Return on Investment is one of the most talked about concepts in the realm of online marketing. Blogs and discussion forums are devoted to helping businesses learn how to judge the ROI of their search campaigns, their email campaigns, their paid search campaigns and every other type of campaign. What often gets overlooked however, is what your customer's ROI is when they shop with you.

Yes, your customer DOES have an ROI, even if you've never thought about it in those terms before.

Matt Bailey explains:

In his post, Matt mentions a conversation we had about calculating customer ROI. It was sparked when I told him about Mango's Place, the drop-in day care center that I've started using for my kids two days a week. I mentioned the fact that I was now dropping $40 each time I took the kids to the center. ($13 an hour for three hours.) Matt laughed at me and asked what the value of kid-free work time was.

He had a good point. In fact, I'm sitting in Panera Bread working on their free wifi as I type this. I need to leave in ten minutes to pick up the kids, but in the three hours I've been here I've caught up on email, IMed with several people about an upcoming conference, edited and posted a guest article, written a 2100 word article of my own and am hoping to wrap up and publish this blog post before I leave.

How many hours would all that have taken me if I'd been doing it at home with a 2.5 year old, a 10 month old and a needy dog competing for attention? Most likely it would have taken the entire day.

That $40 fee is looking pretty good right now.

What are you doing to sell your customers on the positive ROI your product generates for them?

There is a lot more to SEO than often meets the eye, but sometimes the SEO eye isn't enough to make a good optimized page great. While the actual SEO work can be pretty straight forward, it's the additional effort in making the page user-friendly and has the ability to drive visitors to conversions.

Before making any page live we try to have it pass through several sets of eyes, all looking for and analyzing different elements of the page. One writes the content, another reviews the content looking for issues that break the flow of the conversion process, another optimizes it for search positioning and another looks at the page as a whole for usability issues. There are a few other layers of review in there as well and the end result is usually a page that is great for both visitors and search engines.

But even with all that, sometimes it's nice to look at everything from an entirely different perspective. This happened recently as we were working on a PPC account for a client that we also do search engine optimization for. In most cases we can use optimized pages as landing pages for PPC ads. After all, the SEO process is about creating the best entry point for a given set of keyword phrases. That entry point should provide the information the visitor is looking for and be the catalyst to driving them toward the conversion.

However, as we were analyzing the performance of some of the ads and landing pages we realized that one of our optimized pages wasn't all that it should be. Originally, the SEO page was developed as a catch all for a group of keywords. At the time, the client didn't have any category pages and we asked that this, among other, category pages be developed. It turned out to be quite effective. That is until the list of products on that page grew became overbearing.

Looking at the SEO page through PPC eyes we were able to come at the page in an entirely new way and develop some new concepts. We are working with the client now for implementation which should result in a much more usable landing page both for PPC and SEO. And since we decided that we need to develop some additional sub-categorical pages, this will help us to point PPC ads to even more tightly focused pages, thereby improving conversion rates even more.

I have to admit kicking myself a bit, wondering why I hadn't thought of this while working on the on-page SEO. I don't have an answer for that, other than sometimes we just can't see the full forest for the trees. It always helps to have an additional set of eyes on everything. But even that isn't always enough. Sometimes you just have to look at things from an entirely different perspective. And in this case, looking at SEO through PPC eyes is just what the web site needed!

Just because you think you know a thing or two about search engine optimization and online marketing doesn't mean there isn't a little bit of room to learn. That's what Shari Thurow explains today in her ClickZ article: SEO Epiphanies.

Shari talks about the real life experiences that cause a light bulb to go off over your head and how they can change your perspective on how you market your site. Shari breaks her own experiences down by sharing three key learning points that changed the way she does business online.

The second one, "Search is not a Linear, Singular Behavior" harps on an idea I've been trying to beat people over the head with for years myself. Shari says:

I continue to be astounded at how many site owners think they only need to measure the direct conversion rates on their SEO, SEM and other forms of online marketing. They fail to grasp the idea of multiple visitors prior to purchase.

Just this weekend, a friend that works in a high end jewelry retail store was telling me about their last sales meeting. She said the company continually reminds them that the average buyer will visit three stores before making a purchasing decision. It's no different only really...though you may have a user visiting half a dozen or more sites before making a purchasing decision.

If you aren't targeting your buyers at every stage of the search buying cycle, you are passing up sales opportunities.

Shari goes on to deliver a wake up call in terms of usability. After all, a number one Google ranking and eleventy billion incoming links won't do you a lick of good if your conversion rate is 0.0%.

This doesn't surprise me in the least. I've built plenty of sites following all the right "rules" of site design only to watch in utter disbelief as a test user struggled to do what they wanted to do on the site. (It doesn't matter how much you think they SHOULD be able to figure it out, it only matters that they can't.)

Having tried to hack my way through dozens of horridly unusable sites over the years to make a purchase, I can assure you that it was only through my absolute determination to buy a specific product from a specific site that I made it to the checkout. I've probably abandoned items I honestly wished to buy on a hundred or more sites over the years. All because I didn't want the item bad enough to justify the frustration.

I had my own search marketing epiphany about two years ago when I was working on the Zero Dollars series. While I'd always understood the value of the long tail of links in terms of ranking and indexing boosts, I'd never really grasped the true value of those links in terms of traffic and sales potential until that project. To this day, the greatest majority of buyers and blog commenters on The Lactivist come in one or two at a time from thousands of blogs, discussion threads and web site links.

Have you had a search marketing epiphany yet? If not, keep an eye out. It's only a matter of time.