 Good evening. Good afternoon and good morning wherever you happen to be in the world. My name is Robin Lord I work for a digital marketing agency called error here in the UK And I'm going to be talking to you about estimating opportunities with different searches Now it's really important that we're able to estimate opportunity because it gives us a way to talk about how valuable our projects are To other people and it helps us to figure out where we should be focusing our energies, right? So being able to know how much opportunity we might get in different places is pretty crucial So we're going to start with the most basic way of approaching that and then we're going to work our way up to a slightly More complex slightly more nuanced approach But to begin with the kind of things that we have when we start to estimate opportunity with different searches are usually the number of Keywords that we want to target for example Here's one setting up a business and the search for you that we have for those keywords So here in this case setting up a business. We think is searched at 6,500 times a month So it's 6,500 times a month so I'm searching for setting up a business now We're not going to assume that every single one of those is going to come straight to our website Right, we're not assuming that we could get 6,500 clicks straight to our website We get an idea that probably most people are going to click position one But some people are going to click position two and some people are going to click position three in position four and so on and so on So even if we were in the best possible position, we can't be everywhere So we can't just assume we're going to get that 6,500 clicks through to our website and the way that we start to handle that is by using something called a click-through rate Which if you haven't encountered it before looks roughly like this and you can probably see why it's called a click-through rate curve here We've got the curve We've got all of our positions one through ten here at the bottom and the side is How likely we think someone is to click through to our site So the easiest way to kind of visualize it is in a graph But what we what we usually have is in a table so that we can use something like a V lookup If we are saying position one then we know that our click-through rate for that is probably going to be about 35% So we use that to estimate what we could get out of this search for position one Likewise if we're looking at like position eight, we might say click-through rate for that is more like 5% So if we're in position eight, that's kind of what we assume we're going to be able to get out of it And we use that in a in a formula kind of like this one So we say the search volume so how many how many times something's being searched here at the top Multiplied by the click-through rate is how many clicks we expect to get so in this case 6,500 is our search volume 35% for position one gets us about 2.3 thousand clicks a month or 27,000 clicks a year you can see here You can kind of mark it here at this line just to visualize for you. That's kind of what we're doing here We're assuming position one will get us this kind of click-through rate and that would result in about 27,000 clicks a year for this search term Now we could stop that and some people would stop there in terms of okay well I'm going to assume I could get position one for every keyword and I'm just going to multiply out to make sure that I'm not making wild predictions about how much traffic I might be able to get but that's the way I'm going to leave it and that can give you a slightly more accurate estimate, but It's not factoring in times when we might already be ranking a bit for a keyword, right? So say for example, we are already ranking position eight For this specific search now we can see here position eight is already getting some clicks So if we if we move up to position one sure we're going to get more than we're currently getting But we're not going to get 27,000 clicks more than we're currently getting we're going to get a bit more than we're currently getting But we need to factor that in because there could be other searches for example that have smaller Search volume, but we're not ranking at all So the opportunity for us is bigger because really what we want to focus on is how much more Could we get then we're currently getting at the moment? So how could we handle that? Well fortunately the matter on that is actually fairly simple It's exactly the same sum as we've done here. We just need to look at position eight Figure out what our click-through rate is for position eight and then do that same sum to figure out how much we could get now in this case 5% gives us 325 clicks a month about 4,000 clicks a year So we're getting 4,000 clicks a year at the moment. We could get 27,000 clicks a year So we just subtract what we're currently getting and we say okay, we've got an opportunity here of about 23,000 clicks a year So that's starting to get us a bit more of a nuanced idea of what our opportunity is in different places because we're not Going to keep pouring energy into something we're currently doing kind of well for and we can start to focus on the areas where there's kind of untapped growth there How about we push things a little bit further still so we've got this Understanding of how much we could get if we got to position one say for this search Position one is a government website and position two is Amazon and position three is Google now Google once it has a government website once it decides a government website is quite relevant Doesn't really like to replace that because they tend to be very trustworthy. They tend to have pretty good information Also, it doesn't really like to replace Amazon by and large because Amazon tends to be a great result for a whole bunch of different things Particularly doesn't like to replace itself So if we're starting to think about what we could get for this keyword and we're assuming we could get position one It's 35% click-through rate. We might look at some of these results. I think actually I don't think I can get up here I think we should probably be looking a little bit further down. So maybe we look at something like position Say position four is a page about how to start a business position five is Wikipedia Position six is someone offering to offering to sell a service so that you can buy business setup and Seven is 50% off business setup. So they're again offering to sell, but they've got that cheeky 50% discount So if we look at all of this we might start to think okay, well, I don't think I can Reach position one probably not position two probably not position three and actually I think I probably Don't want to assume I can replace Wikipedia here either in position five So the best position that I'm looking at here is actually Position four. So I should go back to some of my click-through rate Estimates I should estimate based on position four rather than position one and then use that to get an idea of the total Opportunity we could get for this keyword now. You could be wondering how you might do this Actually, there's a bunch of tools that will give you the full top 20 Export for a whole list of keywords. The first time I did this I use the stat top 20 export I just exported everything and I dumped it into a Google sheet So I ended up with all of my keywords and all of the top 20 results row after row after row after row and Along my sheet Then I used a formula pretty simple formula to just find any Websites that we thought we wouldn't be able to beat and I use that to mark those rows any time We thought we would be able to be and then I just deleted those rows So I ended up with each of my keywords. I only had the ranking positions That we were at we thought we were actually able to achieve So in this case four six seven and eight which we are currently and then I just found the Highest position that we could get in that list for each keyword and I use that With my click-through rate curve to try and estimate how much traffic we might be able to get So this all really boiled down to like if formulas and V lookups So it's very accessible for anyone who wants to once again involved in this kind of thing now We could leave it there that would give us a pretty solid understanding of Where we might be able to get and it's far more nuanced than the picture that we might get at first blush If you want to get a bit more fancy with it There's other information that you could pull in to your analysis So say for example You're able to pull in the titles of all of the pages that are currently ranking say in position four It's how to start a business and position six. It's by a business setup in position seven It's 50% off business setup again if we look at these We could do some fairly simple formulas even just in Google Sheets to try to categorize these into different Intents so how to it's fairly clearly an informational search An informational result rather, so we're not trying to categorize the search We're trying to categorize the individual results By is a fairly clear purchase search and 50% off again suggests that it's trying to sell us something So if we start to look at these results, we can filter them down even more if we want to so say for example We're working on a site and we know it has to be a product page if we're going to target this term We have to use a product page. Well, we could do that same filtering process except this time We're marking anything where the title is something like how to or top tips or instructions how to or anything That seems like a blog post and we remove them as well So we say actually we couldn't get this either this is the highest we could get with this product page If we do that across all of our keywords We know that we have to use product pages and we're saying okay for this we're position six Well say position six actually has a pretty low search click-through rate If we're looking at position six for this keyword, we're already at position eight So maybe the opportunity that we've got for this keyword is actually pretty small And we decide that we want to focus on other things So that's another quick way to filter all of our different opportunities by just Removing the kind of results that we wouldn't want to compete with Alternatively if we don't already have an idea that it's got to be a product page We could go through all of our searches and say we know that it's going to be positioned for is the best place that we could get We can use that same category. We can use that same categorization formula to say well position four looks like it's informational So as we're as we're identifying our opportunities We can quite quickly say when we go to do a content brief for this for example This needs to be a blog post. It shouldn't be an update to a product page Now the aim for any of this isn't to make people's decisions for them We're never going to just send this sheet for example after someone and not have an SEO professional Look at it, but it means that instead of spending lots of time having to reverse engineer having to think Really hard about all these different things and pull information into one place We have a starting point for people to go from so when we have someone who's an expert SEO looking at this They've got all of the information in front of them to begin with that's actually the approach that we tend to take in general in Error so when we do this kind of work We actually tend to use a Python script and that script pulls in all of the top 20 results It also categorizes those search results the individual results rather than the rather than the search term itself based on whether they seem information or transactional and it finds that opportunity it finds that highest place that we could currently get and Subtracts where we're ranking at the moment and that means that we end up with a sheet where we can order things quite nicely Based on highest opportunity to lowest opportunity and based on and categorize them based on what kind of results They are we also pull in some other things like authority Which is one thing that you could also use to filter down your results if you're starting to dig into this And we also use the search results to see how similar different searches are as a way of clustering them So those are some other things that you can dig into once you get familiar with these kind of concepts and really start to Accelerate now you don't have to go that far You could do any step along this route and get a little closer to a nuanced understanding of what this search result could get you And that's going to be a really positive advancement because the more that we can bring in this nuance The more quickly we're able to identify these different things all of these are decisions that you're going to be making anyway You're already a smart SEO professional. You're already going to know all this information It's about speeding up your path to that answer. Anyway, thanks very much for listening to me I really enjoyed chatting this through with you. I hope you enjoyed it as well, and I'll look forward to hearing your thoughts Thanks a lot