Estimating the traffic of a keyword , that is , knowing the clicks that you will get for being in a certain position is not something new (we use it as seo consultants ) and it is also very easy to know. But a little help never hurts to be able to do it faster in Excel. That is why I have created a simple calculator in Excel to know the visits that your website will receive automatically.
With this little Excel, just by entering the monthly searches for a certain keyword, it will give you an estimate of the traffic you will receive based on the position you occupy in the Google search engine. To know the monthly searches for a certain keyword, I use the Google Keyword Tool.
As an example I have given you the keyword “SEO Analyst” which, according to the Google keyword tool, has about 36 monthly searches in Spain. If we put this data in the corresponding box, it tells us that for the first position it would have to take me 18 clicks. Well, looking at this data in Google Analytics, I get that the previous month (10/11/2011 – 11/10/2011) I received 22 visits for the keyword “seo analyst”, so we see that the data is quite close.
As a curiosity, what has happened to me this month is that an agency has started to bid for that keyword in Adwords and for this reason I have only received 4 visits for this keyword. This means that the Adwords ad is getting 50% of those clicks (it is behaving as if it were in the first organic position), which is the traffic that I was getting previously and now it is as if it were second in the ranking .
How does the traffic estimation tool work?
I have taken an idea that I liked from José B.Moreno to know the potential traffic that a keyword brings to a website . To calculate web traffic, José uses the 3 most relevant Google SERP CTR studies done so far, and with them he takes an average. Finally, I multiply by the number of monthly searches that are made on Google for a certain keyword. This data, as we have said before, is extracted from the Google search estimation tool. I like the idea of averaging since testing gives me better results than just the AOL study.
For the top 10 positions in Google I use the average of the 3 studies and for the rest of the positions the data from the AOL study. Besides, I have left you more spaces in case you want to compare keywords. The studies to average the CTR are the following:
1- AOL Studio .
2- Study by Nielsen and Loranger in the book Prioritizing Web Usability .
3- Cornell University eye-tracking study .
SERP position (Google)
1
two
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
eleven
12
13
14
fifteen
16
17
18
19
twenty
twenty-one
31
41
AOL
51%
12%
8%
6%
5%
4%
3%
3%
3%
3%
0.66%
0.66%
0.52%
0.48%
0.47%
0.39%
0.36%
0.34%
0.32%
0.30%
0.29%
0.12%
0.07%
Nielson
51%
16%
6%
6%
5%
4%
two%
1%
1%
two%
-
-
-
-
-
-
Cornell
56%
13%
10%
4%
5%
3%
3%
3%
3%
3%
-
-
-
-
-
-
Average
fifty%
14%
8%
5%
5%
4%
3%
two%
two%
3%
0.66%
0.66%
0.52%
0.48%
0.47%
0.39%
0.36%
0.34%
0.32%
0.30%
0.29%
0.12%
0.07%
(From position 11 to 41 I only use the data from the AOL study)
Conclusions to the estimation of keyword traffic
These data are a theoretical approximation, because in practice there are elements in the SERP that occupy space and take clicks (AdWords, maps, images, news, etc.), but even so, we can have an idea of the volume of visits that gives us a keyword . In the example that I have given you before, you can see the loss of traffic that a single Google Adwords ad can cause.
As a tip, if any of the aforementioned elements are shown for a keyword, you can safely consider a 50% CTR loss.
And obviously other types of elements that are more difficult to predict have an influence, such as copy in the titles and snippets, as well as an SEO and User Friendly URL. I say this last because Google is testing URLs by including them in SERP titles, so you have to keep an eye on this aspect as well.
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