Many my clients have completed an SEO Audit and implemented several SEO recommendations on their website that have yielded higher traffic results for them. The audit costs around $750 – $1000 depending on the site depth. Then there’s the costs for implementation of recommendations, which are billed hourly.
Here’s an example:
One of my clients completed the SEO audit in April 2021 and implemented the recommendations over a period of four weeks. To determine success, we did a side-by-side comparison from the past year to the post audit/implementation.
What did we find?
As a result of the audit and recommendations implementation, there was a decrease in users and unique users by 75%, and a decrease in sessions (# of time visiting the site) by 69%. What was happening is the number of sessions per users increased by 26%, page views decreased by 54%, and pages per session increased by 46%.
The average session duration also increased by 200% and the bounce rate decreased by 18%. All of those number mean visitors visited more pages in less sessions and spent more time on the site, which Google (and Bing) consider valuable metrics.
We were also able to increase their returning visitor percentage by 3.4% during that same period. And, increase their organic search acquisition from 1,535 to 10,322.
These results also told the marketing team that users were finding the content they were looking for more easily and were discovering more content within the site than they had in the past.
In addition to user changes, we were able to decrease the average page load time by 5.17%, reduce the average redirection time by 0.62%, increase the average domain lookup time by 77.08%, and increase the average server connection time by 64.06%. Page speed and load time are also very important qualitative metrics for search engines.
What does that mean overall?
The goals of SEO improvements are to elevate the number of qualified visitors and make it easier for visitors to find what they are looking for. If it’s done right, the numbers will bear that out.
In this case study, website visitors were
- more qualified,
- found they content they were looking for more easily, and
- visited additional content within the site than they had in the past.
Also, by decreasing the bounce rate (entering and leaving the site from the same page without visiting another page), we were able to positively impact their website SEO score.
Did it increase revenue or RFPs?
I cannot demonstrate that other than to say organic search results increased by 400% from the pre-SEO six-month period to the post-SEO six-month period. Direct traffic to the site increased 176% for those periods. Referral traffic increased 402% during those periods. And overall landing pages saw a 260% increase.
BBGG Integrated Marketing added this, “One of the most important benefits of SEO is the ROI. By appearing on the first page of search results, you are more likely to get higher CTRs (click-through rates) and conversions than someone who appears on the 3rd page of search results. Therefore, ranking higher in search results leads to increased revenue-it’s that simple.”
“SEO can also lower your overall advertising and marketing costs,” they added. “With a well-planned SEO strategy, your business can rank on the first page based on high-value keywords which will continue to drive increased traffic for long-term success and allow you to reinvest funds elsewhere.”