| How much is a first page Google listing worth to your business? | |
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Once we get past the obvious question of ‘I want to get my website on the first page of Google’, which every webmaster requests as a mater of course, the real question to ask is ‘How much is a first page Google listing worth to your business?’. This is more than just a question of academic value. If you blindly want your website to get to the first page of Google for a certain search term or even a number of search terms you must be ready to justify the amount of money it will cost in terms of what you will get back from the expenditure. This is good ol’ return on the investment (ROI) territory and for it to make sense you need to really be able to answer ‘How much is a first page Google listing worth to your business’. The point of this post is that you really do not know and cannot know that until you actually have got your website on Google’s first page for a particular search term. At this point we begin to get into chicken-or-the-egg kind of territory where you are thinking that you probably need to spend a whole lot of SEO dollars just to test your intuition. Let’s look at this logically for a minute. Getting your site on Google’s first page, on the face of it, makes perfect sense. After all, you want high visibility and it does not get any higher for a website than a Google first page listing. But if you focus on maybe a dozen search terms in order to get that result (or even the wrong search terms), a place on Google’s top ten on the first page is going to have little or no effect in terms of visitor numbers and it may even have little effect in terms of desired action (i.e. buying a service or taking a specific action). This means that although you are there maybe you are targeting the wrong crowd, or maybe you are targeting the right crowd at the wrong moment (like a little after they have found your competitors and have already spent their money). You begin to see the problem. I mention this because I have troubleshot clients who spent $30,000 on SEO to get on the first page of Google and then received just $5,000 in return in terms of bought services. That’s $25,000 sent down the drain which, had they just decided to burn, one note at a time and filmed the results and put it up on YouTube would have probably gathered them more than a million viewers and given them more than $5,000 in sales. In order to evaluate a first page listing on Google you need to begin with what you expect from your ideal, targeted, visitor. If what you expect is for them to make a purchase, for example, and that purchase has a value you need to take it into account. If you expect them to take action and do something (like, for instance, I expect one in six people who read this to go ahead and buy SEO Help either as a download here or elsewhere like Kindle or Mobipocket or as a paperback) you also need to have a clearly understood transactional value for that action. This means that you start by giving a monetary value to each ideal convert. Your next step is to determine what percentage falls within the total number of visitors who will be attracted to your website from that first page listing on Google. In the case of Help My SEO, for instance the search term ‘Book to get your website to the first page of Google’ contested by over 160 million other pages, delivers my site to Google’s first page and, at the time of writing this, on the very first two spots with a nested listing (check out my SEO Tip on how to get a nested listing on Google and how beneficial it is to your website traffic. This did not happen by accident. I deliberately researched and thought about the search term someone thinking of doing their own SEO would look for and then worked to get it there. That search term alone delivers thirty visitors a day of whom some are curious, 5% come back, 10% buy the SEO Help eBook download from this site and some go on to Amazon to buy the Kindle version or the paperback edition.  Because I have no real data of just how many buy the paper edition or the Kindle edition of SEO Help my starting point is that each conversion from each visitor is worth $19.99 to me. That means that I get to sell three downloadable copies of my SEO Help eBook a day, on average, on that search term alone. If I were a business owner outsourcing SEO that would have to be my starting point so that I would have to take the monthly sum the SEO firm I hired would be charging me, divide it by thirty (the days in the average month) and then take that sum and see just how many converts a day I would need in order to get back that money and make a little on top. This may sound pretty basic but it is a calculation which many webmasters fail to make and end up, as a result, losing money even after they have achieved a first page on Google listing for their website. If you really want to succeed it is important that you start by understanding ROI right from the outstart, that way you are in total control of your SEO as a potent business tool rather than a feature of your online marketing which you can brag about to your friends but which does not really give you any money.
David Amerland is the author of the Search Engine Optimization book: SEO Help: 20 steps to get your website to Google's #1 page published by New Line Publishing and available to buy from Amazon.com and any quality bookshop. The ebook version of the book is available for Amazon Kindle as well as Mobipocket, smartphone and Sony eBook Reader formats and available to purchase from any quality ebook retailer. You can also purchase it directly from this website. He masterminds winning SEO strategies for complex online business and helps the average webmaster get their site to the position it deserves. David has been instrumental in taking websites to the top of Google's first page in a way that has kept them there year after year. If you would like David to help you with a specific SEO problem on your website consider our SEO Consultation offer.
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