Is it worth it for you, as a small business owner, to invest your time and energy in optimizing your website content in order to get the number one position on Google’s website? Will the effort result in more traffic to your door? And ultimately, will the time you invest actually increase your online sales by an acceptable amount so that the compensation for the time spent on search engine optimization is worth it to you?
I understand the dilemma. If you’re like most business owners who have read this post, your daily reality probably consists of 20 top 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 example below is to help you estimate online sales increases 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 SEO-related terms 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 unfamiliar with CTR, it simply means the percentage of time that searches click on your website that is displayed in their search results compared to a different site. And CTRs are significantly affected based on your website’s Google ranking for a particular keyword. For example, a site that has obtained a Google website ranking of number one for a particular keyword produces a Google click-through rate of 42 percent compared to the site that is ranked number 10, resulting in a meager 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 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 conversion rate of 2 to 4 percent of unique visitors. Measuring your conversion rate is important even if you don’t sell products directly on your website. Regardless, any website should have some kind of call to action, such as clients submitting requests for quotes, emailing customer service related questions, scheduling appointments, calling a special 800 number that only appears on their 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 problems with the content or navigation of the site if your website does not offer a conversion rate of 2 to 4 percent. 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 let’s move on to data collection. You should only select keywords that have a proven track record of generating traffic. Keywords that have proven performance are those words or phrases that Google, Yahoo, and Bing search engines use every day. It’s a vain effort to get a Google website to rank number one for a keyword that no one is using. In my experience, one of the best (and free) keyword tools is the keyword selection tool at SEOBook.com. The tool will show you the number of times a day a particular keyword is searched through Google, Yahoo, and Bing.
Now we will assume that you have a list of keywords that have proven performance 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 an increase in your online sales for every keyword on your list. For example, let’s say you got a Google website ranking at number one for a keyword that, according to the SEOBook.com Keyword Selection Tool, was searched 100 times a day on Google. Based on the graph above, the site that ranks first will 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 2-4 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 your average online order is about $ 50. So a single keyword with a Google website ranking at number one could generate between $ 1,200 and $ 2,400 in online sales for your business each. month, or $ 14,400 to $ 28,800 a year.
This process forms the basis for good practical and tactical analysis. However, it is important to remember how CTRs drop precipitously after position number one. This reinforces the need to keep your website ranked in the Google 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 will not find your website if Google ranks it beyond your first page of search results.