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Estimating the opportunities within your various SEO efforts is an important component of your analytics, not only to help determine where to focus your energy, but also to prove the potential value of your work to others. Building on the recent post about Aira’s new keyword estimation worksheet, in today’s episode, Robin walks you through a good strategy for this all-important estimative work. Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high resolution version in a new tab! Video TranscriptionGood evening, good afternoon, and good morning wherever you happen to be in the world. My name is Robin Lord. I work for a digital marketing agency called Aira here in the UK. I'm going to be talking to you about estimating opportunities with different searches. Now, it's really important that we're able to estimate opportunity because it gives us a way to talk about how valuable our projects are to other people and it helps us to figure out where we should be focusing our energies. So being able to know how much opportunity we might get in different places is pretty crucial. So we're going to start with the most basic way of approaching that, and then we're going to work our way up to a slightly more complex, slightly more nuanced approach. Number of keywords you're targetingBut to begin with, the kinds of things that we have, when we start to estimate opportunity with different searches, are usually the number of keywords that we want to target, for example here's one "setting up a business," and the search volume that we have for those keywords. So here in this case, "setting up a business" we think is searched about 6,500 times a month. So 6,500 times a month someone is searching for "setting up a business." Now, we're not going to assume that every single one of those is going to come straight to our website. We're not assuming that we could get 6,500 clicks straight to our website. We get an idea that probably most people are going to click position one, but some people are going to click position two, and some people are going to click position three and position four, and so on and so on. So even if we were in the best possible position, we can't be everywhere. So we can't just assume we're going to get that 6,500 clicks through to our website. Click-through rate curveThe way that we start to handle that is by using something called a click-through rate curve, which, if you haven't encountered it before, looks roughly like this. You can probably see why it's called a click-through rate curve. Here we've got the curve. We've got all of our positions, 1 through 10 here at the bottom, and the side is how likely we think someone is to click through to our site. So the easiest way to kind of visualize it is in a graph. But what we usually have is in a table so that we can use something like a VLOOKUP. If we are saying position one, then we know that our click-through rate for that is probably going to be about 35%. So we use that to estimate what we could get out of this search for position one. Likewise, if we're looking at like position eight, we might say our click-through rate for that is more like 5%. So if we're in position eight, that's kind of what we assume we're going to be able to get out of it. We use that in a formula kind of like this one. So we say the search volume, so how many how many times something is being searched here at the top, multiplied by the click-through rate is how many clicks we expect to get. So in this case, 6,500 is our search volume. Thirty-five percent for position one gets us about 2,300 clicks a month or 27,000 clicks a year. You can see here I've hidden up here you can kind of mark it here at this line just to visualize it for you. That's kind of what we're doing here. We're assuming position one will get us this kind of click-through rate, and that would result in about 27,000 clicks a year for this search term. Factor in current rankingsNow, we could stop there, and some people would stop there, in terms of, okay, well, I'm going to assume I can get position one for every keyword and I'm just going to multiply it out to make sure that I'm not making wild predictions about how much traffic I might be able to get. But that's the way I'm going to leave it. That can give you a slightly more accurate estimate, but it's not factoring in times when we might already be ranking a bit for a keyword. So say, for example, we are already ranking position eight for this specific search. Now we can see here, position eight is already getting some clicks. So if we if we move up to position one, sure, we're going to get more than we're currently getting, but we're not going to get 27,000 clicks more than we're currently getting. We're going to get a bit more than we're currently getting. But we need to factor that in because there could be other searches, for example, that have smaller search volume, but we're not ranking at all. So the opportunity for us is bigger, because really what we want to focus on is how much more could we get than we're currently getting at the moment. The mathSo how could we handle that? Well, fortunately, the math around that is actually fairly simple. It's exactly the same sum as we've done here. We just need to look at position eight, figure out what our click-through rate is for position eight, and then do that same sum to figure out how much we could get. Now in this case, 5% gives us 325 clicks a month, about 4,000 clicks a year. So we're getting 4,000 clicks a year at the moment. We could get 27,000 clicks a year. So we just subtract what we're currently getting, and we say, okay, we've got an opportunity here of about 23,000 clicks a year. So that's starting to get us a bit more of a nuanced idea of what our opportunity is in different places, because we're not going to keep pouring energy into something we're currently doing kind of well for, and we can start to focus on the areas where there's kind of untapped growth there. How about we push things a little bit further still? So we've got this understanding of of how much we could get if we got to position one. Say for this search position one is a government website, and position two is Amazon, and position three is Google. Now, Google, once it has a government website, once it decides a government website is quite relevant, doesn't really like to replace that because they tend to be very trustworthy and they tend to have pretty good information. Also, it doesn't really like to replace Amazon by and large because Amazon tends to be a great result for a whole bunch of different things. Particularly it doesn't like to replace itself. So if we're starting to think about what we could get for this keyword and we're assuming we could get position one is 35% click-through rate, we might look at some of these results and think, well, actually I don't think I can get up here. I think we should probably be looking a little bit further down. So maybe we look at something like position fifth or fourth. Say position four is a page about how to start a business. Position five is Wikipedia. Position six is someone offering to sell a service, so that you can buy a business setup. Seven is 50% off a business setup. So again, offering to sell, but they've got that cheeky 50% discount that you can benefit from. So if we look at all of this, we might start to think, okay, well, I don't think I can reach position one, probably not position two, probably not position three. Actually, I think I probably don't want to assume I can replace Wikipedia here either in position five. So the best position that I'm looking at here is actually position four. So I should go back to some of my click-through rate estimates. I should estimate based on position four, rather than position one, and then use that to get an idea of the total opportunity we could get for this keyword. How to do thisNow, you could be wondering how you might do this. Actually, there's a bunch of tools that will give you the full top 20 export for a whole list of keywords. The first time I did this, I used the STAT top 20 export, and I just exported everything and I dumped it into a Google Sheet. So I ended up with all of my keywords and all of the top 20 results row after row after row after row on my sheet. Then I used a formula, a pretty simple formula to just find any websites that we thought we wouldn't be able to beat. I used that to mark those rows any time we thought we wouldn't be able to beat, and then I just deleted those rows. So I ended up with each of my keywords I only had the ranking positions that we thought we were actually able to achieve. So in this case, four, six, seven, and eight, which we are currently. Then I just found the highest position that we could get in that list for each keyword, and I used that with my click-through rate curve to try and estimate how much traffic we might be able to get. So this all really boiled down to like IF formulas and VLOOKUPs. So it's very accessible for anyone who wants to get involved in this kind of thing. Get fancy with itNow, we could leave it there. That would give us a pretty solid understanding of where we might be able to get, and it's far more nuanced than the picture that we might get at first blush. If you want to get a bit more fancy with it, there's other information that you could pull in to your analysis. So say, for example, you're able to pull in the titles of all of the pages that are currently ranking. Say in position four, it's how to start a business, and position six, it's buy a business setup, and position seven, it's 50% off a business setup. Again, if we look at these, we could use some fairly simple formulas, even just in Google Sheets, to try to categorize these into different intents. So "how to" is fairly clearly an informational search, an informational result rather. So we're not trying to categorize the search. We're trying to categorize the individual results. "Buy" is a fairly clear purchase search, and "50% off" again suggests that it's trying to sell us something. So if we start to look at these results, we can filter them down even more if we want to. So say, for example, we're working on a site and we know it has to be a product page. If we're going to target this term, we have to use a product page. Well, we could do that same filtering process, except this time we're marking anything where the title is something like how to or top tips or instructions how to, or anything that seems like a blog post, and we remove them as well. So we say, actually, we couldn't get this either. This is the highest we could get with this product page. If we do that across all of our keywords, we know that we have to use product pages. We're saying, okay, for this, we're position six. Well, say position six actually has a pretty low click-through rate. If we're looking at position six for this keyword, we're already at position eight. So maybe the opportunity that we've got for this keyword is actually pretty small, and we decide that we want to focus on other things. So that's another quick way to filter all of our different opportunities by just removing the kind of results that we wouldn't want to compete with. Alternatively, if we don't already have an idea that it's got to be a product page, we could go through all of our searches and say we know that it's going to be position four is the best place that we could get. We can use that same category, we can use that same categorization formula to say, well, position four looks like it's informational. So as we're identifying our opportunities, we can quite quickly say when we go to do a content brief for this, for example, this needs to be a blog post. It shouldn't be an update to a product page. What's the goal?Now, the aim for any of this isn't to make people's decisions for them. We're never going to just send this sheet, for example, off to someone and not have an SEO professional look at it. But it means that instead of spending lots of time having to reverse engineer, having to think really hard about all these different things and pull information into one place, we have a starting point for people to go from. So when we have someone who's an expert at SEO looking at this, they've got all of the information in front of them to begin with. That's actually the approach that we tend to take in general in Aira. So when we do this kind of work, we actually tend to use a Python script, and that script pulls in all of the top 20 results. It also categorizes those search results, the individual results rather than the search term itself, based on whether they seem informational or transactional. It finds that opportunity. It finds that highest place that we can currently get and subtracts where we're ranking at the moment. That means that we end up with a sheet where we can order things quite nicely based on highest opportunity to lowest opportunity and categorize them based on what kind of results they are. We also pull in some other things like authority, which is one thing that you could also use to filter down your results if you're starting to dig into this. We also use the search results to see how similar different searches are as a way of clustering them. So those are some other things that you can dig into once you get familiar with these kinds of concepts and really start to accelerate. Now, you don't have to go that far. You could do any step along this route and get a little closer to a nuanced understanding of what this search result can get you, and that's going to be a really positive advancement because the more that we can bring in this nuance, the more quickly we're able to identify these different things. All of these are decisions that you're going to be making anyway. You're already a smart SEO professional. You're already going to know all this information. It's about speeding up your path to that answer. Anyway, thanks very much for listening to me. I really enjoyed chatting this through with you. I hope you've enjoyed it as well, and I'll look forward to hearing your thoughts. Thanks a lot. Video transcription by Speechpad.com via Blogger Estimating Search Opportunity — Whiteboard Friday Link research is an essential pillar of an SEO strategy, but competitive link research can help you get a leg up. It’s vital for websites to not only know about their own link profile, but to also have an effective strategy in place to stay relevant against competitors. Hopefully at this point, you know who your competitors are, and hey, that’s half the battle. If you still aren’t sure, check out our Competitive Research tool in Moz Pro. This tool can help you find out exactly who your competitors are, the keywords they rank for and what their top performing content is. If you would like to understand our Competitive Research tool more, and learn how it can be used to your advantage, feel free to book a Moz Pro Kick Off Call with a member of Moz’s Onboarding Team below. So, why do we want to conduct "competitive link research"?
If you're seeking guidance on how to build an SEO competitive analysis framework, check out Moz Academy's SEO Competitive Analysis Certification. This coursework covers everything you need to know to confidently implement an effective strategy, and you'll earn your Moz Certification, which you can display on your LinkedIn profile! In the following videos, the Moz team will show you workflows and other tips and tricks within the Moz Pro tool set that will help you with your competitive link research analysis. Link Gap Analysis: Link IntersectLink gap analysis is a popular tactic amongst SEOs. It involves comparing your own link profile to that of your competitors, and finding the gaps that exist. They could be getting backlinks from several websites that you aren’t receiving any from — this could be a golden opportunity — another way to compete with your top competitors. In this video, Emilie will show you how to use Moz Pro’s Link Intersect tool to find out this information. Discover Linking Domains with SERP AnalysisIn the Moz Pro Keyword Research tool, there is a functionality where you can search a keyword, and the top ranking pages for that keyword will show. But, there is so much more to this function. In this video, Varad will show you those ranking pages, as well as the domains that are linking to that particular page. Get ready to soar from there! Use Page Optimization to Find Content SuggestionsMoz’s Page Optimization tool is primarily used to see what improvements may need to be made to a page, as well as keyword placement on a page. When you dive a bit deeper into this particular tool, you’ll find that Moz offers content suggestions to you, including URLs that are ranking for the keyword you first queried. Identifying these top ranking URLs is a great way to see what kind of content you should also be creating. In this video, Rachel will show you what you can do with this new found information and how it can help your link research. Find Backlinks to Competitor’s Broken PagesAnalyzing the backlinks on a competitor’s broken page is another tactic that SEOs are using, that you may not have been aware of. There are hidden opportunities within these broken pages that are just waiting to be discovered. In this video, Arian will show you exactly how you can find those broken pages within Moz Pro’s Link Research tool. Discovered & Lost BacklinksAnother gem within the Moz Pro Link Research tools is the ‘Discovered & Lost’ section. This section will show you all of the new backlinks that Moz has found linking to your competitor in the last 60 days, as well as backlinks that have been lost. This can be insightful information when working on your own backlink building. In this video, Eoin shows you how you can use this functionality to up your Link Research game. If you’d like to continue learning about Competitive Research, check out our previous Daily SEO Fix on Competitive Keyword Research for some great insights into a competitive keyword research strategy. Other additional resources for learning continuation:
via Blogger Daily SEO Fix: Competitive Link Research Whether speaking to senior management or just trying to figure out what direction our SEO strategy should take next, as SEOs we often find ourselves asking the same question: “but what could I get from this?” Particularly when we’re prioritizing work across different keywords, it can be hard to know:
It can really trip us up if any of our predictions are based on wild rankings we could never achieve, or if we accidentally include traffic we’re already getting anyway! So, what’s the solution to solve all of that, and ensure we focus on getting the biggest bang for our buck? Introducing Aira’s Keyword Opportunity Estimation Tool. Get your copy of Aira’s Opportunity Sheet here. What is Aira’s Keyword Opportunity Estimation Tool?Built in Google Sheets, the focus of the tool is to:
The sheet takes a top-20 report from a rank tracking tool and:
Here’s an example output: Let’s dive into an exampleImagine you’re doing SEO for a new flight site. Let’s call it BrainAir. You know that you can probably rank for quite a few “flights” terms, unless there’s a comparison site like expedia.com already ranking. So, you add expedia.com as a domain to remove and now the sheet will find the best possible ranking you could get for each keyword except for positions where Expedia is already appearing. In the example below, skyscanner.net and expedia.co.uk are both listed as domains to remove. In this case, position 2 is the highest potential ranking position, as this sheet only removes the specific ranking positions for the domains listed. This means you can still get a better position if that is available. When doing keyword analysis, you may also realize there are some terms in your list like “Easyjet iceland flights”. If you don’t think you could beat Easyjet for “Easyjet iceland flights”, you can tick a box and the sheet automatically ignores any time Easyjet is ranking for a search that includes the word “Easyjet”. Why use this tool?This sheet can be used to see:
While no estimate is going to be bang on the money, many other approaches will likely wildly overestimate how much traffic you could get in total, as they usually assume a highest position of 1, which is not always attainable. On top of that, other approaches tend to not look at current traffic estimates, so don’t factor in additional traffic, instead just focusing on total traffic. This leads to situations where you’re focusing primarily on keywords with the highest search volume, as opposed to focusing on the keywords capable of driving the highest amount of potential traffic to the site. This can help with developing SEO strategies, such as:
How to use the sheetClick this link to get your copy of the Opportunity Sheet. Stage 1: Copy & Paste in your top 20 reportImport your top 20 report into the tab named [Input] Top 20 Ranking Report, pasting into cell A1. You should delete/override the existing dummy data. The top 20 ranking report can come from any rank tracking tool, for example STAT, Rank Ranger, Accuranker, Data For SEO, etc. At this stage, the order of the columns does not matter. Stage 2: Selecting which columns to includeNavigate to [Input] Column Selection. Here you need to use the dropdowns to select which columns relate to:
The table on the right-hand side will automatically update as these different dropdowns are updated with the first six rows. Please check if the data aligns with the correct columns (or the rest of the outputs are going to look really odd). Stage 3: Defining which domains you’re unable to compete withNavigate to [Input] Domain Selection. The first step is to enter your domain. The example in this case is booking.com Next, add the domains you feel you’re unable to compete with. These can either contain the protocol or subdomain, or not. You can find your competing domains by using a tool such as Moz’s Free Domain SEO Analysis Tool. Alternatively you can go to [Output 4] Current Traffic/ SOV Per Domain, which displays all of the domains ordered by total estimated traffic and share of voice. We would recommend revising this list once you have seen the results, to include any additional domains you hadn’t previously included. On the right side of the page, you can choose to include pre-defined domains in the list. This includes standard, hard-to-beat domains such as Google and Amazon, or social media domains such as Facebook and Twitter. Finally, you can decide whether you want to exclude domains that contain target keywords in the domain name. For example, if you don’t think you could beat Easyjet for “Easyjet flights”, tick this box and the sheet automatically ignores any time Easyjet is ranking for a search that includes the word “Easyjet”. Stage 4: Entering CTR, conversion rates, and average order valuesNavigate to [Input] CTR, Conv Rate and AOV. This section is designed for you to enter an estimated CTR for each position, average conversion rate, and average order value (AOV). You can access the CTR position data yourself by using Google Search Console. It would make sense to focus on non-branded keywords, as branded keywords would skew these figures. Advanced Web Ranking also provides an average CTR for each position for different industries based on a sample of sites. This can be found by navigating to the categories tab on this page. Note: If you leave this column blank, traffic estimates will use the Average Non Branded CTR from Advanced Web Rankings. The Conversion rate and AOV data can be found using Google Analytics, though it’s worth noting that these figures will vary depending on the type of page. For example, a blog is likely to have a much lower conversion rate than a product page, so it’s worth bearing that in mind during your analysis. Stage 5: Output 1 — Keyword BreakdownNavigate to [Output 1] Keyword Breakdown. Here you can see the top 20 report with just the four columns that were previously selected: Keyword, Search Volume, Rank, and Ranking URL. There are a number of additional columns:
Stage 6: Output 2 — Keyword Highest RankNavigate to [Output 2] Keyword Highest Rank. Here you can see a summary for each keyword showing you the highest potential rank, estimated traffic, and conversions/revenue, as well as which domain/URL you could conceivably outrank. There is also data related to your current rankings and potential increase in traffic, conversions, and revenue should you reach the highest potential ranking position. These figures are based on your previous inputs, so go back and check what you have entered if you feel that any of the figures are noticeably different to what you would expect. Stage 7: Output 3 — Keyword Highest RankNavigate to [Output 3] Keyword Opportunities. This output provides the top-level summary focusing on the keyword, search volume, and which domain/URL you could seek to replace. The metrics in this output are focused on potential additional traffic, conversions, and revenue. These figures are calculated by working out estimated current traffic, conversions and revenue based on current rank, search volume, conversion rate, and average order value and subtracting this from these figures should the domain rank in the highest potential position. Stage 8: Output 4 — Predicted Traffic/SOV Per DomainNavigate to [Output 4] Predicted Traffic/SOV Per Domain. This output provides an overview of the total estimated traffic per domain from the top 20 report, which allows you to see which domains are driving the highest amount of traffic across your keywords. There is also a Share of Voice column, which pulls in the share of voice for each of these domains. The calculation is total traffic per domain/total traffic across all domains. On the right side of the page, your own domain's current estimated traffic will be pulled through, alongside Share of Voice. You can then enter competitor domains into the boxes below, which will provide total estimated traffic and share of voice with a comparison to your own domain. How does this Google Sheet work?This tool is designed to allow you to import a top 20 rankings report for your priority keywords, select which domains you feel you aren’t able to outrank within your niche, and optionally enter in CTR figures by position, average conversion rate, and Average Order Value (AOV), if you have access to this data. Then, in the [Output 3] Keyword Opportunities tab you'll get a list of the best potential rankings you could get for each keyword, ordered by total additional traffic and revenue you could get from on top of what you are currently getting. In order to make all this magic happen there is a fair amount of Google Sheets spice happening in the background, so if you’re a Google Sheets enthusiast, you may enjoy taking a look under the hood to see how we’ve pulled it together. The main formula used is the QUERY function in order to pull specific data from one sheet to another, which automatically updates based on the user's selection on the [Input] Column Selection tab. This logic is used in all the main outputs. The domain selection uses REGEX in order to combine together a list of different domains which are used in the different outputs to determine whether a site can rank for a specific domain or not. Whenever working with rows, we use ARRAYFORMULAs in order to ensure that the formulas are applied to the whole column. In the example below, we are using the regex above in order to determine whether a domain can or cannot compete for different ranking positions. The estimated traffic, conversions, and revenue positions take the inputs from the [Input] CTR, Conv Rate and AOV tab.In the example below, we are working out the estimated traffic by multiplying the highest potential rank (in column C), looking up the CTR for that position and then multiplying it by the Search Volume (in column B). The same logic applies to the conversions and revenue figures. Working out the difference in potential vs. current position is done by subtracting the estimated traffic from the current estimated traffic. There is some additional logic in there to catch whether the current traffic is higher than the potential traffic (as we obviously wouldn’t want the potential rank to be lower than the current rank). These are the fundamentals, but if you are interested further, do make a copy, unhide the hidden cells, and have a good look under the hood. Final thoughtsWithin SEO, it’s critical to focus on impact when delivering results. When you have a list of keywords, it’s often tricky to know where you could potentially rank, what levels of traffic you can earn, and how this relates to conversions and revenue. Aira’s Keyword Opportunity Estimation Tool tries to answer these questions. Please reach out on Twitter to let us know how you get on with it! via Blogger Uncover Your Most Valuable Keywords with Aira’s New Keyword Opportunity Estimation Tool |
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