Return on investment for SEO
Date: February 11, 2013Category: Author: David Hall
At Infinity Dental Web, I recently did an analysis of return on investment, when dentists put money into what we call “organic” search engine optimization.
First, to provide background information, there are two broad categories of search engine results. There are what we call “sponsored results.” To get into these results, you have to pay Google. That payment is calculated based on the number of clicks your listing has received. This is called “pay-per-click” advertising in the search engine results.
The other broad category is called “organic results.” This is what we at Infinity Dental Web spend most of our time trying to achieve for our clients – results that come up naturally because Google perceives your website as a valuable source of information.
I ran a cost/benefit analysis for a typical VIP website project with our company. First year costs came to $13,120. Then I estimated a production value of $85,800 from the expected 66 new patients acquired from that website the first year. The result is an ROI of 6.54:1. That’s not very good. We’d like to see a 10:1 ROI on the typical marketing dollar.
However, the second year is when organic search engine optimization really pays off. The development costs of the website are behind us, and we’re paying $625 per month for the ongoing SEO and maintenance. That comes to $7500 for the year. The returns are also greater, because we are continuing to build the reputation of the website in the eyes of the search engines, so we’re expecting, conservatively, an average of 15 new patients per month, or 180 for the year. At an estimated production value per patient of $1300, that comes to $234,000 for the year. So our ROI for the second year works out to 31.2:1, which is actually pretty impressive.
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