“In the beginning of the internet, Sergey Brin & Larry page created a search engine called Google which ranked websites according to relevance AND authority.  This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.”

Mostly, because it never seemed like Google chose YOUR site to be number one, all of these bothered WRONG sites were number one.

So, some ladies and gentlemen determined to stop adding gifs to their sites, joining web-rings, midi-files and visitor counters and tried to optimize their site for this new “Search Engine” . Their goal was to get their page to the top.

Some succeeded.

Flush with success they touted their success on their Mypace page, crowed in AOL chatrooms and on various forums and BBs. VERY shortly therafter, other site owners who kept asking for them to do the same for them actually started to offer MONEY for this OPTIMIZATION for SEARCH ENGINES.

But how much would it cost? How much would ranking number one actually earn the business? If they invested in SEO...would that money ever return?

THE LEGEND OF SEO ROI

There’s a reason why calculating the return on investment for optimizing your website for search is FAR more complicated than paid advertising. There’s a simple formula you can apply to your online advertising, and come up with a nice, comforting ROI percentage.

Take the revenue generated by your advertisement subtract the cost, divide that number by the original cost and multiply that by 100 to get a percentage.

Categories: SEOSEO ROI

Jeremy Rivera

Jeremy Rivera started in SEO in 2007, working at Advanced Access a hosting company for Realtors. He came up from the support department, where people kept asking "How do I rank in Google" and found in the process of answering that question an entire career. He became SEO product manager of Homes.com, went "in-house" at Raven Tools in Nashville in 2013. He then worked at several agencies like Caddis, 2 The Top Design as an SEO manager and then launched a 5 year freelance SEO career. During that time he consulted for large enterprise sites like Smile Direct Club, Dr. Axe, HCA, Logan's Roadhouse and Captain D's while also helping literally hundreds of small business owners get found in search results. He has authored blog posts at Authority Labs, Raven Tools, Wix, Search Engine Land. He has been a speaker at many SEO conferences like Craft Content and been interviewed in numerous SEO focused podcasts.