Keyword Traffic and Revenue Estimator

Use this calculator to estimate website traffic and to project revenue (optional) for your website based on ranking in Google search engine results pages (SERP) for a specific keyword.

Estimated Traffic Chart

Estimated Traffic and Revenue

Calculator Instructions

Keyword Search Volume

To get started with this calculator, enter the monthly search volume for the keyword of interest to you. There are many tools available to find the estimated search volume, some of which are free and others that are paid. Until recently, the Google Keyword Planner, which is part of the Google Adwords platform, was the primary free tool used to source this information. But around August 2016, the Google Keyword Planner was updated to provide only a broad range of search volume estimates for owners of low-spending Google Adwords accounts.

So what keyword research tools do you recommend?

An extremely useful tool that is free and provides search volume estimates is Keywords Everywhere. It’s available as a Chrome and Firefox browser add-on. To use it, just do a Google search like you normally would and the keyword volume will show up in the search results.

As far as paid tools go, there are many on the market. Most of the paid tools have capabilities far beyond providing basic search volume information. These paid tools range in features, capabilities, and price.

Keyword research tools on the lower end of the feature spectrum provide not only search volume information, but also help generate keyword ideas and often provide other useful features. One very useful feature is a keyword difficulty score. This score, calculated differently by each tool, helps to determine how difficult it will be to rank for that specific keyword. One tool that I place in this category is called Long Tail Pro. It's a great tool that balances features and price.

On the higher end of the keyword research tool spectrum are tools like Ahrefs. This tool has a huge set of features that is a must have for those seriously involved in Search Engine Optimization (SEO). But these awesome features come at a higher price.

Regardless of the tool you use to estimate keyword search volume, enter the search volume in the first input box of the calculator above.

Estimate Mobile Traffic

Next, enter the percentage of traffic that is anticipated to be from mobile devices. Because click through rate is different for each search result position between mobile and desktop users, this field is used by the calculator to estimate traffic.

On mobile, the CTR is typically lower for the first search result position than it is on desktop. And interestingly enough, the click thru rate tends to increase slightly on the second page of mobile results. This is somewhat different than the profile seen for desktop traffic.

If your website is new and you are unsure how to estimate the percentage that will be from mobile traffic, I'd recommend setting this to around 60% based on this study from SimilarWeb in 2015. The study found that roughly 56% of searches are conducted from mobile devices.

Revenue Per Visitor

For most, the real goal of driving traffic to a website is to generate revenue. You can use this calculator to help estimate revenue based on ranking for a specific keyword. To do this, simply enter the estimated revenue per visitor in the revenue field above. Be aware that figuring out what your projected revenue per visitor is often the hard part, though it is fun to dream and develop "what if" estimates.

Let's assume that you are planning to monetize with ads and your previous performance for a similar website shows that you can achieve $8.00 RPM (revenue per thousand impressions). We will also assume for the sake of simplicity that your ad impressions are equal to your website sessions. To convert this to revenue per visitor for use in this calculator, divide $8.00 RPM by 1000 visitors which equals $0.008. You would enter $0.008 into the revenue field in this example.

Now let's assume you sell a product (digital or physical) for $35 and you believe you can convert 2% of your traffic into buyers. In this example, your revenue per visitor can be determined by thinking through a simple example. Let's assume you receive 100 website visitors and 2% convert on your offer at $35 each. That means that 2 visitors out of the 100 purchase your offer for a total of $70 in sales. Now divide $70 in sales by 100 visitors. Your revenue per visitor is equal to $0.70. Use this value in the calculator to estimate revenue for the projected traffic.

About this Calculator

This calculator is based on the excellent CTR data published by Advanced Web Ranking. This study looks at millions of keywords across tens of thousands of websites to determine click thru rates for Google search results. I've found this to be some of the best data openly available on the web and is useful for estimating traffic in our case.

This calculator uses CTRs for all search results, which includes branded and unbranded results. This tool provides a good, general estimate of the traffic one might expect as a result of ranking for a specific keyword. In the real world, if you rank for one keyword, you might rank for a number of other long tail keywords resulting in even higher traffic than this calculator will show.

Keep in mind that the traffic estimate is based on many assumptions and estimates. The first input to this calculator (keyword search volume) is in itself just an estimate which is subject to error. Then throw in an estimate for mobile vs desktop and projected CTR for each search position and you can see the potential for imperfection. In short, no tool can provide a perfect estimate, but this tool provides a fairly reasonable approximation based on the best available data.

For more established websites, Google Search Console (and Bing Webmaster Tools) is an invaluable tool for getting CTR information for keywords in which you are already ranking. This information can be used to build your own tool to estimate traffic for keywords related to the industry in which your website operates. This article by Search Engine Land provides a good starting point for analyzing your Google Search Console data.