Posted by Tanya Vaughan, Global SEO Program Manager, HP.com

If you’re an in-house SEO you probably get this same question all the time. What kind of ROI can we expect from our SEO investment? While I can't usually provide a hard and fast number I can at least say with confidence that SEO overall will have a positive ROI. What is more difficult, however, is when I want to employ a certain best practice as part of the grander SEO strategy and I’m asked to justify the ROI for that specific tactic. Take, for example, redirects. It’s virtually impossible to tack an ROI on to making a blanket change of all redirects from 302s to 301s. Or how about developing an on-site site map, or one for submission to the engines or even – what should be the easiest to nail - optimization of a single page for a single keyword?

Let me start first with the bad news: there are no guarantees any degree of SEO effort will make you rank number one or even in the top ten for a given keyword or phrase.

The good news, however, is that SEO can and will help search engines better understand what your site is about and will enable your site then to be served in results for search queries that are relevant. And I’m not just talking about that one high-volume “gold” word but rather all the other limitless iterations of phrases that people might type into a search box to find content on that topic. Sure, gaining top position for that high-volume keyword is the holy grail but even if you don’t it doesn’t mean you can’t garner a significant share of traffic from organic search results by understanding how customers refer to your products and then writing to address that audience using their language. You might not see top ranking for the gold word but you might be surprised to see that hundreds of related phrases are driving smaller numbers of visitors to your site as a result of your optimization efforts. Oftentimes too, these iterations of phrases are more likely to convert because the searcher is more specific about what they want and if you’re offering it, and speaking to it directly, they’re more likely to click through and find what they’re looking for.

SEO is a long-term effort and on-going (that whole journey, not destination analogy). Neither I, nor any other SEO provider, can guarantee you top rankings for any keyword. If they do make that promise, be very cautious and make them put their money where their mouth is – i.e. tell them you don’t pay unless they get you there. See how quickly they backpedal. And if they don’t backpedal, be extremely cautious of what their SEO tactics might be. You could find your site banned from a search engine index if the SEO provider employs black-hat tactics that spam the search engine spiders. Also, even if your site does pull off a top rank for your target keyword today does not mean you will hold that position or even the first page tomorrow. Most reputable SEO providers will set SEO expectations accordingly.

I saw an example recently where a top manufacturer of a product was ranked #1 for a high-volume keyword in Google. Then Google changed their algorithm and they dropped to page four – literally over night. You can imagine what that must have done for their referrals for that query. That’s why it’s important to always be monitoring and paying attention to your natural search referrals. It’s one thing to gain a top position but it’s important to watch overall to ensure that a shift in the market or the engine algorithms or some other butterfly effect doesn’t create a significant problem for your site in search engines.

The expectations I like to set with my management is that I will make the best recommendations for optimizing the hp.com web site for search engine visibility. And regardless of whether we rank well for a targeted term following implementation, I will guarantee the site will be crawled more thoroughly and will provide the search engines with more focused and more targeted content from which to evaluate relevance.

There are many factors (some speculate that it is in excess of 200 for Google) that are considered when a search engine is determining rank for a particular query. Some are well-known in the industry and there are best practices around implementing those. Many, however, are kept secret by the search engines (Google likes to refer to it as their “secret sauce”) as they don’t want webmasters manipulating and spamming the search engines to gain top rankings for sites that don’t offer relevant, valuable content for their users.

The factors we can control are on-page optimization (content and meta tags) and our site structure (to make it easy to crawl and index by the search engine spiders). As part of my role as Global SEO Manager at HP, I aim to give specific guidance to our webmasters and developers on how to create a crawlable and indexable web site and also provide detailed guidance to our content managers on how to create more relevant content (from both a search engine and user perspective) that will establish a foundation for being successful in organic search results.

Other factors we can influence are links. Links are incredibly important in SEO as the search engines see links as votes of authority from other sites. And it’s not just the quantity of links that matter; it’s the quality as well. In fact, one link from a high-quality site (longevity, popularity, relevance and source all come in to play here) can provide much more link juice than 100 links from small, non-authoritative sites that don’t have related content. In fact, if the engine senses that the link was acquired only for SEO purposes it may be considered spam – and no one wants to spam the engines right?

The fact is, from any given tactic we may see results in two weeks or a year but even then it’s difficult to tie it back to the tactic your SEO efforts. Setting realistic SEO expectations will lead to creating a positive SEO experience for your clients, colleagues or management. And SEO success all depends on how well you address the basic and advanced SEO best practices overall.