SEO ROI calculator

What is SEO worth to your business? Enter what you spend, the traffic you have today and how well your website converts. The calculator shows the extra revenue you can expect, your return on investment and the month your SEO pays for itself, with a conservative and an ambitious scenario next to it.

How the SEO ROI calculator works

SEO turns extra visitors into leads, leads into clients and clients into revenue. The calculator follows that chain month by month:

1. Extra visitors = current monthly traffic × the uplift you expect.
2. Extra leads = extra visitors × website conversion rate.
3. New clients = extra leads × sales conversion rate.
4. Extra revenue = new clients × client lifetime value (× gross margin, if you want ROI on profit).

SEO doesn't work overnight, so the extra traffic starts at zero in month 1 and grows evenly until it reaches full strength (month 6 by default; you can change this). The SEO ROI is then:

SEO ROI = (extra revenue − SEO investment) ÷ SEO investment × 100%

The payback month is the first month in which the revenue SEO has brought in so far is higher than everything you've spent on it.

Worked example

A company spends €2,500 a month on SEO and gets 2,000 visitors a month from Google. It expects 50% more traffic: 1,000 extra visitors a month once SEO is at full strength.

• 1,000 extra visitors × 2% website conversion = 20 extra leads a month
• 20 leads × 10% sales conversion = 2 new clients a month
• 2 clients × €5,000 lifetime value = €10,000 extra revenue a month at full strength

Because traffic builds up over the first six months, the first year brings in about €90,000 on a €30,000 investment: an ROI of 200%, with payback in month 4. With half the expected uplift it's €45,000 (still 50% ROI); with 1.5× it's €135,000.

What is a good SEO ROI?

There's no single number, because it depends mostly on what one client is worth to you. A company with a €30,000 client lifetime value can earn back a year of SEO with a handful of clients; a company selling €50 products needs thousands of extra visitors. Three ways to judge your result:

• Judge it over 12 to 24 months. The first months are an investment; SEO pays back once rankings and traffic have built up.
• Plan on the conservative scenario. If SEO is still worth it at half the uplift you hope for, it's a safe investment.
• Compare with paid search. The calculator's reality check shows what the same visitors would cost through Google Ads. Unlike ads, the traffic from SEO doesn't stop the day you stop paying.

Starting points by industry

Don't know your numbers yet? Pick your industry in the calculator to start from these values, then replace them with your own as soon as you can. They're Overflow's working assumptions for B2B companies, not published benchmarks.

IndustryWebsite conversionSales conversionClient lifetime valueGoogle Ads cost per clickB2B SaaS2.5%15%€15,000€6.00Professional services3%20%€10,000€5.00IT & software services2.5%15%€25,000€5.00Manufacturing & industrial2%15%€30,000€2.50