How To Estimate Your Search Engine Traffic
By Anna Johnson on June 2nd, 2010When using a keyword tool to estimate search term traffic, it’s wise to keep one important caveat in mind: the number of searches does NOT equal the number of visitors to your website. Nor do the ‘estimated’ traffic figures given by the keyword tool necessarily apply to YOUR site.
So how do you estimate traffic from the search engines? Here’s a way to generate arguably the most accurate estimate of traffic you’re likely to get. Follow these six (6) steps…
Step 1: Identify a bunch of webpages that are already highly optimized for certain keyword phrases.
The more pages you can identify, the better, and the higher they rank in the search engines, the better.
Take note of where these pages rank in the search engines for the associated phrases and check your website analytics tool to see the average monthly (seasonally adjusted) traffic they get based on the given rankings.
In other words, you want to know how much traffic is associated with what search engine ranking.
For example, you might have a webpage optimized for ‘gluten free banana bread’ that is number one on Google and attracts x number of unique visitors from Google.
Step 2: Open up your keyword research tool.
If you’re only concerned with traffic from Google, you might just use Google’s free keyword research tool. In this case you don’t need to get search engine rankings or traffic numbers from any other search engines. If you want a more comprehensive view of your potential traffic, however, you might use a keyword tool that estimates searches from multiple search engines e.g. Wordtracker or Keyword Discovery.
Step 3: One by one, type the keyword phrases you’ve identified into your keyword tool to see how much monthly search volume they each get. Again, adjust for seasonal variation (if applicable).
For instance, you might find that ‘gluten free banana bread’ gets y number of searches each month.
Step 4: For each keyword phrase, calculate the ratio between the monthly traffic to your page and the monthly search volume i.e. divide x by y.
Step 5: Now that you have a bunch of ratios, derive your average overall ratio. This number represents the average relationship between search volume and traffic to your site. Call it your ‘traffic to search’ ratio or ‘TSR’.
Step 6: Armed with your TSR you can now type ANY search term into your keyword tool and multiply the monthly search volume by your TSR to estimate the actual traffic to your site.
Okay, okay – this method is NOT fool-proof. It’s a way to ESTIMATE traffic based on historical performance and, of course, historical performance is no guarantee of future performance!
Nor is the relationship between search volume and actual traffic likely to be the same for all key phrases. What’s more, the relationship is likely to vary depending on the search engine and the ranking in that search engine.
With that in mind, you might generate a range of TSRs – a TSR for ‘Google Result #1, Page #1′, a TSR for ‘Bing Result #3, Page #1′, etc to estimate traffic based on different scenarios.
Or you might keep it simple: use one TSR and test it out.
That’s right: test out your TSR to see how accurate it is. If it turns out to be inaccurate, try a different, more precise TSRs. After a bit of testing, you might find that, in fact, you have a TSR that does provide a good indication of traffic to your site.
Above all, don’t assume that search volume equals traffic volume because whatever TSR you generate, it’s unlikely to be a 1:1 ratio!
