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October 26, 2022 (Updated: March 8, 2023)
When you understand your potential SEO traffic, you can create a stronger content marketing campaign. That can help you generate more visitors to your site, increase your brand awareness, and create more quality leads for your business. However, estimating SEO traffic can sometimes feel more like an art than a science. Luckily, we have the steps and the expertise to help you become the best SEO traffic estimator out there. In this article, we discuss:
Search engine optimization is one of the most powerful marketing strategies at your disposal. It provides you with consistent, organic traffic, from the content you create. And more traffic can help your brand build stronger relationships with its target audience and in turn, more quality leads. In order to ensure your SEO is effective, it’s important to estimate the results of your marketing campaign. This helps you see how much traffic you’re likely to attract with your content creation and how that might affect your business’s goals overall. For example, let’s say your main goal is to improve sales.
SEO traffic might just be one of your many strategies, but you need to understand how to use it and if it’s actually going to help you. So, you compare your current number of sales with your number of website visitors and you get a ratio that you can use as a benchmark as you start increasing current sales. In this case, you might receive a sale for every two hundred people who visit your site. If you estimate that your SEO traffic should increase by 30,000 people a month, that’s a potential of 1,500 new sales.
Read more: 35 Ways To Increase Your Website Traffic
There are three main variables you should check out when estimating your SEO traffic. These variables include:
Search rank is the position of your content on the search engine results page (SERP). Though your search ranking can range from one to three million and more, your content will rarely receive traffic unless it sits in one of the top ten positions on page one. And each one of those positions is going to give you varying results of organic traffic.
Generally speaking, the higher your organic search results, the more potential for traffic to your website. But that’s not a steadfast rule. When estimating traffic, it’s important to understand how many visitors each page receives on the first SERPs. This shows you roughly how much traffic you might receive if your content were to rank in that same position.
Search frequency, also known as search volume, is how often people search for a keyword every month. For instance, as of April 2022, the keyword “how to change a tire” had a search frequency of 83. This means that people search for that keyword 83 times a month. Companies have no control over search volume, only the keywords they decide to target. The higher the frequency, the tougher it is to rank well for that keyword, too.
But that’s why keyword research is so critical. Keywords can have a lot of variations, so it’s important to look at different ones to see which might be easier to target and which ones might give you the most traffic. For example, the keyword “how to change a flat tire” has a search frequency of 53, which might make it less appealing. But it’s possible the keyword might be easier to rank for, which would help you boost traffic even more.
Click-through rate (CTR) compares the number of clicks your content receives versus the number of impressions. Impressions are when someone searches for something and it shows up on the search engine results pages (SERPs). So, if your content appears in SERPs 100 times, but only ever receives one click, you have a CTR of 1%. The purpose of measuring CTR is to help you see how often people click on content, especially wherever it currently ranks.
If the top-ranking page on the SERP has a CTR of 25%, that’s pretty good, but there’s still a potential for even more traffic there. Improving your click-through rate isn’t exactly a cut-and-dry task, but there are some approaches to take to start improving it:
Related: What SEO Tactics You Should Try Before Hiring an Agency?
Even with the available SEO tools for content marketing, you can still measure SEO traffic manually. The approaches below can help you get started without an estimator tool:
Conducting keyword research helps you understand the difficulty of different keywords. This shows you what you have the best chance of targeting and some of the most trending topics in your industry. It can also show you what your competitors currently rank for and how they’re structuring their content around those topics.
Though you might want to focus on the main keywords in your industry, it’s often better to search for long-tail keywords that might have less competition. For example, let’s say your business provides automotive repair services. You might want to target the keywords “car repair” or “vehicle maintenance.” But those keywords are most likely difficult to target because they’re so broad.
Instead, it’s helpful to narrow down the keyword. If your business is local, try adding the name of your city or county. If you specialize in a certain type of vehicle, try adding the make and model names to the keyword. To conduct keyword research, use tools like Google Trends, Keyword Surfer, or Answer The Public.
These tactics can lead to new opportunities for content creation and traffic generation for your business. Plus, by finding the right phrases, your team better target exact keywords in your content to help your website rank higher in search.
As you collect your keyword information, it’s helpful to keep a list of it on a spreadsheet. This allows you to organize the information and estimate your traffic more easily. Once you have a list of potential keywords, look at each term’s search frequency and search engine ranking.
After you create your list from these variables, find the keywords and phrases that are the most difficult to rank for. Remember: the higher the search frequency and difficulty, the more challenging the keyword can be to rank for. If there are a few keywords that are very difficult, it might be better to replace them with different ones.
The easiest way to determine your potential ranking for keywords is to look at the first page of the SERPs. Start with the number one ranking webpage. What is that site’s authority on the internet? How does your website compare to theirs? Do you have a chance of beating that site for its number-one position? If so, mark that keyword as a potential for ranking at the number one spot. If not, go to the next webpage in the SERPs and ask the same questions.
This isn’t an exact science. You might guess right or wrong, and only time can tell if your SEO campaign is strong enough to rank where you predict. But that’s why they call it estimating. You can also use tools for tracking SERP rankings for specific keywords, where these SEO rank trackers show you the current SERP position and traffic volume. With this information, your team can plan content that focuses on the target keywords with the most potential.
Finally, take your list of potential rankings and find out how much traffic each receives. You can find this information through various tools, such as Ubersuggest, Ahrefs, and Spyfu. For example, let’s say you believe you can rank at the number two position for the keyword “best golf club for short range.” Take the URL from the page currently ranking at number two and see how much organic traffic they get per month. This can help you judge how much monthly traffic you might receive if you beat them for their current SERP position.
As you do this, you can fill out the information on your keyword spreadsheet. Then combine the numbers to see how much monthly traffic you might get overall. Comparing this number to your SEO traffic goals can help you determine if you need to target additional keywords. Remember, when estimating, it’s always better to overshoot your goals instead of hitting them directly. SEO campaigns are fickle and they don’t always work as you intend.
Though you can easily estimate your SEO traffic using the steps above, working with a content marketing expert can save you time, money, and other crucial company resources. Businesses like CopyPress have the SEO tools and experts to help you create a strong content marketing campaign that generates organic traffic for your site. We’ll work with you to develop a list of keywords that are sure to boost your site visitors and click-through rates. Schedule a call with us today to see how we can help you create excellent content for your target audience and improve your SEO traffic.
Read more: How To Improve SEO
When estimating traffic potential, using SEO tools makes the job easier. Take a look at some of the options you can use:
CopyPress has a content marketing analysis tool that compares your website and its content with your competitors. It shows your site’s current organic traffic per month, as well as your pages currently in the top 10 of the SERPs. Your content report also gives you possible content syndication and low-hanging fruit opportunities.
And these opportunities include the keywords that your competitors rank for, but you don’t. Targeting these gaps in your content can improve SERP rankings and increase traffic. Request your content marketing analysis today to learn where your content currently stands and discover how to better estimate your future SEO traffic.
“CopyPress gives us the ability to work with more dealership groups. We are able to provide unique and fresh content for an ever growing customer base. We know that when we need an influx of content to keep our clients ahead of the game in the automotive landscape, CopyPress can handle these requests with ease.”
Kevin Doory
Director of SEO at Auto Revo
Serpstat is a tool that provides you with an overlook of your website, including its current organic traffic, visibility, and more. You can easily search your website with their tool to learn more about your site and its performance, including which keywords you rank for. This can help you discover a better keyword targeting plan to estimate your SEO traffic more accurately. You can even use the tool to search specific URLs to uncover their monthly traffic and learn the potential traffic you might generate by winning that SERP ranking.
Sitechecker provides you with a site’s current traffic overview, engagement, and traffic sources. It also provides you with other information, such as your top organic keywords, top paid keywords, and possible competitors. These stats can help you understand what you might need to improve in order to boost your SEO traffic. Finding possible competitors can also help you conduct more thorough keyword research by seeing what your competitors target and how their pages currently rank.
Ahrefs has a lot of different SEO tools that can help you monitor your website and business. From keyword generators to your traffic overview, Ahrefs helps you determine a lot about your SEO strategy. Use its keyword generator to see which keywords have the greatest potential in offering you better SEO traffic. Use the site analysis to see how your site currently ranks and performs against your competitors. It even has a built-in rank tracker that can help you see where your content ranks, or could rank, and how much traffic you might receive while there.
SpyFu is another SEO tool that lets you see data for a range of things on your website. That includes your traffic and keywords you currently rank. Using this information, you can learn a lot about your potential SEO traffic and ways to improve it. That includes targeting certain keywords and creating or optimizing different pieces of content, which can all help with improving your click-through rate and website visitors.
Estimating your SEO traffic is important because it can help you understand what content you need to develop and how to best achieve your digital marketing goals. Start by creating a list of strong keywords to target and develop your list of data and estimate traffic from there. But don’t be afraid to ask for help.
At CopyPress, our team of experts works with you to set goals, research SEO opportunities, plan content types, and develop a strategy that gets results. From initial strategy development to content creation and delivery, we help you cut production time and the costs of hiring a full team of content creators. Get in touch to find out how quality content writing can help your business or agency achieve its goals.