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
-
Increase conversion rate to buy
I am trying to understand why my women fashion site has a very low conversion, basically zero apart from some occasional sales (last one a few months ago) There is a lack of organic traffic the to shop subdomain, but what worries me is that (email/social media) campaigns to existing clients who happily buy repeatedly from our brick and mortar store do not generate results, despite using promotion codes etc. Before investing heavily in PPC campaigns etc, I'd like to improve conversion. Any advice on what can be improved ? PD: link can be found in my profile.
Conversion Rate Optimization | | J-S0 -
Bounce rate vs main domain and subdomain
So there is a website www.domainname.com that is based on wordpress. Basically this site has 8-10 pages but it is not a blog. And it has a subdomain mystore.domainname.com which is based on magento. While developing the site the circumstances were such that we had to use a subdomain for ecommerce based on magento. So the wp site is ranking and people are landing on that site. It makes sense when it has a bounce rate of around 72% because people are actually going to the subdomain ( store ) after they land on the wp site. Because they are actually looking to buy. My question is will this bounce rate affect in ranking of the wp site ? Because for now only the wp site is ranking for most of the terms. Should i consider removing the wp site and have the whole site based on magento ? I appreciate any kind of feedback and suggestion 🙂
Conversion Rate Optimization | | MindlessWizard0 -
Help with ecommerce duplicate pages and SEO advice(magento base site)
Hi, We have a magento build site (www.mokee.eu) and are selling our own branded goods. So far it is a very limited range of products. It's 1 baby crib in 5 variations. We recently started getting more sales from the site, so I started to look a bit more into optimising our site. I rewrote item name, created better descriptions, added meta titles and description etc. and subscribed to the MOZ analytics platform to understand a bit better ways to improve things up. From what I saw we have a big issue of duplicated content because our product pages are the same and only the product colour changes, which is something google apparently doesn't like However it is important for us that each colour get referenced by google so people who search for grey cot can find a picture of our grey cot etc... Also I was thinking to create only on multi variation page with all colour but when you have only 1 product to sell it might look a bit empty on the site. 1- Do you guys have some advise on how to go round this issue? 2- Do you have any other advise for my site in particular to optimise things and actually do you think i should be worried at all with such a small catalogue? Thanks Sam
Conversion Rate Optimization | | mokeestore0 -
Tracking Organic Seach Queries From GA to Companies
Okay, so this is a kinda ridiculous, long shot whim du jour. But it's so intriguing I can't resist. Last week, GA reveals that my client had 6 queries (vs. 0 since the beginning of time) in the format: Large Red Widgets #3 in Obscure Suburb (of my client's head office) Large Red Widgets #3 just happen to be expensive and profitable. My question: is there a snowball's chance in hell of tracking this query any further? I'll take what I can get -- since not many people are interested in red widgets #3 in said obscure suburb. I'd like enough info so a sales rep can follow up. These folks are not shy. Thoughts? Next steps? Idiot proof instructions on where specifically to look in GA?
Conversion Rate Optimization | | DanielFreedman0 -
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 -
Ecommerce Store Sales
I am the webmaster/developer/seo guy for my company's online stores. Of course doing this gets a lot of pressure based on the sales the websites are bringing in. In the past month or so, we've had a somewhat steep dropoff of sales and I've been having an extremely hard time figuring out why. I have researched our visits, and those are staying steady, our ranks have actually gone up for a few of my targeted keywords, the sites are working fine, all statistics seem like everything is normal other than the amount of sales. So the question is: does anyone else here run an Ecommerce store that has run into this kind of problem? Have you found any outside influences from google or other search engines that have had this kind of effect that you wouldn't normally think of looking at? I'm just completely out of ideas for things to check... it may very well be they need to re-price things, but I want to make sure I've done my due diligence to find anything I may be able to fix! Thanks!
Conversion Rate Optimization | | Ask_MMM0 -
Finding your competitors - for SEM and Adwords
Hi, I wish to understand how do we exactly compete against our competitors. Do you mean to say that I search for a set of keywords and if results show something else instead of my website these others become my competitors. Is that all? Do I have a tool to see who my competitors are and how can I compete against them? Please kindly advice
Conversion Rate Optimization | | shanky10 -
Ideal product page conversion/retention rate for eCommerce sites
Hi SEOmoz-ers, I was wondering if anyone has data regarding product page abandonment rate (% of potential customers that leave the site after seeing product pages) for websites like Overstock, REI or Zappos? As you may know the above mentioned sites do an exceptional job with product pages. It would be helpful to know what some of the leaders in this space are achieving in terms of conversion rate. What is your personal opinion about this? Thanks,
Conversion Rate Optimization | | Kush_VMI
Kush0