At one point or another, you might have thought about investing in SEO to get more leads to your website, but you aren't sure whether the investment would be worth it or how much it makes sense to invest in the first place.
I'm going to give you a super easy way to check this, that will give an exact number expressed in dollars, which should give you a good sense of whether your website has potential to grow further.
This method involves looking up a specific metric for competitor websites using an SEO tools such as Semrush, and it shouldn't take you more than 5 minutes to execute. You can also use other SEO tools if you wish, but the exact instructions for this easy method will be specific to Semrush.
In case you don't have direct competitors, I will also give you a method for doing your own research and manually calculating this metric.
TL;DR
- Look up the Traffic cost metric for competitor websites, then look up the same metric for your website and compare the numbers.
- If you don't have direct competitors, you can create a list of keyword, then look up the ad cost for each one and do the math yourself.
- In case you are confused, just ask an expert. Getting an assessment usually won't cost you anything
Easy way: Traffic Cost
If you are using Semrush for this analysis, the easiest way to assess your SEO potential and assign a dollar value to it is to look up the Traffic cost metric of your competitors. Traffic cost represents Semrush's estimate of how much money you would need to spend on ads to get the same amount of traffic, for the same keywords, that is currently generated organically. You can find this metric under SEO > Organic Research, which you will find in the menu bar on the left of the screen once you are logged in.
All you need to do is look up this metric for your direct competitors, then look up the same metric for your own website and compare the numbers. If you see that you are at $1k, but your competitor is at $50k, that is huge because this is a monthly metric. If they are getting an extra $49k worth of organic traffic each month, it will be quite hard to compete with them by just increasing your ad spend so you really want to start closing that gap through deliberate SEO efforts.
Note: With a free Semrush account, you will be able to look up about 10 reports per day. This means you should be able to look up the Organic research for 10 websites, but if you go looking at other reports, you might hit your daily limit with just 1-2 websites.
Things to know about Traffic cost
The great thing about this metric is that it assign a dollar value to the traffic, making it much easier to estimate if investing in SEO would make sense. This also ensures that the keywords a website is ranking for bring actual value to the business. Google Ads pricing is driven by supply and demand, meaning that the keywords that no one is advertising for won't have any value and ranking for them won't increase Traffics cost.
I've seen examples where a website has 10 times the traffic, but only 3 times higher Traffic cost compared to a website in the same industry. This usually happens when a website goes after keywords with a lot of volume but no real business value - in one specific case I came across, those were celebrity names. This can be a valid tactic if you are trying to build brand awareness, but visitors coming from those search queries likely won't convert into customers during that visit.
Another thing to keep in mind is that this metric is based on Semrush's estimate of website traffic. I've found that this estimate can be temporarily inaccurate, but the long term averages tend to be close to actual data from Google's Search Console. Since Traffic cost is tied to overall traffic, it too can fluctuate, and since you can only see it for current and past month, you need to take it with a grain of salt. If there were recent fluctuations in the organic traffic, then the Traffic cost might be less accurate, but if the traffic has been stable for a while, so should the Traffic cost be.
One more thing to note is that Traffic cost is displayed separately for different countries (US, UK, Canada...), so it will be really easy to look it up just for the market that your company is targeting.
How much of the gap can I close?
When people see a large gap between them and their competitor, the first thing they want to know is how much of the gap they can close and how fast. The answer differs from case to case, but as a reference I recently helped one of my clients go from $1k-$1.5k to a stable $20k per month average in 8 months, and they were a pre-seed startup with less than 10 employees.
Keep in mind that this kind of growth of more than 1500% in organic traffic isn't typical. Most SEO studies I came across over the years mention a growth of no more than 100% a year, with most of them actually stating that the average is in the 10-20% range. However, these percentages aren't as easy to translate into business value as the metrics we looked at. That's why looking at the Traffic cost gap makes more sense in most cases - if there is a big gap, that means you can grow a lot and how fast you will be able to grow will depend on multiple factors.
The two most important factors that determine your growth will likely be your capacity for producing content and your domain's Authority Score compared to competition. Even if these aren't great at the moment, they can be improved.
You can lookup your Authority Score in Semrush under Domain Overview or Backlink Analytics, and you will want to compare it to that of your competitors as it can be an important factor in determining whether you will be able to outrank them for a specific keyword. If your score isn't that high, don't worry as it is something you can work on. A whole article could be written on how it's done, but the gist of it is that you want to get backlinks from high quality sources.
When it comes to producing content, the important thing is that you have domain experts at your company. You can always hire writers or supplement your writing process with AI, but you need to have the knowledge about a certain topic in order to produce quality content around it.
Hard way: Manual Keyword Research
If you don't have a direct competitor you can look up, or you just prefer to do this manually, there is an alternative method to achieve a similar result.
You can use an SEO tool of your choice, like Semrush, and make a list of potential keywords that you could rank for and add them into a table including volume for each keyword - in most SEO tools you can actually make a list inside the tool itself and then export the table at the end.
Once you have the keywords, you also want to know the Cost-per-click (CPC) value for each, and the good thing is that Semrush will give you a number for each keyword, so you will be able to export it as one of the columns in your list.
Next you will want to add one more column to calculate the total value for each of the keywords in your list, but don't get too excited as you will rarerly get to capture all the value for any specific keyword. We'll address this in just a moment.
Alternatively, you can lookup the PPC/CPC ad prices for each one using Google Keyword Planner (free with Google Ads account) and add them to the table. It will usually be shown as a range, so you might want to add two columns into your table, one for each value. This means your final result will be presented as a range, which is a good thing when it comes to predictions.
In this scenario, you will want to add two more columns to calculate the low end and top end value for each of the keywords in your list.
To get a realistic number you will first need to total the values for all keywords, which will likely live at the bottom of the Value columns, and then multiply those with a number between 3% and 15%, which represents a realistic portion of traffic you can capture if you manage to rank for those keyword. The percentage varies greatly because page 1 gets about 95% of the traffic, so the difference between ranking on the first page and ranking on the second page is quite substantial.
If you are good with spreadsheets, you can create a calculation for multiple scenarios between 3% and 15%, but always keep in mind that these are just estimates. The Traffic cost method will usually give you a more accurate perspective, but this method is still good in case you don't have websites you can look up for reference.
Pro tip: Whether you will be able to rank on the first page is mostly dependent on keyword difficulty, which you can also find using Semrush, export it into your table and include it as a factor in your calculation.
If in doubt, ask an expert
If any part of this confuses you or you just don't want to do it yourself, to best thing you can do is consult an expert. It usually won't cost you anything for them to look up your competitors and give you their opinion, as they would do it anyway to show you how much potential you have and to warrant the investment in their services.
If your website is built on Webflow, or you are planning on moving it to Webflow, I would be more than happy to help you with this assessment, so feel free to reach out.
If you are on WordPress or other platform, with no plan of changing that, it's best to find an SEO expert who has experience with that platform. While most of SEO is universal, there are some optimization tactics that will need to be executed differently depending on the tech that was used to build your website, so some familiarity with it is necessary. Some times it also comes down to preference - I do have experience with WordPress, but I have made a conscious decision to stay away from it.
Finding an expert
The first place I would look are referrals from your friends and acquaintances. Someone you know who runs a business with a nice website might be a good person to talk to and ask what they are doing in terms of SEO. If you are a member of any business related communities, you can ask for referrals there as well.
Neat trick is to use Semrush to look up someone's website before asking them for a referral, but keep in mind that traffic growth is more important than overall traffic in this case. If someone increased their traffic 10 times in 6 months, it doesn't matter if they have less traffic then you, it's still good to ask them how they did it and who helped them.
In case you are a VC backed startup, you can try asking your investors if they know someone that worked with another company in their portfolio.
If you don't have anyone you can ask, all the usual channels, like LinkedIn and other social media, freelance platforms and job boards, should also work when finding an SEO expert.
Conclusion
A lot of companies out there are seeing huge business upsides from their SEO efforts. Seeing if you could be one of them is super easy, and learning that you can offset tens of thousands of dollars (or more) in monthly ad spend can be a huge unlock for your company.
It can take some time to get things rolling, but once you do, SEO can produce serious long-term benefits.
If you haven't already, go to Semrush, make a free account and look the numbers up. It could really improve your day.
Author
