September 4, 2024

How Much Revenue Does a Top 5 Keyword Generate?

As you’ve researched business growth strategies, you’ve likely come across the claim that organic search marketing is key to building a more profitable business and driving the revenue required to scale.

Sounds great, but the claim itself is rather nebulous. You want details: How much more profitable could your business be? How much marketing revenue can you expect to see, and what can you expect your marketing ROI to look like? 

Unpopular answer: It depends. 

However, through informed keyword research tailored to your business, it’s possible to accurately forecast each keyword’s new monthly revenue contribution so you can identify the most valuable keywords. 

How do we know? Because we do this for each of our clients at VELOX Media.

Here’s an inside look at the value your business could realize from ranking revenue-driving pages in one of the coveted top five organic positions on Google Search.

First, a quick overview of how organic search works and why it delivers unparalleled results.

Why Does Organic Search Deliver Better Marketing ROI?

Organic search is the most powerful digital marketing channel, driving over half of all website traffic globally. 

Are you an SEO skeptic and unsure if optimizing your site for search visibility is worth the investment?

Consider this: The SEO market continues to grow rapidly, with an expected increase from $75.13 billion in 2023 to nearly $89 billion by the end of 2024. By 2028, the SEO industry could hit $170 billion. 

Companies wouldn’t be spending more and more on growing their organic search traffic if it didn’t generate a considerable return on marketing investment.

And when someone says “organic search,” for all intents and purposes, they mean Google. 

Not only does Google control over 91% of the worldwide search engine market share as of July 2024, but Google is also the world’s most visited site, with a total of 130.1 billion monthly users. 

What Does Organic Search Success Look Like?

Revenue is the ultimate goal of any digital marketing effort, but revenue comes from conversions, which in turn come from users. 

The goal of an organic search campaign is to increase your online visibility and attract a significant (and, ideally, ever-increasing) number of new users to your site. 

Marketing comes down to reaching your customers where they are. In the case of organic search, your customers are on search engine results pages (SERPs) for keywords relevant to your business—and that’s exactly where you want your brand to be, too.

Here’s where it gets tricky: For any given query, Google will display thousands, if not millions, of results. At 10 results per SERP, that gives users hundreds of thousands of SERPs to sift through. 

Of course, nobody in their right mind would do that. In fact, fewer than 1% of users even explore results past the first page. 

So that means you want to rank on the first page for relevant keywords to your business, right? The first page is a great start, but the higher you can position your brand, the better. 

Consider the click-through rates (CTR) broken down by SERP position. 

At #10, your page might garner a 1 to 2% CTR. But over two-thirds of all clicks on search results go to the top three spots, with approximate CTRs broken down as follows: 

• #1: ~33-40% 
• #2: ~15-20% 
• #3: ~10%

Does that mean achieving a #1 ranking is the only real way to win in organic search? Absolutely not! Depending on your business and the competitive landscape, simply making it onto page one can mean a huge boost in marketing revenue.

Every brand with a digital presence should invest in attaining the highest organic rankings possible. However, the ranking positions themselves make poor marketing KPIs because they don’t tell the story of the new traffic, conversions, and revenue benefiting your business.

When analyzing the value of your organic search campaign, you should focus on two KPIs: new revenue and ROI.

How to Measure Revenue Contribution From Organic Search

Historically, marketers have had a much easier time measuring revenue and marketing ROI from paid search campaigns than organic campaigns. However, there are a few ways to reliably forecast and measure the benefits of organic search.

How much monthly revenue can you expect to drive by obtaining a particular ranking for a keyword? Consider this formula:

New Monthly Revenue = KW Search Volume x CTR x Conversion Rate x Average Order Value

There are other ways to measure this, with varying degrees of accuracy. 

For instance, you could compare channel data in Google Analytics 4 or Google Search Console year-over-year (YoY).

Third-party tools and SEO platforms are valuable, but their data is often less reliable than data from Google.

Creating campaign-specific landing pages is also an option, especially if you plan on running a smaller campaign that only targets a handful of keywords. You can use this data in comparison to other landing pages on your site. 

Why Is Organic Search a Good Investment?

The benefits of an organic search campaign can vary widely depending on the competitive landscape within your vertical, the size of your business, your target audience, and your brand’s positioning or USPs. 

Here’s a look at how VELOX organic search campaigns delivered results and spurred growth for a few of our clients across different verticals.

Primally Pure

After bad experiences with other digital marketing agencies, Primally Pure partnered with VELOX in 2020. Their team needed to see concrete results quickly. 

Verifiable Revenue Results:

• 3,969 Keywords Ranked in Top 10 – Up 375%
• 111% Increase in Organic Traffic YoY
• $99,000 Average Monthly Organic New Revenue

Democracy Clothing

This women’s denim lifestyle brand was just getting its online sales off the ground when Democracy Clothing partnered with VELOX. 

Verifiable Revenue Results:

• 3,026 Keywords Ranked in Top 10 – Up 7,465%
• 745% Increase in Organic Search Marketing ROI
• 400% Increase in Revenue as a Result of This Campaign

Magliner

Already a legend in the material handling industry, Magline partnered with VELOX to expand its digital marketing efforts, seeking new revenue from an organic search campaign.

Verifiable Revenue Results:

• 5,481 Keywords Ranked in Top 10 – Up 317%
• 94% Increase in Revenue in 8 Months
• $1,000,000 Increase in Total Revenue

These are just three examples of VELOX’s client success stories through organic search. While getting to the top 10 isn’t easy and takes considerable time, once a brand solidifies its position, the revenue gains are limitless.

How to Optimize Your Organic Search Campaign For Maximum SEO ROI

Organic search experts often discuss rankings, but those rankings are a means to an end for your brand. Remember, rankings themselves do not equal new revenue.

Rankings bring in site traffic, and your website must be optimized to push users through the funnel and turn your new traffic into conversions. 

Overall, you’ll want to follow the best practices for building any site or page. That includes basic technical optimizations, such as using high-quality images, implementing proper heading tag hierarchy, and addressing any technical issues causing slow load times.

Optimize Your Landing Pages

Your landing page is the first thing a user sees after clicking your link from SERPs. If that page is unhelpful, low quality, or not designed to function as a part of a funnel, why go through the effort of ranking higher in SERPs? 

If your landing page doesn’t have what a user is looking for, they’ll simply leave. That means the only thing your organic search campaign has done so far is increase your bounce rate. 

It’s best to tailor your landing page to the search intent behind the target keyword. This will help your ranking and ensure you deliver genuine value to the users who discover your page in search results. 

That doesn’t mean every landing page has to be a product page. In fact, if someone is using an information keyword during the top-of-funnel stage, they likely aren’t ready for your product pages. 

But if you provide them with a best-of-web blog post about the topic they’re interested in, with specific callouts referencing your products and using anchor text to link to those product pages, you may very well pull that user further through the funnel.

Implement Strategic Internal Linking

The links between different pages on your website are how users and search engines explore your site. Links within the same domain—those that don’t take users to a different website—are known as internal links. 

Every page on your site should function as part of your sales funnel to maximize conversions and revenue.

No, that doesn’t mean you should pressure users like a used car salesperson. However, it does mean you should implement a strategic internal linking structure to help users get where they’re trying to go—hopefully, to your revenue-driving pages.

Have a Backup Plan for Out-of-Stock Items

Nobody wants to waste time navigating to a product page that doesn’t allow them to make a purchase, like a page for an item that’s currently out of stock. 

If the page features a discontinued product, use a 301 redirect to point users to a relevant page, ideally, the page featuring a successor product. 

But if you plan to restock the item, consider adding a waitlist to the product page in the meantime. 

A simple way to do this is to offer a short form that allows users to enter their email addresses so your brand can notify them when the product is back in stock. Bonus points if your notification email includes a discount code to reward customers for their patience.

Hopefully, you’re starting to see a theme here: The best way to optimize your landing pages and your website as a whole to maximize conversions and revenue from your organic search traffic is to deliver genuine value to your users. 

When you provide an outstanding user experience, you can bet they’ll be back. They may even share your brand with their friends on social media.

Your Brand + VELOX = More Organic Traffic & Revenue

At VELOX, we don’t simply put your brand on page one and say, “Good luck!” As a full-service, revenue-focused digital marketing agency, our goal is to help you build a more productive and revenue-driving business. 

We tailor our fully customized campaigns to meet your specific growth goals, conservatively targeting 400 to 800% ROI. It’s just one reason we’re recognized as a Google Premier Partner, ranked among the top 3% of agencies globally, because of our commitment to exceeding our clients’ expectations.

Want to see how much revenue your brand could generate from a top 5 ranking? Contact VELOX today, and we’ll generate a custom New Revenue Model for your brand.