The Value of SEO
Search Engine Optimisation is now the single most important marketing available to business
This is one of the nitty gritty Commercial questions about online presence going forward. How can you put a value on being on Page 1 for your search phrases. Well there are several pieces of data available to help do this and arrive at an estimate of the monthly value on being ranked on page 1.
Now bear in mind if you advertise in a newspaper or the yellow pages you are doing so fairly blind to how your advert will perform for your business. You have no idea how many times your advert will be seen and even less idea how it will convert into sales unless of course you monitor it very closely and make a range of asssumptions over a long period of time eg you use a special phone number attached to that advert and you record the number of phone calls you get to that number and how many sales were made. All businesses should be doing this in an attempt to understand their customers reaction to the company’s advertising but the reallity is nobody does monitor this.
So how is this relevant to Google and estimating what value Google’s page 1 may have to your business. Well Google publish their traffic figures for every phrase searched on the internet in each country around the world, they publish these figures monthly at the end of each month, so currently May 2010 traffic figures are showing. They also publish their average Cost per Click for each search term. So we know 2 things from these figures:
1. HOW MANY SEARCHES EACH PHRASE GETS IN AUSTRALIA PER MONTH.
2. HOW MUCH ADVERTISERS ARE PREPARED TO PAY PER CLICK( ie the cost per click).
At this point we make an assumption. We assume that the average Cost per Click for a phrase is based on reasonable behaviour ie companies are not paying more for a click than it is worth to them. This is a fair assumption as with the help of Google analytics(which should be installed on all websites) businesses should know their conversion rates of clicks to enquiries or sales and as a result know what each click (on average) is worth in terms of enquiries and sales( a tiny fraction of what is involved to track magazine and newspaper ad performance).
So we now have a market price of what a click through Google is worth and a figure for how many clicks a phrase gets every month. If we multiply these 2 together we should get a fair estimation of monthly value available for a phrase in Google.
To give you some examples:
“dentist brisbane” average CPC $1.00 No. of monthly searches(May 2010) 5,400
MONTHLY VALUE OF $5,400
“cosmetic dentist brisbane” average CPC $4.90 No. of monthly searches(May 2010) 170
MONTHLY VALUE OF $833
“pest control brisbane” average CPC $6.88 No. of monthly searches(May 2010) 4,400
MONTHLY VALUE OF $30,272
“personal injury lawyer” average CPC $21.87 No. of monthly searches(May 2010) 2,400
MONTHLY VALUE OF $52,488
“furniture brisbane” average CPC $1.82 No. of monthly searches(May 2010) 40,500
MONTHLY VALUE OF $73,710
“office furniture brisbane” average CPC $3.56 No. of monthly searches(May 2010) 4,400
MONTHLY VALUE OF $15,664
“accountant brisbane” average CPC $1.50 No. of monthly searches(May 2010) 2,900
MONTHLY VALUE OF $4,350
These are just a few examples, most businesses have a minimum of 10 different keyphrases that they should be getting searchers from eg accountant brisbane, brisbane accountant, accountants brisbane, accounts in brisbane……….etc.
If you’d like to know the Monthly Value of your keyphrases, send us an email to : info@onlinemarketingconsultants.com.au and put “Page 1 Monthly Value” in the subject heading. If you include your website we will tell you what your keyphrases are worth by return email.
