Local SEO ROI, computed with your numbers instead of ours

The breakeven formula

Most ROI content in this industry works backwards from "SEO is worth it" to whatever math supports the conclusion. We'd rather hand you the formula and let it say whatever it says, because for some businesses it says no, and pretending otherwise is how owners end up resenting marketing for years.

Four inputs:

1. Job value: what an average closed job is worth to you.
2. Close rate: the fraction of leads (calls, form fills, texts) that become paying work.
3. Extra leads: additional leads per month above what you were already getting before the campaign.
4. The fee: what you pay each month. Ours are published on the pricing page: $750, $1,500, or from $3,000 a month depending on the plan.

One line of math:

Breakeven leads per month = monthly fee ÷ (job value × close rate)

If the campaign produces more extra leads than that number, it's making you money. Fewer, and it's costing you money, and you should be asking your provider pointed questions. Everything else on this page is about filling in the variables honestly, because the formula is only as good as what you feed it.

Where your three numbers come from

Job value: average your invoices, not your highlights

Pull your last twenty or thirty invoices and take the average. Not your best month, and not the dream remodel you landed once. A Naples pool builder and a Golden Gate drain-cleaning outfit will get very different numbers here, and that's the point: the same $750 retainer is a rounding error against one job list and a serious line item against the other.

If customers come back on a schedule (dentists, lawn care, pool service), the first invoice understates what winning them is worth. We get to that wrinkle further down, but for breakeven purposes, use first-job value anyway. It keeps the test conservative, and conservative is exactly what you want from a test.

Close rate: your real ratio, not your remembered one

Count last quarter's leads, then count how many turned into paid work. Owners guess high here almost every time, because the wins stick in memory and the tire-kickers don't. If thirty calls produced ten jobs, your close rate is one in three. Use the real ratio, not the one you'd like to have. And if you don't track this at all yet, start this week. You can't evaluate any marketing without it, ours included.

Extra leads: the number the campaign has to earn

Job value and close rate are yours. Extra leads is the campaign's job, and "extra" is doing heavy lifting in that sentence: it means leads above your pre-campaign baseline, not every phone call that arrives after you sign. Counting this honestly is its own discipline, and it gets its own section below.

Three worked hypotheticals

These are invented examples with the assumptions spelled out, not client results. We publish exactly three prices on this site, our own plans, so we borrow those as the sample figures instead of inventing market numbers. Swap in your own.

Hypothetical: a Cape Coral plumber on the Local plan. Say the average job happens to be worth the same as the plan fee, $750, and one out of every three leads books. Job value and fee cancel each other out, so breakeven is simply the inverse of the close rate: three extra leads a month. Less than one extra call a week. If your average ticket runs higher than the fee, and for many licensed trades it will, breakeven drops below three.

Hypothetical: a dock and seawall contractor on the Growth plan. Say a single job covers ten months of the $1,500 fee, and one estimate in four closes. Run the division and breakeven lands well under one lead per month; call it one extra qualified estimate request every couple of months to carry the whole engagement. This is why high-ticket trades (marine construction, roofing, remodeling) are where local SEO math turns almost absurd: inside this hypothetical, one closed job funds most of the year.

Hypothetical: a pediatric dentist on the Growth plan. A first visit may not cover a month of the fee on its own, so the strict formula looks tight. But a family that stays for years and brings the siblings along is worth far more than visit one. Run breakeven on first-visit value anyway. If the math clears even on that stingy basis, the real return is better than your spreadsheet admits.

The shortcut: the one-job test

If spreadsheets are not your thing, collapse the whole formula into one question: how many average jobs does it take to cover a month of the fee?

If one job covers a month or more, the entire ROI question reduces to "will this produce at least one extra job a month?" You know your market, your reputation, and how often your phone rings today, so you can judge that bar for yourself before any agency shows you a chart. If it takes several jobs to cover the fee, the math can still work, but volume and close rate are carrying it, which makes lead tracking more important, not less. And if the answer to the one-job test makes you wince, that is real information. Believe it over any pitch, including ours.

The strict version: profit per job, not revenue

Invoice totals include materials, subs, fuel, and payroll. A job that bills big but nets thin contributes far less to breakeven than the top-line number suggests. So rerun the formula with gross profit per job in the job-value slot. Your breakeven lead count goes up, sometimes by a lot, and that's fine. Better a hard test the campaign passes than a flattering one it fails. If a provider only ever talks about your revenue when pitching ROI, notice that.

How to count "extra leads" honestly

• Establish a baseline first. Know how many leads a normal month produced before the campaign started. Extra means above that line. An agency that starts counting from zero is taking credit for your existing reputation.
• Track the source. Calls and form fills need attribution, which is why call tracking with a live lead dashboard is built into our Growth plan. Untracked SEO is unaccountable SEO, no matter who sells it.
• Don't count people who already knew you. A repeat customer typing your company name into Google was coming anyway. Branded searches mostly measure your past work, not your SEO vendor's.
• Expect flat months, and expect to see them in the report. Real campaigns have them, especially in a market as seasonal as Southwest Florida. A report with no flat months has been edited.

If a monthly report shows ranking charts and traffic graphs but never a lead count against a baseline, you cannot run this formula. Sometimes that's the point. We wrote up what an honest report contains, and what a decorative one hides, in reporting red flags.

What the formula leaves out

Ramp time. SEO returns are back-loaded. We set a 90-day ramp expectation with every client, and the honest accounting window is a year: total fees paid over twelve months against the value of extra jobs won in the same twelve. Judging the whole thing on month two is how good campaigns get cancelled and bad ones get excused. More on the timeline in how long SEO takes.

Capacity. Extra leads only become revenue if you can actually take the work. If your crews are booked into next season and you're not hiring, more leads buy you a longer waitlist and some annoyed callers. We wrote a whole piece on when SEO is not worth it, and a full pipeline is case one.

Compounding. The formula treats every month as identical, but a page that ranks keeps producing leads without new spend, so year-two math tends to beat year-one math on the same fee. That asset argument is its own article: how SEO pays for itself.

Season. Naples demand swings hard between snowbird season and the depths of August. Run the twelve-month version of the math, not the version from your slowest month or your busiest one.

Run your own number

Full disclosure: this page lives on an SEO agency's site, and we sell exactly the thing we just taught you to evaluate. That's why the formula runs on your numbers, not ours. We would rather sign clients who did the division than clients who bought a pitch, because clients who did the division stay when they see the return and leave when they don't. Since we bill month to month, that's the only kind of client relationship that works for us anyway.

So: last quarter's invoices, last quarter's lead count, one division. If breakeven looks reachable, the next question is what to spend, which we cover in how to set an SEO budget. And if you want the other half of the equation, meaning where your site stands today and where the extra leads would realistically come from, the free audit is where to start, and the report lands within one business day.

Frequently asked questions