Is it worth it for you as a small business owner to invest your time and energy toward optimizing your Website’s content with the goal of earning a Google Website ranking of number one? Will the effort result in more traffic to your doorstep? And ultimately, will the time you invest actually increase your online sales by an acceptable amount in order to make the trade-off of time spent on search engine optimization worthwhile to you?

I understand the dilemma. If you are like most of the business owners who have read this post, your daily reality likely consists of 20 top priorities that need to get done today. Not just two or three. And search engine optimization is likely 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 eliminate the guesswork regarding where to invest your time for the greatest impact.

As a starting point, you should become familiar with two key SEO-related terms as well as learn how to collect two pieces of data. The terms are:

• Click-through-rate or CTR
• Conversion rate

If you are not familiar with CTR, it simply means the percentage of time that searches click on your Website displayed in their search results versus a different site. And CTRs are impacted significantly based on your Google Website ranking for a particular keyword. For example, a site that has earned a Google Website ranking of number one for a particular keyword produces a Google click-through-rate of 42 percent versus the site that is ranked number 10, which produces a meager 6.06 percent CTR. See the chart below for more detail. The chart contains data for Google click-through-rates for Websites ranked in the Top 10 by Google (first page) for whatever keyword being searched by visitors.

 

 

 

 

 

Patrick Altoft and Neil Walker wrote a couple of informative blog posts about Google Website rankings, CTRs, and provide some excellent data from several studies conducted over the last four years.

The second term is 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 deliver a 2 to 4 percent conversion rate of unique visitors. Measuring your conversion rate is important even if you do not sell products directly on your Website. Regardless, any Website should have some form of call-to-action such as customers submitting requests for quotes, e-mailing 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 content or site navigation if your Website is not delivering a 2 to 4 percent conversion rate. I recommend reading Don’t Make Me Think, which in straightforward language makes the difficult topic of Web usability very simple and easy to understand.

And the 2 to 4 percent average conversion rate is simply that, an average. Check out Fireclick.com for more information about industry specific conversions rates.

Now on to data collection. You should only select keywords that have a proven track record for delivering traffic. Keywords that are proven performer are those words or phrases that are used every single day by searchers in Google, Yahoo, and Bing. It is a wasted effort to score a Google Website ranking of number one for a keyword that no one is using. In my experience, one of the best (and free) keyword tools is the Keyword Selector Tool at SEOBook.com. The tool will show you the number of times each day that a particular keyword is searched for via Google, Yahoo, and Bing.

I take the keyword selection process several steps further in Chapter 4 of The Small Business Owner’s Handbook to Search Engine Optimization by demonstrating how you can take the data from the SEOBook.com Keyword Suggestion Tool, along with some data from Google, and combine it to form a simple ratio that I call the “500 ratio”. With the 500 ratio, your probability for scoring a top ranking in Google is very high. Inc. Magazine highlighted my 500 ratio in their July-August 2010 issue.

We will now assume you have a list of keywords that are proven performers and your probability for scoring a Google Website ranking in the Top 10 or better is high based on the 500 ratio. Now we will combine the different data points to predict an increase in your online sales for each keyword on your list. For example, say you scored a Google Website ranking of number one for a keyword that according to the SEOBook.com Keyword Selector Tool was searched on 100 times per day in Google. According to the chart above, the site ranking number one would receive a Google click-through-rate of approximately 40 percent. This would translate into 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 delivers the average 2 to 4 percent conversion rate. 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 will also assume that your average online order is approximately $50. Therefore, a single keyword with a Google Website ranking of number one could drive between $1,200 to $2,400 of online sales for your business each month, or $14,400 to $28,800 annually.

This process forms the basis for a good practical and tactical analysis. However, it is important to remember how CTRs drop off precipitously after the number one position. This reinforces the need to keep your Website ranked in Google’s Top 10 or higher (first page of search results) for the keywords that matter to your business. Otherwise, a large percentage of your customers and prospects will not find your Website if Google has you ranked beyond their first page of search results.