How to find average organic traffic growth rate for ecommerce startup?
-
Happy Friday Everyone,
I have a quick question:
I am in the process of crunching some numbers to try and figure out an organic traffic forecast for a client.
One of the crucial metrics I can't seem to figure out is traffic rate of growth over the next year or so.
The reason this is complicated for me is that I have only ever done this sort of thing for an established business before, and had plenty of past organic traffic data to work with.
What I am looking for is a source that could give me a reasonable idea of what kind of growth rates I might expect for a startup with practically no data; I would be perfectly happy with a national average for online retail startups.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks!
-
I had some great ideas for a response but the previous three were pretty much everything about the subject i could say. ( I thumbs upped them all)
I would mention that you are getting in murky water making organic growth prediction a year in advance for an unknown company with no data. I wouldn't do it.
With that said If I had to I would apply theory of business law and go with a case study and press a correlation.
ie so so and in a similiar industry spent this amount of money on content development and marketing. With GOOD SEO and the same budget you can see a similar growth.
Like bryan said use google insights as back up. I would even use data form google keyword tool data as well. You can argue that if you get high enough on ranking you will earn a percent of that organic traffic. Main point i would stress is correlation between $spend combined with your seo skill correlates to such and such growth.
Even still that's hard to concretely present but it's a starting point.
-
A more important projection is....
... How much will the client need to spend each month to become competitive.
You must have the ability to answer that question before you can estimate organic traffic - because you must first be able to make the site rank before public traffic data - by keyword - can be used to make a reasonable traffic estimate.
This is the most difficult question for many SEOs. They will ask the client his budget and have no idea if that is enough money to compete in his niche. And sending 200 troops out to a fight where 20,000 is needed is a waste of 200 troops.
So, average traffic growth data is meaningless because it varies by niche, it varies depending upon spend and most importantly it varies by the skill of the SEO.
-
"Google trends" should give you an idea of what people are searching for and if the terms are moving up/down etc...
If you want to know volumes of terms searched within Google you can use "Google adwords keyword tool".
-
Trying to forecast organic growth will be extremely difficult to do. It really depends on what they have been doing as compared to what you are planning to do for them.
Have they been conducting content marketing?
Have they been heavily involved in social?
Have they been creating local citations?
Have they... etc. etc. etc.
I'm not saying that you should pull a number out of your ass, but conservatively estimating that you will be able to drive a 20% increase to their organic traffic should be easy to hit, especially if they haven't been doing a lot of what they should have been (see above). If you can't get their traffic up by 20% in a year, they should fire you anyways. Anything about that will make you look like a rock star.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
80% bounce rate
Hello, I have a website that I have worked hard in developing and have tried to create useful content, however I am getting an 80% bounce rate. Can anyone give me some feedback as to why this might be? The website is www.usconstructionloans.com. Let me know your thoughts - thanks!
Conversion Rate Optimization | | nadylime0 -
Facebook Connect login preventing traffic source conversion data. Any solutions?
We're buying traffic to the website via Adwords, and when they hit the website and go to sign up for an application (enter into our conversion funnel), the session concludes as a bounced session, a new session starts and that session now has a referral from Facebook rather than the original referring source. This means we can't monitor adwords conversions properly (or any other traffic source conversions) this seems to be quite a common problem with Facebook/Google account logins, in the case of Google, people block account.google.com but we can't afford to block Facebook outright as we're wanting to see other Facebook referrals. Has anyone come across this problem? Any suggestions of how to fix this?
Conversion Rate Optimization | | Startupfactory0 -
Adwords Remarketing Advice - Low Traffic Pages
Moz, I am just looking for a little advice if anyone has any experience with Google Adwords and remarketing in particular, I am currently looking through the Adwords help pages to gain a better understanding of how Adwords remarketing works, from what i gather this can be a really useful resource to use in certain industries and i have a lot of ideas and scenarios where i think this could work really well, I am just trying to get a good understanding of the how remarketing lists are built up, Using Rule based targeting for visitors that have visited a specific page that gains roughly 1200 unique visits every 60 days, so i have set the membership duration to 60 days, So if i use the visit of this page as a rule for my list, then in a little less than 60 days time then my custom ads should start appearing to these previous visitors ? My Question Am a right in thinking the remarketing list is like a funnel, once 1000 visitors are added to this list/funnel then my ads will start showing, but then as those visitors in the funnel have reached the 61st Day they will be removed, and replaced with the new visitors being added to the list for that day ? Aslong as my list remains above 1000 visitors it will continue to show, but if i were to drop below 1000 visits within that 60 days my ads would not be visible ? so i would need to potentially extend the membership period if this happens ? Apologies as i really struggled to explain this question as best as i can 🙂 Hope someone can drop me a quick comment and straighten this out to ensure that i am on the right track and i am understanding this correctly 🙂 Thanks a lot James
Conversion Rate Optimization | | Antony_Towle0 -
Advanced Traffic Segmentation?
How to segment the traffic by "primary purpose" and "task completion rate" in Google Analytics? Is there any tool that in your opinion works better than Google Analytics for achieve the same result?Many thanks to everyone that share his experience and tips.
Conversion Rate Optimization | | YESdesign0 -
Video for Ecommerce
Hi all- I am currently making videos to put on our site about some of our products. The same video will appear on a few different product pages as they will be about the category of products (i.e. how many gumballs fit in a few different size jars). My questions are: Should I worry about duplicate content issues if the rest of the page is unique? and for hosting the videos/SEO: Should I put the videos on youtube or use another hosting service. I don't think any of these are going to go viral, it's mostly about more content on the page to increase conversions. Any thoughts would be appreciated Thanks Ken.
Conversion Rate Optimization | | CandymanKen0 -
Suggestions for Conversion Rate Optimization low cost companies?
Does anyone have a list of suggestions for lower cost companies to do conversions. I am a new business and just wanted my "Cart" check out with maybe some suggestions for improvement and a little testing to see if it is done correctly. Thank you, Boo
Conversion Rate Optimization | | Boodreaux0 -
E-commerce Customer Reviews/Ratings Solutions?
Hi all, Was wondering if based on your experience you could recommend E-commerce customer reviews/ratings solutions? Or if you prefer to use in-house built solutions. I currently have proposals from bazaarvoice, Shopzilla and Reevoo. Cheers
Conversion Rate Optimization | | Carlos-R0