Many web owners, both newbies and those with more experience, wonder how much their Google ranking is worth to their business. More importantly, they wonder how much a #1 ranking with Google would be worth.

Naturally, the worth of your Google ranking depends on a vast variety of factors. Chief among these is the actual keyword you’re ranking for. Ranking for the most relevant keyword for your product, service, or industry will be worth a whole lot more than ranking for a relatively unsearched keyword.

But what about in general? How much does your Google ranking matter in general? We discuss the answer to both of these questions and more below.

The Real Value of SEO

So does your Google ranking matter? Of course it does. Ranking near the top of the search results is what gets eyes on your website.

But your Google ranking isn’t the most important result of SEO. It’s not even close. While a high ranking is the first step to SEO success, you actually need to convert those views into sales.

Look at it this way. You pay for a television ad and then see it while you’re watching TV. Does this mean the ad is successful? Of course not. It means that you put it right there in front of your audience. Just because it’s on TV doesn’t mean that your audience has responded well to it (or even responded to it at all).

You can think about your Google ranking in the same way. Whether you did the SEO yourself or hired a company for your campaign, your Google ranking is just a piece of the puzzle. Much more important is driving new traffic, leads, and sales to your business.

How to Measure Value of SEO

For now, let’s work with the idea that the goal of SEO is to bring more traffic, leads, and eventually sales to your website. To measure the potential value of your SEO efforts, you’ll want to know how many times your relevant keywords are searched each month, how much traffic the #1 search result is getting, and how much of that traffic will likely convert to sales.

Luckily, there are a number of tools available that will help you easily do all of these things. The first is Google’s Keyword Planner tool. Not only does it help you find your relevant keywords, it shows you how often they are searched for each month.

Moving on down the list, most studies show that the #1 search result for any Google search term receives around 33% of the clicks on average. You can find out how much traffic you’ll likely receive by multiplying your keyword’s monthly search results by 33%. This will provide you with an estimate on potential website traffic.

The final step to measuring the potential value of your SEO results is to figure out the likely rate of conversion. This is most easily done by multiplying your estimate on potential website traffic with whatever your normal conversion rates are. Most of the time this is somewhere in the range of 0.5% and 5%.

What Does This All Mean?

What we’re trying to say here is that, yes, your Google ranking is important. But it’s not the be all end all method of measuring the success of your SEO efforts.

SEO is and always will be a great opportunity when done right. It’s just important to measure your progress to figure out what’s working and what isn’t. This is the only way to fine-tune your efforts to turn all that new traffic into sales.

So keep on the ball with your SEO efforts. Continue to create new, great value search engine optimized content. And be sure to include a call to action, a reason for viewers to buy your product or service. Stay dedicated to this and you’ll notice your conversion rate rising even before your eventual crawl up the Google ranking ladder.