How to Calculate SEO ROI for a knowledgebase or support portal

[NortonSupportSEO]

Dear Moz Friends,
We are trying to calculate SEO ROI for our customer support website driven by Self-Help documents, Support Videos, and path to contact our Live Support. We would like to collect your valuable thought/inputs on how to better calculate support website SEO ROI.
A typical customer journey scenario:

1. Customer searches for a solution to a problem with our product in Google/Yahoo/MSN

2. Customer then clicks our link in the SERPs that addresses his/her current problem

3. Customer lands on the link, reads the fix/solution and does one of the five below-mentioned actions

• a) Customer resolves the problem and clicks the ‘Yes’ button to notify us is he is satisfied. Eventually, the customer leaves our support website.
• b) Leaves the website as a result of resolving the problem without clicking the Yes or No button.
• c) Customer does not resolve the problem and clicks the ‘No’ button to notify us that the problem persists even after he/she tried to fix the problem using the support/help document. Then customer might contact us using the contact button (when takes them to Live-help options page).
• d) Customer clicks the ‘Contact Us’ button to contact our live support agent either via chat or phone, who will help resolve the issue.
• e) Searches using the Internal Search, if the link doesn’t seem to solve his/her problem and can hop onto other support documents.

Note: The website is purely for support. We currently do not cross-sell, or up-sell, or do any marketing activity like conversion, etc.

Please share your thoughts and help us figure out the ROI formula for our efforts. Let me know if any questions.

Thanks,
Norton Support SEO team.

[EGOL]

This is just my opinion.  I am certain that accountants and pseudoaccountants will disagree.

This is how I would value the site if I owned it.

If your website provides accurate, easy-to-find and easy-to-follow advice for lots of Norton's most frequently-encountered customer problems then the website might have a positive ROI from a branding perspective.  Since you don't sell anything or try to sell anything then you really can't calculate a direct ROI.

If your website provide skimpy, inaccurate, hard-to-find advice then it should be closed down because because it is stinking up your brand and the ROI is negative.   Lots of companies have support websites like this.  The worst ones have a forum that nobody visits where you can ask a question and it might get answered next year by a spammer.

[Innovation-Group_SEO]

In general the ROI (Return Of Investment) is calculated as (gain of investment - cost of investment)/cost of investment, which gives a good measure of what you get compared to what you spend. As you probably already know, the higher ROI the better.

In your case, you have a knowledge database for computer problems solving. As you also note in your question, you don't do any marketing activity, therefore there is no straightforward way to measure the gain of the investment.

One key point to mention is the buying cycle which explains the 5 steps to convert your site visitor to a customer. Aw****areness: Through your SEO people find your website and get to know about your products and your services.
R****esearch: After getting on your site, people can search for more information about your product/service, and refine their search.
Preference: This step contains the process of making the final choice and the confirmation of it.
Purchase: Now that the final choice is made, the visitor can be converted to an actual customer. Loyalty/advocacy:.After the purchase, we expect a satisfied customer that will come back to the site, and search for other products/services that are provided.

The last step takes us back to the first one, as we make a customer aware of more products.

As you can see, the key point is the marketing, that you make people know what you "make" and try to convince them that they need it. That is the main aspect of ROI.

On the other hand, I noticed that you don't have anything related to the social media (facebook like and share, tweet, etc). That is the best tool in our days to attract people and let them know what you can provide. In fact it is also a very good way to boost your ROI. Even in your case, it would be imperative to have people to able to share their experience on your site, for example: "I was very satisfied by this article" along with a link of a solution shared on facebook or after contacting your live support to share that "The article didn't work for me, but they have a great online live support!". This will bring more people on your site searching for answers and/or solutions.

If you would like more information, check also these links:
http://www.quicksprout.com/2014/05/16/how-to-calculate-the-roi-of-your-seo-campaign/
http://www.quicksprout.com/2014/06/27/how-to-calculate-the-roi-of-your-social-media-campaigns/