Traffic Cost, An SEO Evaluation Indicator
Over the past decade, considering the rapid growth of online businesses, many market participants entered into the market in order to take advantage of such a fast-growing marketplace. As the number of online businesses increased, the competition to be presented on major search engines, Google in particular, became tighter. Under such circumstances, SEO or search engine optimisation became very important for online businesses, as the SEO concept is based on how to rank higher on Google by applying Google’s regulation and guidelines or SEO best practice.
Nowadays, almost all market participants who are active on the internet are familiar with SEO and have fully understood the importance of having a SEO plan. However, having a proper and professional SEO plan for your online business is necessary but not sufficient! Like other plans, your plan execution is even more important than having a plan. Therefore, you, as a business owner, must be very careful on how your SEO plan is performing. To do so, there are some techniques, tactics and indicators to be used for having a good understanding of your SEO performance over time. We, through this article, will explain “traffic Cost” as one the most valuable and precise SEO performance indicators.
What is Traffic Cost?
Traffic cost as an SEO performance indicator, is basically a service provided by SEMrush. The term “Traffic Cost” refers to the amount of money you have to pay for an Ad on Google for your strategic keyword to receive a known amount of traffic during a specific period of time. To make your mind clearer, assume that after one year of working on your SEO plan, you have some traffic on your strategic keyword on your website. Now, think of a website that starts today and wants to have the same amount of traffic instantly, without a SEO plan. Such a website must go for a Google Ad! Obviously, Google would charge the website owner a particular amount of money. That is exactly what we call traffic cost. It is the amount of money that you should have paid to receive the traffic you have now, if you did not have a SEO plan.
How is it calculated?
SEMrush considers some elements in order to estimate your strategic keyword traffic cost. Obviously, the traffic you receive organically on your keyword, click through rate, bounce rate and some other factors are being used to calculate how much the traffic cost of your keyword is. Even though the calculation is complicated, the result is usually reliable and can be considered to make a fair judgement about your SEO performance.
How does it work?
Monitoring SEO performance is basically a complicated task which needs to be done by an experienced SEO consultant. It is important to evaluate it precisely as your business success is highly dependent on your SEO performance. However, the Traffic Cost indicator is capable of showing you how your SEO is progressing and alerting you if a problem exists, though the nature of the problem cannot be identified by such an indicator. The simple rule is to check the traffic cost of your keyword on a reasonable timeframe. As long as the cost is trending upwards, you can rest assured that you are doing well in terms of your SEO plan. On the contrary, if not much value is created over time, or in a worst case scenario, if the traffic cost decreases over time, there are some problems with your SEO performance and you must take action instantly to get it back on track!
How reliable is it?
Traffic cost is one of the most reliable measuring tools for SEO performance. However, there are some bugs associated with traffic cost. The most important bug is that SEMrush, as the main provider of such service, does not consider the keyword relevancy. For example, think of owning a massage centre for which you start a SEO campaign. One of the most important things you must be considering in selecting the right keywords that add value to your whole business by creating quality traffic for your website. However, if the keywords are not chosen precisely, the created traffic will not add much value to your business as most users are pretty much misled by the keywords and will not stay in your website for a long time as they are not after massage services! Hence, not much value will be created for your website. However, SEMrush considers the traffic on your website as a positive factor and the value of such irrelevant keywords will be shown on a rise while it is not adding any value to your business.
Final Words
Monitoring your SEO campaign performance is an absolutely crucial task. SEMrush traffic cost is a valuable and precise measuring factor to see how your SEO is performing over time. It is capable of showing you how you are progressing and if everything is moving on track. However, like other digital marketing services, it needs to be performed by an expert SEO consultant in order to avoid all bugs associated with such elements. The main errors have been discussed earlier in this article. Therefore, you, as a business owner, must make sure of having a proper SEO plan in place, get it accomplished precisely and monitor it from time to time to see how it is progressing. As the last rule of thumb, you must have an experienced SEO consultant beside yourself, so you can rest assured that you will be moving on the right track to success.
