Rank, Traffic & Value Benchmarking

If you want to know whether you’re winning or losing in your market and whether the gap is closing or getting further apart you need to track more than rankings. You need to be looking at traffic and value / revenue as well.

Linkdex has made the benchmarking of these key performance indicators (KPI’s) easy as part of our standard platform features.

Not having these metrics makes answering the questions impossible to answer:

“How much is my market worth?”

“Am I winning or losing?”

“Should I be investing more in natural search?”

What are the features that make this possible

• With Linkdex you can rank check your competitors as well as your domains
• We then estimate the number of clicks you and your competitors are getting from your rankings
• We then estimate the amount you have to pay for those clicks if you were using paid search (the equivalent media value)
• We then estimate your % share of your keywords
• And finally we estimate revenues based on the conversion and sales value assigned to keywords via keyword tagging i.e. you can say that keywords tagged with “Car Insurance” have an average conversion of 2% and are worth £500 a sign-up

If you’re reporting internally or pitching for new business, these calculations are going to help you get the investment decisions you want.

So what do you need to do to make the most of this feature?

• Add competitors to your domain list on the Rank Tracking page
• Use keyword research to find and start rank tracking as many keywords as you believe define each market you’re in e.g. for ‘Car Insurance’ it’s possible to rank track 800 + keywords that define this segment
• Tag the keywords you and your competitors are rank tracking, making sure you group them into market groups e.g. Car Insurance, Credit Cards, Loans, Mortgages could be 4 different types of keyword tag
• If you know the conversion rate and value of a sale at tag level e.g. conversion rate of people looking for ‘car insurance’ and the value of a sign-up, add this data via the ‘tag management’ screen.

We’ll do the rest. Which means we’ll calculate the Rankings, Traffic and Value of each tagged market, each domains you’ve added share of the marketing in equivalent media value of natural search, percentage of all clicks, and forecast revenues (if you added conversion and value metrics to a tag).

Small health warning

In order to create this hugely valuable benchmarking data we have used Google search volume estimates which do not always reflect site owners volume experiences, but offer a good feel for relative demand.

We also use standardised clickthrough rate formula. However we know that lots of types of searches do not lend themselves to standardarised thinking. If you’re looking for ‘British Airways’ most people will click the top result. If you’re looking for ‘cheap flights’ you’re click further down the page. Over time we will look to take different types of search in to account, and make our estimates more accurate.

The final bit of the mix is average cost per click data. This does not take into account quality scores that may help you buy clicks cheaper than the average.

That said there is still HUGE amounts of value in what we have done as we’re using the same rules for you and your competitors, our benchmarking metrics still offers a reliable way of comparing relative shares of natural search, whether in traffic or value.