What’s a First Page Google Ranking Worth to Your Business?

For those businesses whose customer base are searching Google, achieving an organic ranking on the first page (usually in the top ten) must be a priority. But if your business is not found on the first page of their search results, chances are your prospects will never find you. Which begs the question: what is an organic first-page Google ranking worth to you?

First some clarification: by organic, we mean being ranked by Google naturally, without any paid placements.

To find out what your customers are searching for, the Google Keyword Planner is a great place to start (yes, it has a bit of a learning curve). If you plug in a couple search keywords (or keyword expressions, as I prefer to call them), it will show you how many searches per month that it receives, in addition to countless related expressions, and their respective search volumes also. Bottom line: if you want your prospects to find you, you need to know what they are searching for.

Let’s consider the local search expression “dentist columbus ohio.” According to Google’s Keyword Planner (which anyone can access), this single expression alone averages 1,300 searches per month (If you think that number is low, remember this is a local search—most of which is likely based in the Columbus, Ohio region.).

This means that each month, on average, roughly 1,300 people are searching on Google for a dentist in Columbus, Ohio. There are other related expressions that also have significant counts, but this one is the highest. Do you know what that number—1,300—is worth to a dentist? To find out, do a simple equation:

Step 1: Estimate a single number that represents the Lifetime Value of just ONE repeat client. The Lifetime Value is what a single client or customer does with you over the long term, or the duration of your business relationship with them. For this exercise, be conservative, and take what a typical client might do in a single year (I know it might be a wide range, but pick a conservative, average number), and multiply that by just five years (even if a long-term relationship might be ten or more). For example, a dentist might conservatively chose an annual revenue for a single customer of $400, and multiplied that by five. That came to a Lifetime Value of $2,000 for each new customer (or “patient” in this case).

Step 2: Take THAT number—2,000—and multiply that by the average monthly searches for a single expression (in this case, 1,300). That gives us a total of $2,600,000—which represents the total POTENTIAL business that is going through the first page of Google for this one search expression each month.

Yes, that’s a big, pie-in-the-sky number. But if you’re in the pest control business and you could capture just 1/2 of one percent of that volume, it would result in SIX to SEVEN new long-term customers each month.

For a small business, that’s nothing to sneeze at, even as conservative as it is.

To learn more about how video production can get your business found on page one of Google, check out our new video below!