Make your business more sustainable.

Accessing SEO opportunity.

Read time: 3 minutes

90.63% of pages of your website get no organic search traffic from Google.

It is only 10% of the pages which does the magic (for most of the websites). Make sure you are getting these 10% pages of your website right.

That is exactly what I will attempt to tell you in today's newsletter. How to get your product page SEO prospecting right.

(Graph by Ahrefs)

And yet, nothing, I repeat nothing is more sustainable than SEO in digital.

Still, only a few websites have a long-term view and work on driving this channel that arguably has the highest conversion rates.

The problem is- too many below-average and average SEOs in the market that are not able to paint the right picture.

In today's newsletter, I will attempt to explain- how to connect the dots from organic traffic to conversions.

I started working in the SEO space around 9 years back. Good old days, just write (not so comprehensive) content, build inorganic backlinks, get the tags right and you are done. Forget about Black-hat SEO best practices even White-hat was not that difficult.

But SEO, like other marketing channels, has evolved over years.

The first study that any brand should do about SEO- is to access the opportunity.

Let's talk about accessing the SEO opportunity. This is where most of the brands and agencies go wrong. Have a look at the below image, this is a slide of a bigger presentation I made to a mobile handset brand in 2020.

This gives you an end-to-end understanding of a category search- 'phone under 15,000'.

The total search volume of this keyword & its variants is 1M on Google.

Aiming for 0.6M of these keywords in the first year can potentially generate 60,000 unique users on the website (typically top SEO results have an organic CTR of about 10% for known brands & ~4-5% for new brands).

If I consider that 5% of that traffic logs in on the website, the website can potentially get 3000 logins/year.

Now at a conversion rate of 2% (again conversion rates of SEO are usually 2-3x of the rest of paid channels), they can generate a top line of 8.4L.

Now this number may not seem big but imagine targeting 50+ keywords and their variations for one category.

For this brand, we were anticipating revenue of ~1.2cr in the first year & closed at 1.4cr. It is not about achieving the target, it is about how close we were to our estimation.

The bottom line is, prospecting the universe --> Traffic --> Logins --> Conversion --> Revenue before you kick off SEO with an agency.

If you already have an agency on board, ask them to prospect like this for complete visibility of the value they bring to the table.

Move beyond chasing rankings on Google.

That's it for today.

By the way, today I posted something interesting on my Instagram story about the future of ChatGPT & Google. Check it out here:

Cheers,

Apurv