What’s your SEO Growth Potential?

8th June 2017Elizabeth

How much potential for organic traffic is lurking in under-optimized pages?

Chances are, your site has valuable content not generating the organic traffic that it could. Discover how much of your site could be optimized – and how much additional SEO traffic you could be driving with a simple growth potential calculation.

Detecting your SEO “growth potential” is the process of calculating how much additional organic traffic you can potentially generate by identifying and improving under-optimized pages in your site structure.

What is Growth Potential Detection

In an ideal world, your site’s most strategic pages – those valuable for SEO purposes – would achieve 100% active pages ratio over the course of a month. That is, 100% would receive SEO visits in that time period. In reality, however, this is rarely true, and it is this portion of inactive pages (those that don’t receive SEO visits) that holds the most potential for boosting SEO traffic with a little optimization to get them active.

Though nothing is guaranteed, and your calculation won’t take into account seasonality in search or query popularity, growth potential detection is a valuable tool to prioritize implementations and communicate possible gains with strategic SEO changes when reporting internally or delivering recommendations to a client.

How to Calculate Your SEO Growth Potential

The best way to find hidden opportunities for organic traffic is to calculate the potential of your inactive pages to become active and generate SEO visits.

Put simply, the calculation requires three clear steps:

• Identify segments of pages that can generate more organic traffic
• Detect poorly-optimized, inactive pages in those segments
• Determine how much traffic these pages could generate if they were well optimized

1. Which areas of your site could be hiding potential?

Choose a segment of your site to focus on first where you suspect there may be unrealized potential. This may be a section of your site that earns a large portion of your total traffic, or represents a large proportion of your site. Assess each segment in turn to discover the areas of your site most likely to be hiding some under-optimized pages that could give your traffic a boost if SEO was improved.

2. Which pages in those segments are not receiving organic traffic?

Within your selected segment(s), break down your analysis into active and inactive pages. Determine which inactive pages – those that did not receive any SEO visits in the last 30 days – have the potential to be improved in order to generate organic traffic.

In this example, inactive “articles” pages that are unique (no duplicate content) and have a significant amount of text (not thin content), represent a large number of URLs that could begin receiving Google traffic.

Identify poorly-optimized pages based on key SEO metrics such as:

• Depth > 5
• Load Times > 2000 ms
• Duplicate content or HTML tags
• Not enough inlinks (compared to active pages)

3. How much traffic should these pages be generating?

Once you’ve found the number of pages you plan to optimize, it takes a simple calculation to see just how much organic traffic you could be driving, potentially.

Take the number of inactive pages (IP) with potential, multiplied by the current number of visits received, on average, by each active page. ‚Üí IP x visits = the number of SEO visits you could possibly receive once inactive pages are optimized.

Therefore, growth potential = the number of inactive pages with potential x potential SEO visits, on average per page.

Simple, right?

For a more accurate idea of your opportunity, perform this calculation at the segment level to analyze the potential in specific sections of your site. Identify under-optimized pages then match that with average traffic received by each page in that segment.

The Real Value of Growth Potential

Capturing growth potential is a great strategy for prioritizing SEO implementations and beginning to quantify SEO efforts. Expected growth potential can uncover which projects will be most impactful and can guide your roadmap.

Check out other insightful reports in the Botify platform or schedule a demo today.