A couple of important things to remember when planning your SEO strategy is; what time-line can you expect results and also a way to quantify those results to figure out the ROI of your campaign.
Both of these can be challenging and the one factor that has caused me the most stress is coming up with a reasonable time-line to judge results. I always make sure to tell clients upfront that SEO is not a quick fix and it does take time to show noticeable results. When working on a brand new website it can take 6-8 months to see results and even with an existing site it can often take 4-5 months.
Here is a look at some 26 month results that I was able to achieve (bottom image on .pdf). We are now getting approximately 8,000+ additional visitors each month and the revenue increase directly attributable to this traffic is in the range of $120,000 – $160,000 per month, this is based on a 7% – 10% conversion rate (the actual rate might be as high as 15%). Please note the quality of traffic is also expected to be higher (due to more inner page traffic and search traffic for long-tail terms) and we have also increased the value of our PPC campaign with higher quality scores and lower per click average cost.