Tips on Calculating the Value of Organic Traffic

Entrepreneurs handling their businesses online in one way or another are also SEO salespersons. The job of an SEO salesperson is to help their clients understand the value of the services they provide. For any business person, this is a crucial part of the business both online and offline. It entices the future customers to the available services that the company offers, and it builds trust between them and the company.

One may ask, are the efforts for having an SEO program for the company actually worth it? Fortunately, there are ways of assessing this. One of the most common ways is to calculate the traffic from year after year, as well as the revenue changes from the organic channel. The results may be encouraging, sometimes, it may not be too delightful.

Most of the time, companies credit their brand recognition because of big PPC and print advertising budgets. It also leads to the assumption the organic traffic is a mere side effect of the company’s Pay Per Click or print efforts. But this may not always be so.

In this article, let’s see some methods on how to differentiate the brand from the non-brand traffic, as well as assign a value to non-brand traffic that a PPC-minded business owner can appreciate.

What is Organic Traffic?

Organic traffic is the kind of traffic that is a result of unpaid search activities. Most often, the goal of SEO is to increase organic traffic. The other kind of traffic is the PPC which comes from ads that cost money.

So now, how can we calculate the value or Search Engine traffic that is organic? It may seem like a daunting task at first, but if you know the value of the organic keywords, then the process won’t be as complicated as you think it is.

What is a Quality Keyword?

An essential thing anyone should realize is that keywords may or may not lead to conversions. The choice of keywords is predetermined. What this means is that the keywords are dependent on the goals of the blog or website. These goals may include getting more traffic, generating qualified leads, getting subscriptions, and bringing in users to sign in, and much more.

What can attain those goals are high-quality keywords. But you have to choose a keyword that is relevant to the content page. It also has to be integrated as organically as possible. Along with this, the page ought to be properly optimized for the target keyword. Lastly, choose a keyword that will match not just the language users search for, but as well as the intention behind the query.

What are Relevant Keywords?

Relevant keywords have two criteria. One is that the keyword should be relevant to your company or business. The second is that the keyword ought to be relevant to your audience.

If you are having trouble on how to start, an option is to go to Google Keyword Planner. It is a tool that can help in discovering keyword opportunities. It can display hundreds and even thousands of relevant keywords.

The basic rule of optimizing a page for a particular keyword is that you have to make sure you are targeting two to three keywords per page and that these keywords are associated with one another. Start Uncovering “Hidden” Profit-Generating Keywords in Seconds with SEMrush… In Literally Any Niche.

How to Calculate Traffic Opportunity for Each Keyword

Once you’ve seen the keyword suggestions for your keyword, you can start identifying the traffic potential of those chosen keywords. The Google Keyword Planner comes in handy here since it also shows information about the search volume. With this, you can see the how many users may click your landing page, given that your landing page is already ranking for that particular keyword.

Search Engine Results Pages or SERPs can show up to ten results. There are some basic things that your site has already achieved. For example, it should already be appearing in the SERP. If not, the first thing you ought to do is to work on optimizing your pages first. In this way, Google can display the landing pages for all of the relevant searches.

Search Analytics Report

You can get the last 90 days of organic queries that drove traffic to your site through Google Search Console. With the results, you can see the relative volume of non-brand queries which drives traffic to your site, and also discuss the value of that non-brand traffic with more specific detail in analytics programs.

Here are steps on how you can extract non-brand queries from this Search Analytics Report.

• Go to Google Search Console > Search Traffic > Search Analytics, and alter “Dates” to return the last 90 days.

• Click “Download” at the bottom left of the table. You’ll be able to get a CSV.

• To filter out the branded keywords, Click [CTRL+H] to open the Find and Replace dialogue box.
• Click “Replace All.”
• Highlight all and delete.
• At the top row, click “Select All” and then click “OK.”

You now have a list of non-branded keywords and 90 days of click data.

Suggested CPC to non-brand clicks

After that, we can now get Google’s Suggested CPC for the non-brand keywords. It will be multiplied by one-month click average column by the Suggested CPC.

Here are the steps:

• Add a new column and name it “QueryForCPC.”Include a formula to wrap the query within brackets. The brackets will indicate the exact match for the phrase when we will ask for the suggested CPC.
• Highlight this column. In this column, you can copy and paste the values into Notepad. What you will be left with is a txt. File. Save this file.

Next steps are:

• Open Google Keyword Planner at https://adwords.google.com/KeywordPlanner.
• Click “Get click and cost performance forecasts.”

• Select “Choose File” under “Option 2: Upload file.”

• Select your .txt file, and then click the “Get Forecasts” button.
• Enter a bid of $10.00 in the “Enter a Bid.”
• Enter $10,000 in the “Enter Daily Budget.”
• Click “Get detailed forecasts.”
• Click the “Keyword” tab, and then the “Download” button.
• Select “Excel CSV” and Download.
• Look at the Keyword and Estimated Average CPC Columns.
• In your original XLS, add a worksheet where you will paste the Keyword and Estimated Average CPC columns.
• Add a column to the original worksheet. Name it “Average CPC.” In it, we’ll do a VLOOKUP on the tab added with the CPC data.
• In the Avg CPC column’s first cell, type in =VLOOKUP(A2,Sheet1!$A$2:$B$1000,2,FALSE).
• Press enter, then copy that cell and paste all the way down that column to the last row.
• Lastly, add a new column. Name it “Est Cost/Mo” and type =G2*H2.

The sum of Est Cost/Mon is what you have to pay AdWords to be able to get those organic, non-brand clicks every month.

Takeaway

Trying this process may be tedious, but it may well be worth it. Calculating the value of your organic traffic will allow you to understand your customers better. You will be able to see the kind of keywords they are using and the phrases that are usually associated with what they are looking for. Importantly, you will be able to see the value that organic, non-brand traffic can generate and how this can work best for your business.