What is the dollar value of a number one ranking on Google?
Is it worth it for you, as a small business owner, to invest your time and energy into optimizing your website content in order to get a number one Google website ranking? Will the effort result in more traffic to your door? And, ultimately, will the time you spend actually increase your online sales by an acceptable amount to make the trade-off of the time spent on search engine optimization worth it to you?
I understand the dilemma. If you’re like most business owners who’ve read this post, your daily reality probably consists of the top 20 priorities that need to be done today. Not just two or three. And search engine optimization is probably not one of your top priorities. My goal in sharing the following example is to help you estimate increases in online sales so you can take the guesswork out of where to spend your time to make the most impact.
As a starting point, you need to become familiar with two key terms related to SEO and learn how to collect two pieces of information. The terms are: 1) Click Through Rate or CTR and 2) Conversion Rate.
If you’re not familiar with CTR, it simply means the percentage of time that searches click through to your website showing up in their search results compared to a different site. And CTRs are significantly affected based on how your website is ranked by Google for a particular keyword. For example, a site that has achieved a number one Google website ranking for a particular keyword produces a 42 percent Google click-through rate compared to a site ranked number 10, which produces a poor CTR of 6.06 percent.
The second term is the conversion rate, which represents the number of monthly orders generated by your website divided by the number of unique visitors to your site during the same period. For example, if your website generated 50 orders last month and 2,000 unique visitors flowed through your site during the same period, then your website’s conversion rate would be 2.5 percent (50 orders divided by 2,000 unique visitors = 2.5 percent). On average, a website will offer a 2 to 4 percent unique visitor conversion rate. Measuring your conversion rate is important even if you don’t sell products directly on your website. Regardless, any website should have some sort of call-to-action, such as customers submitting requests for quotes, emailing customer service-related questions, scheduling appointments, calling a special 800 number that only appears on your website etc Each of these actions can be tracked and then used to measure the effectiveness of your search engine optimization efforts.
There may be some underlying issues with the content or site navigation if your website doesn’t offer a 2-4 percent conversion rate. And the average conversion rate of 2 to 4 percent is just that, an average. Fireclick.com contains more information on industry-specific conversion rates.
Now we go to the data collection. You should only select keywords that have a proven track record of generating traffic. Keywords that are proven performers are those words or phrases that searchers use every day on Google, Yahoo, and Bing. It’s a wasted effort to get a Google website ranking number one for a keyword that no one is using. In my experience, one of the best (and free) keyword tools is the Keyword Picker Tool at SEOBook.com. The tool will show you the number of times a day a particular keyword is searched for across Google, Yahoo and Bing.
Now we will assume that you have a list of keywords that are proven performers and your probability of getting a Google website ranking in the Top 10 or better is high based on the ratio of 500. We will now combine the different data points to predict a increase in your online sales for each keyword in your list. For example, let’s say you got a Google website ranking of number one for a keyword that, according to the SEOBook.com keyword selection tool, was searched for 100 times a day on Google. Based on the graph above, the site ranked number one would receive a click-through rate from Google of approximately 40 percent. This would translate to 40 visits to your website each day (100 searches x 40 percent CTR = 40 visits), or 1,200 visits per month.
Now we will convert the 1,200 visits into dollars. For this, we will assume that your website offers an average conversion rate of 2 to 4 percent. This means that the 1,200 visits should produce approximately 24 to 48 orders per month (1,200 unique visitors x 2 to 4 percent = 24 to 48). We’ll also assume that your average online order is approximately $50. Therefore, a single keyword with a Google website ranking of number one could generate $1,200 to $2,400 in online sales for your business each month, or $14,400 to $28,800 per year.
This process forms the basis for good practical and tactical analysis. However, it’s important to remember how CTRs drop precipitously after position number one. This reinforces the need to keep your website ranked in Google’s Top 10 or higher (first page of search results) for keywords that are important to your business. Otherwise, a large percentage of your customers and prospects won’t find your website if Google ranks it beyond its first page of search results.
