Let us say you are a business owner of a halloween costume store, and you want to expand your customer reach by taking online orders on your website. You would like to know whether you should do pay per click advertising or hire an SEO consultant to get organic traffic to your website.
You give an SEO professional these 5 keywords that you are considering ranking for.
- halloween costumes for kids
- pirate costumes
- superhero costumes
- costumes for children
- kids halloween costumes
If I were that SEO specialist, I would generate the following data for you and explain the importance of each.
Who controls the money in your market?
From the chart above, we can quickly see that spirithalloween.com controls the money in the “halloween costumes for kids” market. This is a very lucrative market, with over $4.4 million dollars worth of traffic being divided up among the top 10 search results (page 1). Of the $4.4 million dollars, spirithalloween.com receives $958,752, which is the biggest chunck (see diagram below).
How much money is in the market?
Reviewing the top five positions for the “halloween costumes for kids” market, you can see where the potential is in the market. Only 3 out of the five domains are ranked for all five of the market keywords. This allows for you, the website business owner, to be able to come in and take a slice of the pie. If you are ambitious, you can even take a large chunck of that pie. It all is dependent on the time and budget you are willing to invest.
Can you predict the future for this market?
But before you spend a dime on SEO services, you want to make sure that your market has long term viability. Does this market have potential to make money year after year? One way to answer this question is to look at past trends.
Is investing in SEO Services really cheaper?
Now that we can agree that this is a long term lucrative market, let’s take a look what it would cost you every month if you were to pay for this traffic through Google Adwords advertising.
- SE Traffic – Monthly search engine traffic
- PPC Clicks – Monthly clicks from Google Adwords advertising
- CPC – Cost Per Click from Google Adwords advertising
- PPC Costs – Monthly Google Adwords advertising, before consulting fees.
What would be your one-time SEO investment to get the same traffic?
- SEO Time – estimated number of months it will take to rank in position #1 for the keyword.
- SEO Costs – estimated promotional costs, before consulting fees.
What are Estimated Revenue from SEO Traffic?
Below are two estimates. The first assumes a $10/sale revenue, while the second assumes a $100/sale revenue. Both make the following assumptions:
- Your website ranks at position 1 for the given keywords.
- 25% of search engine traffic land on your website.
- There 1% conversion rate once the visitor is on your website.
$10 revenue per sale
$100 revenue per sale
As you can deduce from the two samples above, you will recoup your SEO investment sooner when your product or service has a larger profit magin.
The Rest of the Market Story
Up until now, we have only accounted for 5 keywords in the entire Halloween Costumes market. Let’s look deeper into each of the five keywords and consider also its keyword variants (long tail keywords, related keywords, supporting keywords). Below are data about the five keywords, along with their most profitable variants.
The Organic Market Value is the entire organic search market value for a keyword (web pages that are on page 1 of Google). The websites on page one are the market leaders and such are the ones that take the greatest chunk of potential profit for the given set of keywords.
The Yearly ORVMax is the Maximum Organic Rank Value for each keyword set and is measured in dollars. It is the calculation of websites that rank in the #1 and #2 positions for the keyword sets on both the Google and Yahoo search engines. This dollar amount is what you would have to pay each year for Pay Per Click advertising on Google and Yahoo.
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