average ticket and conversion rate numbers have been changed: You never know exactly who is going to be reading this data, so I couldn’t risk other computer repair companies scooping our private data… Obviously.)

---

Free Tool Time!

---

Here is the link to the ROI SERP tool. Just save a copy to your Google docs account and you will be able to edit and change the metrics. Here are the numbers you will need to know to make this tool work.

1.  You will need the monthly search volume for your targeted keyword:
2.  You can either use the CTRs I used from http://www.optify.net or you can use your own.
3.  You will need to know the conversion rate of your site (for more on conversion rate visit Optimizely.com)

That’s all. The ROI tool will do the rest of the work for you.

ROI is something that every good business owner understands. As long as the company has money to spare, it should be pretty easy for you to get the necessary approval for SEO projects. At Search Love NYC Rand talked about how much it costs to produce and run a national TV commercial. The average TV ad costs about $150,000 to produce and $350,000 to run (on a national level.) That means it costs an average company half a million dollars to make one commercial. A commercial only lasts a few seconds and then it’s over! One of my favorite things about SEO is that a #1 spot on Google can last at least a few months, and if you sustain your marketing efforts it can last a long time! Spending a few thousands dollars on a link-bait idea is well worth the investment if it is going to produce $275,000 in sales!

Feel free to modify this tool, or use it to inspire your own ideas. I’d love to hear about how you use the tool. Keep me posted through twitter @bryantjaquez

 
.