I want a quick way to check the competitors in a niche, and estimate what can I spend on a search engine marketing campaign to make money in the segment, using the search engines (read: Google).

For a quick test I dive into the money segment, got the top 70 search phrases of October off of 7Search and for each get the top 100 results, resulting in a mysql database with 7.000 url’s on 3500 domains.

Then I try three cross-sections to extract the top 25 domains in the segment :

• (100 – position) / 100 per result
• (100 – position) / 100 per result, +1 for first 10, +1 for first 6, +1 for first three
• AOL experience based percentage of search volume

rating by rank

If I rate the sites’ urls based on (100 – position) / 100 per result.

place 1 = 0.99, place 100 = 0, that yields this table :

domain	score
www.amazon.com	51.05
www.youtube.com	34.82
en.wikipedia.org	34.04
wordpress.com	30.93
www.streetdirectory.com	29.62
money.cnn.com	24.5
www.wikihow.com	22.84
www.experienced-people.co.uk	22.29
ezinearticles.com	22.26
books.google.com	19.22
www.problogger.net	17.52
entrepreneurs.about.com	16.53
www.43things.com	14.75
moneycentral.msn.com	14.74
answers.yahoo.com	14.41

That makes Amazon top dog for all phrases containing ‘money’. I know the first pages get most traffic, and that first method doesn’t express that, so I change the routine and do my old trick.

rating by rank, bonus for front page

(100 – pos) / 100, and
for place 1-3 3 points
for place 4-6 2 points
for place 7-10 1 points

That gives this table :

domain	score
en.wikipedia.org	91.04
www.wikihow.com	67.84
www.amazon.com	65.05
www.youtube.com	56.82
money.cnn.com	50.5
entrepreneurs.about.com	45.53
ezinearticles.com	45.26
www.experienced-people.co.uk	42.29
www.freemoneyfinance.com	31.9
www.streetdirectory.com	31.62
wordpress.com	30.93
www.43things.com	30.75
abcnews.go.com	30.15
moneycentral.msn.com	29.74
moneymakerinfo.blogspot.com	29.55
www.thisismoney.co.uk	27.06
www.moneymakingmommy.com

That still does not show what domains actually get the traffic I need for conversion.

It is easy to score in a low traffic niche and anyone can be a winner on long tails, “alabama ski resort”, but long tails only get you a few hits (and wonder if they are serious?). And these results doesn’t give me a clue what I can spend (or what my competition would be willing to spend) on the actual traffic spots.

So I am going to estimate what traffic every site gets. I need search volumes and percentages for the serp ranks. I grabbed the search volumes per phrase from 7Search. For percentages, Aaron Wall quotes an old AOL source on the average click through rate of search engine result pages per spot on the first page :

Overall Percent of Clicks	Relative Click Volume
42.13%, 2,075,765 clicks 11.90%, 586,100 clicks 8.50%, 418,643 clicks 6.06%, 298,532 clicks 4.92%, 242,169 clicks 4.05%, 199,541 clicks 3.41%, 168,080 clicks 3.01%, 148,489 clicks 2.85%, 140,356 clicks 2.99%, 147,551 clicks	3.5x less 4.9x less 6.9x less 8.5x less 10.4x less 12.3x less 14.0x less 14.8x less 14.1x less
1st page totals: 89.82%, 4,425,226 clicks 2nd page totals: 10.18%, 501,397 clicks

That was what i was looking for. Given these percentages I can estimate the traffic any spot on the search engine result front page in Google would generate, and that yields a more realistic table of the money segment :

domain	traffic	result	result+(1,2,3)
www.bidvertiser.com	737478	6.65	17.65
money.cnn.com	294316	24.5	50.5
en.wikipedia.org	160370	34.04	91.04
www.wikihow.com	132332	22.84	67.84
www.wealthsuccess.usana.com	123503	9.4	24.4
entrepreneurs.about.com	117069	16.53	45.53
www.moneymakingmommy.com	112507	11.65	26.65
www.freemoneyfinance.com	102122	12.9	31.9
www.experienced-people.co.uk	86498	22.29	42.29
www.forbes.com	84393	7.22	19.22
www.netjobs4all.com	75868	4.61	12.61
makemoneyforbeginners.blogspot.com	75399	6.53	15.53
www.missingmoney.com	65326	3.63	12.63
www.youtube.com	60586	34.82	56.82
technology.timesonline.co.uk	55009	3.53	8.53
moneymakerinfo.blogspot.com	54431	13.55	29.55
www.moneyclaim.gov.uk	50544	1.9	5.9
moneycentral.msn.com	39399	14.74	29.74

That shows which sites actively target and get the traffic in the segment, a site like amazon doesn’t show in the top of the last table.

One way of testing the validity of the estimates is comparing with alexa rank, doing a quick SeoQuake toolbar check :

domain	est. search traffic	alexa rank
www.wealthsuccess.usana.com	200000	20000
moneymakingmommy	110000	70000
freemoneyfinance	100000	60000
makemoneyforbeginners.blogspot.com	75000	140000
problogger.com	6500	43000

That’s roughly correct based on old AOL percentages (well done, Aaron) and Oktober’s search volumes. It does not work for youtube, msn and others that have an alexa rank based on the entire domain. Being a search engine traffic estimate it doesn’t cover your ‘audience’ (returning visitors on bookmarks and referrals off of other sites (which are included in the alexa ranking) or other segments.

Problogger for example, according to that calculation would get about 6K hits through Google but the Alexa rank indicates it has ~~160K hits a month. That indicates high return visits and direct traffic, a high usability and I think they get traffic from other segments (‘blog’ ?).

The use of it

Why did I start doing this ? To estimate a budget for niche penetration.

If I were interested in a niche and have a 1% conversion at $100,- per year per conversion, what would I be able to spend to get Bidvertisers’ traffic in the search engines ? With their traffic and my conversion, 730.000/100 = 7300 conversions per month =y 88.000 a year @100/conversion = 8.8 million dollar gross revenue on search engine traffic conversions.

If my marketing budget is 20% of gross sales, for a year project that amounts to 1.7 million dollar. If I already had 300K hits my budget would be a million.

That (roughly) answers my question.

I have my doubts about the use of a tool like this, it could function as quick way to scan a segment, make a ‘heatmap’ and pinpoint the soft spots that are easy to penetrate and get a foothold, but that would require some stiff programming and a lot of switches, as well as processing a lot more segments. Nice project for the winter.