Ok SEO professionals, we’ve all sat in front of an opportunity and had someone ask us the 1 Million Dollar question. The client asks "Can you give me an idea on what your SEO services are going to do for our bottom line?" How do you answer it?

Let me give you my answer. 99% of the time I say that I can’t and that it is quite reckless to try to come up with an answer because the space is so dynamic. I do try to develop a model to see how many impressions / leads / sales a client needs to earn a positive ROI, but telling a client if we can get X percent of their terms on page 1 that should result in a return of (insert figure here) is absolutely reckless, and here’s my 11 reasons why:

1. Keyword Research tools suck! -  Let's be honest: we do the best with what we’ve got, but until the search engines start giving us real numbers (Thank you MSN) we will be using Overture’s tools, Keyword Discovery, Wordtracker, and other tools that are marginally accurate.  So on any given day for the same terms, all tools could give DRASTICALLY different search volume numbers.
2. Quality of SERPS – If a searcher looks at the top 5 results for a query and they are all spammy, and you are at #8, there’s a good chance that they are going to assume the rest are spammy and may not continue down, and instead change their query.  The opposite is true as well: if the SERPS are strong then you are more likely to be able to get conversions for a #8 as the person is doing their research.
3. Impact of the long tail / purchase continuum – You can’t optimize for every keyword that will lead to a conversion. People search in so many different ways based on where they are in the purchasing process that who really knows the conversion rate of each keyword?  No one.  I would bet that the value of Sony ranking well for “digital camera” is great from a brand perspective, but conversions may be a lot lower than those searching for “6.0 megapixel digital camera.”  The long tail of search is where many conversions happen, yet the searches are so few that you don’t explicitly target them in your keyword lists.
4. Product Quality / Product Pricing – Hey, what happens when you get your client highly ranked and nothing sells?  Everyone loses, maybe their product sucks (as Brandweek Columnists thought here), or their pricing is so high that they can’t sell the product?
5. Industry fluctuation – If I am buying socks, once I find a site that gets me what I want (with free shipping of course) I’m done, the first one I find gets the sale.  If I am purchasing a CRM system or laptop, I am not clicking and converting on the first site I see; I need to do more due diligence and will dig much deeper (even onto page 2 sometimes!).
6. Brand Control  / Site Control – If your client has done something to put them in a negative light in the press 3 months into your campaign, well guess what, there is nothing you can do with your rankings to fix that.  What if their new hot shot design team put in a 302 redirect on the homepage right before their busy season and your rankings take a slide?  Might that change things a bit from your predictions?
7. Conversion Funnels – How many of us have seen a client want to rank well and totally ignore the fact that once this traffic comes, they haven’t given one thought to or developed a plan to maximize the conversions by multivariate tests of landing pages / entry points and the conversion process itself?  How does that affect your ROI prediction? A great funnel helps the client get a higher ROI from the same service, and likewise a bad funnel has the opposite result.
8. Rankings Change – Due to a slew of factors, rankings rarely stick forever, and we all know that even on page 1, the difference between clicks and conversions is DRASTIC from #1 to #10.  (Lower rankings on page 1 typically convert more, according to a Marketing Sherpa study).
9. Inflated search volumes - On any given day, depending on the industry, I wouldn’t be surprised if 20-30% of searches were automated scripts or programs by SEOs or people checking “where they rank today.” These aren’t real legitimate users looking to purchase or research a good or service.
10. Too many variables – Personalized search, for instance, is changing things BIG TIME!  Local search, algorithms, click to call, cost per action, mobile search...all these things are new and affect SEO ROI.   Who knows the impact personalized search is going to have? I am keeping an eye out, but don’t know for sure.
11. Tracking is lacking – Many companies do not track SEO efforts that lead to phone calls, for the B2B space this is especially critical.  Not everyone is going to use your lead form or download your demo. Some people, dare I say, use e-mail or the phone, both of which don’t show up in your analytics tools.  Are your inbound sales teams asking if people found you “on the web”?  That should be credited back to the SEO effort.

Who wants to purchase a service that is site unseen by someone who says “I don’t know exactly what this is going to do for you?"

So that leaves us with quite an issue now, doesn’t it?  How do you address this situation?