How to estimate what traffic you should be getting?

[buntrosgali]

Hey guys i have a question in regards to targetting seo results. A lot of my customers will me SME and most have visitors of under 50 per day. My question is how do you judge the amount of traffic a website of a small local business should be getting?

For instance i have a site that gets average 22 visits per day, i would love to know how much their competitors get per day so i can know what targets to strive for.

I feel that is 22 is ten times more than the compeitors website then the amount of seo time needed is less than if it is 10 times behind what competitors get.

Thoughts?

[SteveGerencser]

Unfortunately any number you come up with will be a rough estimate at best. A WAG at worst. Since Google never shares actual search numbers for specific terms there is no real way of knowing what the maximum number 'could' be.

You can use traffic estimators to give yourself a ballpark idea of what the maximum 'could' be and then use a percentage of that to get an estimate. You could start with the keyword estimator tool here to get started.

Assuming that a search term gets 100 searches per month and you rank #1 for the term you might be able to grab 40 clicks. But again, these are all estimates. Things like title and description can make a #3 result get a better CTR than a #1 spot.

We tend to use 40% for #1, 25% for #2 and 10% for #3 to at least get us an idea of where we are. Then we watch the analytics and compare that with known numbers to get more accurate as we go.

Assume you rank #1 for your term. And you get 100 clicks but the traffic estimator says 800 searches. This means that based on the estimator traffic results you are getting a 12.5% CTR. You can then use the 12.5% on all of your other terms for that estimator to get more accurate numbers for all of your other terms.

In the end, we assume that traffic estimators are guesses themselves so the extra research needed becomes important.

[Group16]

I use SemRush for that. Simply type in competitor's url and see results for their traffic. See how much % traffic they are getting for each keyword compared to the total amount of traffic they are getting.