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
-
Which eCommerce Platform?
Dear MOZ community members We currently run a custom built IIS/ASP/SQL Server system that is starting to fall apart and needs major overhaul. I'm currently evaluating a number of open source eCommerce platforms (Magneto, OpenCart) and would welcome any advice that some of you may have. We are not a major brand, but we have a good name in our field which we wish to maintain and we ranking very well for our top phrases despite not having SEO-friendly URLs amongst other things. I've downloaded Magneto and installed it on a LAMP could server and got it up and running. It looks very flexible, albeit a little bloated and I can concerned that it's a sledgehammer to crack a nut. Do any other small businesses have experience with Magneto? Thanks for your time! andy www.prendas.co.uk
Conversion Rate Optimization | | andystorey1 -
Adwords and Seller Ratings
We are in the process of having an agency take over an adwords account. Will we lose our seller ratings? The website we are advertising will not change, just the adwords account. Based on what I've read google pulls data from display URL. We were concerned with losing them as we've had a CTR% since they started showing up in our search ads. They will NOT be using our account, but they will be adding us to their MCC & granting us access. Thank You!!
Conversion Rate Optimization | | TP_Marketing0 -
Conversion Rate Optimization Coruses?
Hi is there any well recognized certified courses like Google Analytics or Adwords qualification that Google offers. I'm after a course which is on split testing, multivariate testing and CRO overall. Any suggestions?
Conversion Rate Optimization | | monster990 -
How Do you Reduce Bounce Rates?
I'm doing work for a website right now that sells musical instruments. They have great content on their site but we're helping them to create even better content. We've been working with them for 2 weeks now and they average about 180 site views a day according to Google analytics. Their pages also have very high bounce rates (70-98%) What are your best ways to reduce bounce rates?
Conversion Rate Optimization | | TylerReardon0 -
Review Functionality Plugins for eCommerce. Which are the best and most cost effective?
Hi Mozzers! Let me give you a bit of background for my question. I currently look after two eCommerce sites and naturally I want to get them using reviews for products for customer interaction / content and rich snippets. I am basically looking for a cost effective plugin that can plugin to our CMS system that can give us review functionality and will be compatible with rich snippets. At the moment we use Disqus for the blog commenting system and i've heard this can be used for product reviews. Any ideas would be great. At the moment our client is holding back due to 'lack of funds' so the most cost effective measures would be appreciated. Cheers,
Conversion Rate Optimization | | SEOAndy0 -
Any SEO tips for optimizing / driving traffic to category pages?
Hello! I listened to Adam Audette at Linklove in Boston this month and he spoke a little on creatively linking product pages back to their respective category pages - as it had an effect on the SEO... However, I don't know much about "internal" linking... Any other SEO tips for optimizing / driving traffic to category pages? Thanks!
Conversion Rate Optimization | | BGroup0 -
Need help Tracking PPC vs Organic and respective ROI
So I have a client who uses PPC and Organic SEO to drive traffic. Once a user gets to the site, the most common action is to fill out a form. I have Auto Tagging enabled in Adwords so all PPC clicks have "gclid" in the url. I am also grabbing the Google Cookie and parsing it out to determine if the visitor is PPC or Organic. So I have an if statement in my form code to pass PPC vs organic through the form for tracking purposes: $url = 'http://' . $_SERVER['SERVER_NAME'] . $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']; if (false !== strpos($url,'gclid')) { ?> Essentially this is saying: If gclid is in the url, or if the cookie contains PPC
Conversion Rate Optimization | | tjsherrill
set the Web field as PPC Else
Set it as Organic. this is working about 80% of the time. I am trying to raise the accuracy. any ideas where I might be missing some data? thanks0