Aaron Hoos

Business owners know that the closer you are to the very top of a Google search, the better. If your business is buried on page 10, you won’t see much traffic. If your business is on page 2 or 3, you might see some. The first page gets more. The top spot gets most of the traffic. This isn’t news to anyone.

But exactly how much money is that top spot worth? The smart folks at SEObook wrote a great article about how to uncover the value of the top spot in a Google search for the term you’re after.

It’s a long article and it requires some research, but the information is very compelling. I’ve summarized the five steps they’ve written to find out the value of the top spot, and you can read the entire article at SEObook.

Here are the steps to know how much that top spot in a Google search is worth:

1. Establish a baseline keyword value.
2. Know the typical click distribution profile.
3. Consider factors that modify click distribution.
4. Tap into the long-tail.
5. Improve monetization with scale.

If you’re working toward a top placement in Google search for a particular keyword, and if you want to know in advance what it is worth to your business, follow these steps.

Read SEObook’s post How much money is a top Google ranking worth to your business?

This week, I challenged you to attract an entirely new market of people to your business by using a long-tail keyword or keyphrase that you have not previously been optimizing for.

How did you do?

Although you may not be at the publishing stage, did you find something? Were you successful at coming up with a campaign to use that keyword?

Even if you find a keyword that brings in just a couple hundred people per month, that could still be a significant boost to your business since they are highly targeted!

The Weekly Sales Funnel Challenge is a week-long challenge for business owners to focus on a specific aspect of their sales funnel for one week. It’s a fun way to keep you focused on one of the most important parts of your business. A new Weekly Sales Funnel Challenge is published every Monday and a wrap-up post is published every Friday.

Long-tail search engine optimization is when you target a keyword that doesn’t necessarily have a lot of traffic. It attracts some traffic but not nearly the amount that the more popular keywords in your category attract.

Identifying a longtail keyword and building an entire marketing campaign around it will help you opportunistically draw in even more business through a keyword that most of your competitors are probably ignoring.

So here’s what to do: Go to Google’s keyword tool and use the big keywords in your industry. Then find a keyword/keyphrase that has considerably less traffic. Say, hundreds of people instead of thousands.

Once you’ve identified that keyword, brainstorm potential blog content and article content optimized for that keyword specifically. That’s all you need to do for this week’s challenge, but be sure to plan to release that content in the next couple of weeks.