How Much Revenue Does SEO Generate for HVAC Contractors?

Finally! Organic revenue attribution benchmarks

If you’ve enjoyed reading about how much revenue channels like PPC and Facebook generate, you may have been wondering when we will publish benchmark data for organic channels.

Well, the wait is over!

In this article, you’ll get to see 90 days of lead-to-revenue performance from organic channels (Google My Business, Google Organic, and Bing Organic) for a sample of 5 HVAC contractors.

We’re going to highlight and analyze the following metrics:

• Unique leads

• Matched Leads

• Booked Jobs

• Cost per Booked Job

• Average Ticket

• % of new customers

• Sold and Closed Revenue

. . . and more!

While we don’t manage SEO campaigns, Relentless Digital, led by Josh Crouch, does and we partnered to help him enhance his reporting with lead to revenue data.

We’re fortunate for the partnership because we are now able to provide you with some benchmarks as you think about your SEO strategy and what you’re getting out of it.

The below data is based on more than 1,200 organic leads (Google Organic, Google My Business, Bing Organic) across 5 HVAC Contractors from June - August of 2022.

Note: we used the cost of SEO management services to replace ad spend in the ROAS (return on ad spend) calculation.

Let’s dive in!

82% of SEO Leads Came from Google My Business (Google Business Profile)

We’ll kick off the data with a breakdown of which organic channels the 1,227 leads in this sample originated from:

Google My Business - 82%

Google Organic - 16%

Bing Organic - 2%

We also found that 95% of all SEO leads from this sample converted via Phone Calls.

This isn’t surprising.

If you perform a mobile search on your phone for your brand name, your Google My Business profile will likely show up first with a “call” button making it easy for a customer to call right from your profile.

If someone types your business name into Google, there wouldn’t be much reason for them to scroll past your GMB, and the data we measured here shows that in this case, they don’t.

✅ Now that you have a reference (82% of SEO leads in this sample converted via Google My Business), you know how important it is to make sure your Google Business Profile is up-to-date with accurate information.

35.7% of SEO Leads Matched to New Opportunities in the CRM

Just like in PPC and other paid marketing channels, cost per lead is not a good KPI to use when evaluating your SEO performance.

It wouldn’t be surprising to see existing customers search your business name and call from your GMB or organic listing to check on an appointment, ask about a bill, a warranty, your business hours etc.

These scenarios have to be considered, because all of the above conversions would lower your cost per lead, but not create new sellable opportunities for your business.

In this sample, 438 our of the 1,227 SEO leads matched to a sellable opportunity in the CRM.

That’s 35.7%.

Meaning, for every 100 SEO leads, ~35 ended up in the CRM with a new sellable opportunity.

Let’s break it down even further by SEO category:

All three of these categories are pretty similar in terms of the percentage of leads that matched to a new opportunity in the CRM.

25.51% of SEO Leads Turned Into Booked Jobs

Out of 1,227 leads from SEO, 313 of them turned into a sold or closed job.

That ends up being a 25.51% booked job rate, meaning for every 100 SEO leads, ~25 of them turn into a booked job.

Let’s look at it broken down by SEO category:

In this case, Bing Organic had a slightly higher booked job rate than GMB, but it drove much lower volume. Google Organic is lagging here, with almost a 5% lower booked job rate than Google My Business.

It Cost $127.24 to Get a Sold Job From SEO

Instead of using cost per lead to measure the effectiveness of SEO peformance, use per booked job, because leads don’t show up on your bottom line, sold jobs do.

There’s no media budget in the SEO category, so we divided the number of booked jobs (sold and closed) by the management fee.

In this case, it cost $127.24 to get a paying customer from SEO channels.

Again, let’s break it down by SEO category:

Google My Business was the most inexpensive to generate paying customers at $125.44, over $13 less than Google Organic.

SEO Drove a 30x Return on Ad Spend (Sold and Closed Jobs)

SEO drove $1.69 million in revenue potential (the sum of Open Estimates, Sold Jobs, and Closed Jobs) from June - August across 5 HVAC contractors.

On average, it cost $127.24 for a paying customer from SEO, and those paying customers had an average ticket of $3,820.

The result?

A 30x ROAS on sold and closed jobs.

That means $30 for every $1 spent on SEO management fees.

Again, let’s look at average ticket and ROAS by SEO category:

Google My Business - $4,170.52 average ticket | 33.24x ROAS

Google Organic - $1,921.28 cost per booked job | 13.82x ROAS

Bing Organic - $1,866.27 average ticket |13.97x ROAS

Interestingly enough, Google My Business generated more than double the ROAS of Google Organic and Bing Organic.

And because Google My Business generated 82% of the leads, it brought the total ROAS average of these channels up to 30x.

69.5% of Sold and Closed Revenue Was From New Customers

The burning question about SEO performance is how much revenue from new customers the channel drives.

We commonly hear that if someone searches your business name “they were looking for me anyway” but it doesn’t necessarily mean they’re already your customer.

In this sample, 69.5% of the sold and closed revenue from SEO came from new customers.

If you think this number is high, let’s dig into it a little more:

50% of of the booked jobs from SEO came from new customers - an even split!

$5,293.37 was the average ticket for new customers, versus $2,337.19 for existing customers.

Existing customers spent 44% less than new customers!

Even though SEO drove the exact same number of booked jobs for existing and new customers, because new customer spent more money, they ended up driving nearly 70% of sold and closed revenue from SEO.

Closing Thoughts

SEO drove an impressive 30x return on management spend, with 69.5% of that revenue coming from new customers.

While your results will vary, and this sample size is only 5 HVAC contractors, you now have some benchmarks in understanding how well, and how efficiently, SEO channels can generate revenue for your business.

If you’re looking for an SEO provider and are impressed with the results seen here, I encourage you to reach out to Josh at jcrouch@relentless-digital.com (no, this isn’t a sponsored post, we like Josh, and the data speaks for itself).

If you’re looking to measure SEO revenue performance and get metrics like these for your business, you can e-mail me: Jon@SearchLightDigital.io.

PS - thank you so much for reading this content and sharing it in your network. There have been a lot of new readers in the past month or so, and I’m grateful to have you here.