The ROI of Hiring a Freelance SEO Expert: Real Numbers and Expectations 

As the internet continues to evolve at an unprecedented pace and become an essential route to reaching customers, achieving visibility on the web has become a new currency. Search Engine Optimization or ‘SEO’ is fast becoming a staple of business for those hoping to reach new heights of success in today’s global marketplace.

Yet for business owners, working out how to take their SEO to the next level can be a minefield – should they be hiring a whole team of in-house SEO’s or splurging on the most expensive agency on the high street. Alternatively, could using a freelance SEO expert offer the best middle ground and allow for rapid scalability as your business grows in order to gain greater visibility in search engines.

This in-depth guide is going to give you a rundown of why a specialized freelance SEO expert is the best way to invest in your company for finding and utilizing Search Engine Optimization for business growth. For those businesses that are striving to go from simply being visible on the Internet to actual, long-term growth, there are a number of important numbers, expectations, and other factors you should know in order to understand the complete scope of work involved with successful SEO.

The work of bringing a business from the bottom of search results to the top can seem grueling and thankless, which is why most people believe that SEO is simply optimizing for certain keywords to achieve rankings in search engines in order to bring more traffic to a website. The fact of the matter, however, is that truly effective SEO work can be aligned with the revenue-driven goals of your company in order to bring about real returns on your investments.

So when done right, the ROI of a top-tier freelance SEO expert can be enormous, and while the process can be complex, subject to the whims of the search engines, and hard to find good ones, that’s what we’re here to help explain to you in detail, and set you on the right path. We’ll walk you through the process for calculating the returns that you can get from hiring a freelance SEO expert, give you a realistic time-frame of when you can start seeing some positive results, and how to go about finding the right person for your business.

Understanding the True Value of SEO Investment 

SEO for professionals is a one off investment in your digital infrastructure, not a continuing marketing expense. As opposed to ‘adverts’ that you pay for and which are only useful until you stop paying for them, effective SEO creates massive returns from your search rankings and visitors conversion rates, through your creation of high quality content and of the detailed, accurate technical work that has underpinned it to create your creation of a continuing stream of high quality organic traffic.

Why SEO is a Long-Term Asset

Compound Interest: Initially, an SEO campaign designed by a freelance SEO expert may cost as much to set up as a Pay-Per-Click (PPC) campaign. However, unlike PPC campaigns that stop attracting visitors as soon as you stop paying for clicks, the value of SEO increases over time allowing massive returns on investment in form of search rankings and visitor conversion rates – creating a long-term flow of targeted visitors.

Brand Authority: Search engines have become the new gatekeepers of credibility and high rankings immediately establish your brand’s credibility and trust with your potential customers. They subconsciously associate the top results with industry leaders. So every time your site comes out on top for critical searches, you’re not just getting a click, you’re establishing your brand as a trusted authority in your field of business, a status a freelance SEO expert can help you secure.

Cost Effective: Yes, there is a cost to begin with for creating great content and or having a professional freelance SEO expert conduct a technical audit of your site. However, as your site becomes a mature authoritative property, the cost of the SEO will drop to zero as you can stop paying for PPC (since your site will likely be ranking at the top for targeted search terms). This is by far the highest ROI of any type of online marketing.

The Hidden Cost of Inaction

Lost Market Share: Your competitors are likely putting time into optimizing for search, to capture future leads that would have been otherwise yours. Every day that you don’t, you are losing search volume that can be profitable in the long run.

Technical Debt: The poor search engine optimization on your website is causing your site to fall into what is referred to as SEO decay. As search engines evolve to place a greater emphasis on a site’s speed, accessibility and mobile-friendliness, a poorly optimized site will see its ranking decrease at an accelerated rate.

Lower Conversion Potential: No matter what the bot says, no matter how well your website is optimized for search engines, optimization is for people too. And for the leads that you’re finally getting, it’s likely that your average conversion (of purchases or of signups) is not where it could be with professional site optimization by a freelance SEO expert to create better reader experience through the flow of your website.

Calculating ROI: The Math Behind the Rankings 

The Standard SEO ROI Formula

Formula: (Gain from Investment - Cost of Investment) / Cost of Investment.

Gain Calculation: In this calculation, you will multiply the total organic conversions per month by the average value of each lead or the average sale of products per organic transaction. Using our example, if the freelance SEO expert is able to generate 500 organic conversions per month and each conversion averages $100 in profit for your business, your gain for the month would be $50,000.

The investment costs also are typically misunderstood and are far more than the monthly retainer that a business pays to a freelance SEO expert. They need to factor in the cost of all the content creation (writers, designers, videographers, etc.) that the expert creates to obtain the rankings that ultimately drive conversions. Additionally, many business owners don’t realize that there are also software and tools that perform technical SEO that have subscription fees, as well as CMS (content management system) plugins that are an integral part of their growth strategy that also have subscription fees.

Freelance Fees: The fee that the freelance SEO expert is charging on a per month, per project or per hour basis.

Content Production: Writers, designers and video production staff who have created content for your website that is ranked.

Software and Tools: Technical SEO platforms, for example Ahrefs, SEMrush, or Moz, as well as SEO plugins for your Content Management System (CMS) that support your growth strategy.

By adding up all of the costs to do SEO, you get a true picture of how your spend is performing against the revenue it is generating from organic traffic.

Factoring in Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)

One of the largest mistakes in SEO ROI analysis is to take the initial transaction as the end result of SEO conducted by a freelance SEO expert. Most SEO transactions start at the top of the funnel – a research query where the person is searching for answers not purchasing products. If you only count the immediate sale of the initial transaction, you severely undervalue organic search.

• Beyond the First Click: While intrusive ads may drive the occasional impulsive purchase, consumers using search are typically better educated and more researched prior to conversion. Therefore, it’s crucial to analyze the long-term value (CLV) of these users, including repeat business from past sales, paid subscription renewals, and referrals from conversions generated from SEO strategies implemented by a freelance SEO expert.

• Retention Benefits: Because organic traffic is the highest converting type of traffic, there is inherent brand loyalty with them. People find your website through their query, and because they have been given the solutions that they are looking for, they are entering into a relationship with your brand based upon trust. That means that organic traffic will generally retain better than paid – particularly when pitted against display ads that have a very intrusive nature of marketing to people. 

Intrusive display ads tend to get people’s back up – particularly if they are seen to be bargain hunting. Paid search users don’t tend to have the same preconceptions about a brand, and have usually only completed a search with the intention of looking for a solution to a problem. By finding your website through their own search, they are more likely to retain as a loyal customer than a user found by means of a paid display ad. When looking at the return on investment of your freelance SEO expert, over a 12 to 24 month period, you will find that the compounded loyalty from organic traffic conversions far outweigh the return on investment from the initial freelance SEO expert work.

Setting Realistic Timelines for Success 

It takes time to see results from your SEO investment. This is because search engines have very complex algorithms that go through changes periodically. Thus, there is a big difference between how people perceive search engine optimization and what it actually is. By understanding that organic growth is a cumulative process, you’ll be able to accurately measure the return on your investment and abandon ineffective strategies while your effective ones continue to bring you a healthy ROI. There are three main phases of any effective SEO campaign.

The Initial Phase (Months 1-3): Foundation Building

The Initial Phase of SEO is to remove any obstacles of growth from your website. In this 3 month period the primary objective is to establish a foundation upon which to build your SEO ‘authority’ and generate ROI on your investment in SEO.

• A technical audit of your website – it’s essential that search engines can crawl and index your website efficiently. This is the first step of gaining success in search, any subsequent SEO activity will be wasted if your website isn’t search engine friendly. An expert will typically find crawl errors, work on your website’s loading time and make sure that your website is 100% responsive on mobile devices.

• Keyword Research: A Freelance SEO Expert’s Strategic Roadmap to Growth. Although searching for highly trafficked keywords is often an SEO Expert’s main task, it is of little value without application to drive leads and sales through searching for high-intent, low-hanging fruit phrases which align to the core subject of your online business.

• On-Page Optimization: On the heels of a technically optimized site comes the intricate work of fine-tuning every single page of the site to ensure that all of the search engines that index it are perfectly informed as to what said pages will be able to provide to users searching for said site’s topic. By modifying meta tags and the titles of individual pages, as well as changing URLs to better facilitate organization on your website, your business can help to tell search engines what to expect should they happen to come across said pages while they are out crawling the World Wide Web.

The Growth Phase (Months 3-6): Early Gains

Once you have secured your foundation you will start to see the early signs of growth and returns on your investment. Search engines will start to trust your pages and return them in search results.

• Content Production: Your SEO specialist develops content on an ongoing basis as high value articles and guides which address problems of potential customers identified in the respective research phase and that are published in a timely manner.

• Early Results - Initial Movement:  Your site will start to move up in the search engines for your targeted keywords. Instead of being on the bottom of page 10, you will start to see movement up towards the top of page 2 or 3. This is a great sign that your Domain Authority is increasing.

• Indexing Success: With your new optimized site structure the search engines will now correctly crawl and index all your new, high value content pages, thus increasing visibility online.

The Maturity Phase (Months 6-12+): Real ROI

• First Page Dominance: By six months you will have climbed to the top of search results for your primary keywords and in doing so achieve First Page Dominance. The top 3 results for organic search receive the largest amount of traffic, resulting in a huge ROI for your SEO.

• Conversion Optimization: The leads are of high value only if they convert in the end. In this phase the expert will fine-tune leads’ and visitor’s navigation through a site’s content. He will fine-tune CTAs on the site's pages (i.e. “buy now”, “get a demo”, etc.). This way newly acquired visitors will navigate a site efficiently.

• Traffic Stability: Even organic traffic that once was so experimental now becomes stable and even a major source of revenue providing you with cost efficient customer acquisition (CAC).

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to Track 

Before we have a chance to review the final revenue numbers from your campaign, we need to start tracking some of the leading indicators of SEO health to get a feel for how things are going. By monitoring your primary visibility and traffic metrics we can get a pulse on how things are going and see what is working for you and what you might need to go back to the drawing board on.

Primary Visibility and Traffic Metrics

This important metric will show you how many times your site is being displayed in search results for your chosen keywords. With Organic Impressions increasing, you can be sure your content is becoming more and more relevant to related keywords too.

• Click-Through Rate (CTR): If ranking highly for organic results doesn’t translate into traffic for you then Click-Through Rate on search results can highlight whether your page titles and meta descriptions are compelling enough to secure clicks over your competition for search snippets.

• Keyword Rankings. No metric is more fundamental to the discipline of SEO than tracking the position of targeted keyword phrases. Not only will this metric inform you of how close you are to achieving page-one dominance for specific queries, but it will also serve as an indicator of the overall effectiveness of your content strategy.

Engagement and Conversion Metrics

There are more important metrics to pay attention to than Visibility – such as Engagement and Conversion metrics, that measure the value that traffic brings to your business.

• Bounce Rate and Session Duration: Measuring the value of your traffic.When users land on a page and leave immediately, this is called a bounce. Measuring the time that users spend on pages is important in order to measure the quality of your content and make sure that the content on your pages are relevant to the questions that your users are trying to answer.

• Goal Completions: These are the actions on your site that are most important for your business, whether that’s people filling out a contact form, signing up for a newsletter, making a purchase on your e-commerce site, etc. This is what actually translates into revenue for your company and helps you see how much value your traffic is bringing to you.

• Organic Conversion Rate: When you compare the performance of organic traffic to other channels like social media or paid traffic, you can see the real quality of your organic leads. A high organic conversion rate is a clear indication that your SEO efforts are able to attract high intent traffic, which are people who are looking to purchase your product or service and are able to convert.

Freelance SEO Expert vs. Agency: A Cost-Benefit Analysis 

The Freelance Advantage

• Direct Communication: An agency will set up an SEO strategy and then an account executive will then inform an analyst of updates and then inform a writer of changes to implement. There are many chances for miscommunication and bottlenecks to occur. Working with a freelancer means you work directly with the individual and your business goals are translated into SEO actions quickly and accurately.

• Specialized Expertise: In an Agency, you pay for a team of people, including Junior Analysts, while they learn the ropes. A Freelancer is a Specialist in their field, like a Technical SEO Architect, High-Converting Content Strategist or Complex Link Building Campaigns Specialist. The people you would work with in an Agency, the ones who would implement your SEO Strategy, are a Freelancer’s whole team.

• Lower Overheads - Agencies typically have high overheads, such as office space, administrative staff etc. A large proportion of your budget is typically used to pay for the management structure of an Agency, whereas a Freelancer has lower overheads, meaning that every dollar you spend is going towards your Project.

Flexibility and Scale

• Agile SEO Strategy: While updates to algorithms can occur often, an agency may go through various layers of approval before implementing any new direction. This can lead to your site being left defenseless against search updates. With Freelance SEO Services, your expert SEO Consultant can change direction quickly when needed and keep your site performing in accordance with the latest best practices.

• Modular Hiring: A really powerful aspect of the freelance economy is that it’s inherently modular. With an agency, you are committing to a huge annual retainer, much of which is probably going to be spent on “service” that you never really needed in the first place. Hiring experts on a freelance basis is highly modular: you can hire the best people in the world for a few high-impact projects (e.g. a full-content-site audit, a site migration, or a full-site-technical-overhaul), and know that every dollar of your budget is being put to maximum use to get the best results for your business.

Finding the Top 1%: Leveraging GigMint for SEO Success 

While there are often numerous concerns surrounding the hiring of a freelance SEO expert, the greatest concern facing businesses is often the inability to properly vet them before spending time and money. GigMint circumvents this particular hurdle by allowing for the connections of businesses with pre-screened freelancers who can enable instant results through work of the highest quality.

Why Vetting Matters

Rigorous Screening: As mentioned above, GigMint doesn’t just list people who are looking for freelance work. Instead, it identifies the top 1% of digital talent, and goes through a rigorous screening process to select only the best. This means that every freelance SEO expert on GigMint has gone through a multi-stage vetting process that not only tests their technical SEO skills, but also their ability to communicate and work with clients effectively.

Quality Assurance: When you source the right SEO talent through GigMint, you can guarantee that the expert(s) will implement modern SEO methods that are not only up to par, but in constant pursuit of the latest updates to the search algorithms. This ensures that your team will always be fostering sustainable and future-proof digital growth while abiding by the best practices in the business – instead of flirting with search penalties by employing outdated black hat SEO methods.

Streamlined Recruitment and Protection

AI Task Pipeline: Our AI powered interface for Task Pipeline transforms your business objectives into a detailed working brief. This is then auto-matched with the perfect freelance SEO expert whose skills and experience precisely matches your current technical requirements for a project.

Secure Escrow System: Our financial protection is built into the core of GigMint’s workflow. All funds for a project are held in escrow until you have reviewed the work done and approved it for payment, giving you complete control of the financials for your SEO project.

Global Payouts: Payouts to experts in over 90 countries with Stripe in GigMint. Your expert gets paid in full and quickly, which makes him completely focus on the success of your SEO project.

Your Roadmap to Sustainable SEO Growth

Measuring ROI of a freelance SEO expert requires setting up a job with realistic expectations and finding the right freelancer for the task. The content above went into details explaining SEO as a fundamental investment in a company’s core digital assets that grows in value over time while paid search ads decline in value over time.

To achieve all of this, you simply need to focus on your long-term assets, monitor the right KPIs and hire a high-intent freelance SEO expert through a platform like GigMint that connects you with the top 1% of freelance SEO experts. Once you have set up search engines as your most powerful revenue generator (and most predictable), the companies that achieve sustainable growth are the ones that focus on Search, capturing market share, building brand authority and maximizing ROI.

Start your way to growth today!

1. Define Your Goals: Understand what you are trying to get from lead generation (such as sign-ups for services) and direct sales (such as purchasing from your online store).

2. Auditing Your Presence: An initial content and technical audit to ensure you have a solid starting point and identify any low hanging fruit.

3. Secure Your Partner: Source a vetted expert via GigMint to build a custom, data-driven 12-month strategy that aligns perfectly with your business vision.