Organic Traffic Valuations - what method do you use?

Hello BHW,

I'm curious what method other users use to value the organic traffic for the industry or niche they are considering investing in. Here's a quick method I do to value the revenue potential before I build a site in a new industry; let me know what suggestions you might have.

Identify top advertisers for main "money" keywords in Google SERPS
Place each of them in Spyfoo (I found SEMrush to not be as accurate), export top 100 keywords for each after removing branded keywords
Add up daily PPC budget from Spyfoo from top competitors, and that is what Google makes on those keywords per month. Average CPC across competitors is what the advertisers value that traffic as, which can be assumed to be generating a positive return
Take 20% of that total ad spend number per keyword as an idea of what traffic value you can revive with upper first page rankings
I then check the competition for the most profitable keywords in ahrefs/majestic for root domains and backlink profiles to prioritize which long tail keywords to create content for first

Let me know what you guys think. Cheers.

I sometimes run adwords ads just to test the market and get an idea on number of searches for that keyword.