There are many aspects to SEO and its valuable resources, some of which are more easily understood than others. One of the more difficult ones is to do with page ranking and click-through rate (CTR). Can you estimate the kind of increased traffic and revenue you’ll get if your webpage scores a high ranking?
There’s a bit of sleuthing to do and some math is involved (not too much!) but this method, devised by Erin Everhart, provides a fairly accurate estimation of how much increased traffic you can get following a high page ranking.
Don’t trust generic data
In 2006, AOL released 20 million popular search queries to the public. These queries were designed to make it easier to understand how organic click-through rate works (traffic that’s come to a website without paid search results guiding it there).
Other studies have used graphs to track Google’s click-through rate based on organic search results, broken down into tables on both desktop computers and mobiles.
While these studies of generic data are useful to initially understand the inner-workings of SEO, they aren’t specific to your data. Depending on what your website is selling, organic click-through rate and keyword searches work differently for each website. It’s better instead to find and analyze your own data.
Getting your own data
Google Search Console (formerly Google Webmaster Tools) allows you to examine your Search Query data up to three months back. GSC takes your keywords and ranks their search results positions, giving you the number of impressions (times your ad is shown on a search results page) and clicks.
Page rankings fluctuate, so it’s up to you to calculate your average ranking based on where it has moved over the past few months, which will provide an accurate reading of your CTR. To do this, put in the keyword search relevant to your website, along with the organic entries and average search volume. This will give you a percentage number of your average CTR.
Predicting your traffic
Once you have an accurate CTR, your estimated monthly visits can be calculated when you combine your CTR with the average search volume of your keyword.
Making money
All this data gives you a good impression of how your website is fairing in the deep recesses of the internet, but what’s the value in it?
You can estimate the monthly value of your keyword as soon as you figure out the average value of each visit to your website. You should know this based on the sales you get each time someone visits your site. Find the average over a few months to account for holiday sales and seasonal fluctuations and multiply it by your estimated monthly keyword visits.
To get your organic conversion rate, divide organic sales by organic visits.
Once you have that number, multiply it by your estimated monthly keyword visits to get an idea of the number of sales that keyword brings. With this, you should have a number that estimates the value of your keyword.
After this?
Business people have been predicting revenue and making projections since goods have been traded. SEO is simply the latest form of trading, and the projections can be made as long as the work is done.
With this information, you can reduce the mystery behind clicks, impressions and website visits, allowing you to prepare for the future of your business.
