[SEO GUIDE] How to calculate SEO investment required to rank

splishsplash

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This was a question someone asked me in an email and I ended up writing quite a large response, so I decided to take the concept and turn it into a more detailed article.

The question was one I get a lot actually, but usually I didn't give an alternative for how to calculate the investment for your SEO strategy.

The question is : "How much do I need to spend to get position X" or "How much do I need to spend to beat X competitor"

The question itself is flawed and completely unanswerable.

Instead, we need to take a different approach and calculate it based on 2 things :

1) How profitable our own site is

2) How good we are at SEO. Or rather, how "SEO efficient" we are. Ie, one person can spend $5k and get 1000 points of results, while another will spend $5k and can barely get 100 points of results.

Important Points Before We Start

There's a couple things to point out here so there's no confusion based on some of my other articles.

You'll often hear me say "you don't rank pages with links"

This isn't true in the absolutely strictest sense, as you CAN boost pages, but, you cannot hammer them, and you have to be careful with your strategy. In general, for most sites, it's just better to take the strategy of "You don't rank pages with links" and focus instead on building up the authority of the whole site.

However, for some niches where you have say 5-10 really profitable money pages, and the other 100, 200 or however many pages are just support pages, you can start to focus more on the money pages.

BUT, you still wouldn't want to take the strategy of focusing only on 1 page at the expense of the others, as this will create that unnatural approach that makes your campaign less efficient, and more links will be ignored.

Ie, it's this concept of SEO efficiency. You want to be as efficient as possible, and MAXIMIZE the results you can get per $ of spend.

The way you focus on pages is to send the strongest links to them, spread it out over the month, and also making sure you're still linking to other pages and there's not an overly greedy unnatural pattern.

You keep your anchors related, but don't abuse exact/partials. 1 or 2 is ok, but you don't really get extra benefit. Natural long phrase are better. The type of anchors you find in articles. As long as it contextually relates to the main keyword group, it has the same effect in my experience as exacts.

Ie, don't use brand/naked/misc. These are stupid anyway for contextual links. When do you ever see naked anchors in real articles? lol. Spam signal.

Brand sure, sometimes, but.. Chances are you're not a big brand where people are constantly using your brand name, so it's also stupid in articles. Fine for directory links/profile links etc.

And even worse is the "click here" nonsense from the early penguin days when you could dilute your anchor text to avoid penguin with misc/brand/naked. Don't even think about that strategy in 2025. You're 10 years too late for that. This would be like in 2013 doing keyword stuffing and expecting to rank.

Another approach is you build topical hubs that are highly related to your money pages, and you link to those. This helps focus PageRank/juice into the money page while avoiding the unnatural link building filters.

Ok, so. With that out the way..

WARNING: This is going to be a really math heavy post. This isn't really written for the casual SEO who's starting their first blog and looking to rank some low comp keywords.

It's written for companies and high profit businesses who have 4 to 5 figures to invest into their SEO, and need a robust, accountable and methodological strategy.


First - Which class is your site?

Decide what class your site falls into.

There are 2 main types.

Type 1

You don't really have any major money pages. You make money more evenly. You could be an info site or an ecom.

Some ecom will be type 2. Usually smaller ones with only a few profitable collections/products, but anything decently large is going to be type 1.

Type 2

Service providers, ecom and some local businesses will be type 2. This is where you have a few pages that make most of the money. Usually in the region of 2 to 3 up to about 25 pages. Can be more in the case of bigger sites.


Type 1 Site Calculation

The strategy for a type 1 site is drastically different than a type 2. You could combine them. There's no reason you can't if you want to exclude your money pages, calculate the average rpv for the rest of the pages, then combine, but I won't go into that in this guide as it's a little more complex. If enough people do want me to go into it I will though.

Step A) Calculate Sitewide Revenue Per Visitor

For type 1 you need to be able to calculate your average revenue per visitor.

If you have no traffic, this is more difficult, but most businesses are going to have some data to work with, even if they're not ranking.

You can use google ads data or even fb ads data.

Google ads revenue per click is going to be similar to organic for more targeted keywords, a bit less for broader.

Fb will be less. 1/3 to 1/6, but fb is highly variable, but if you are smart about which campaigns you use for your baseline, you'll be able to estimate your organic rpv

Step B) Prepare a complete content/keyword plan over a specific time period.

Your keyword plan should contain pages, keyword groups and keywords with volumes.

Ecom site?

Prepare a complete keyword plan that covers everything you sell.

Content site?

This is a bit trickier, since you can't just prepare an arbitrary "complete" plan. If it takes you 5 years to implement it, then you won't be able to garner any useful data to help you decide how much you can invest.

Instead, create a plan over a useful period like 6 months.

So you can assume 6 months to create the content and another 6 months to start getting decent rankings.

With an info site you potentially would keep the velocity of content creation high, or you might reduce and go into a maintenance. If you're going to keep the same velocity up, you could calculate your investment in 6 month chunks that would include 6 months of content costs and 12 months of SEO. Then your next 6 month chunk would also have 6 months of content costs, and 12 months of SEO, but split the cost 50/50 with the investment from the previous chunk.


The Keyword Plan

(You can use AI to do this, but doing so is beyond the scope of this guide. I might write a guide in how to do that in another post if you guys want)


You should have the following groupings.

You start with raw keywords with volumes.

Form groups.

Groups are keywords that have the SAME meaning.

Ie, "best toaster", "what are the best toasters", "what's the best toaster in 2025", "what are the top toasters today", "where can I learn about the best toasters" and so on.

These are the SAME meaning. You might want to make separate groups for singular and plural in my example. It's up to you how granular you want to go.

Next, label each group with an intention. Just a sentence describing what the person searching for this group wants.

You may have seen me talk about primary, secondary and tertiary intents.

This intent is none. It's just a user intent.

Now, you should have lists of user intents that can THEN be grouped.

You want to group these into what will be a page.

THIS is where you decide the primary, secondary and potentially even tertiary intent.

Not all pages will have tertiary. Only larger articles usually. Very specific product pages etc really only have a primary.

Ie, if you have some intents like :-

how to cook salmon
how to fish for salmon
how to season salmon
how to prepare a salmon you've fished

You might group these into 2 articles, the how to cook and how to season in 1, and the how to fish and how to prepare in another.

One will be a primary, depending on the title of your article.

If your article is "How to Cook Salmon", then any groups with the intent to cook salmon, are primary. "How to season salmon" I would label as a SECONDARY intent for that article.

Since, someone searching for how to cook, probably also has the intention of learning how to season, even if it's not conscious.

You can also organize your pages so they are beside ones that are closest in intent which will help you form your pages into silos/topical hubs and do internal linking.

Step C) Calculating your estimated traffic

This is the most important part, and where most people will get it wrong.

We need a sensible strategy that is going to carry over into the real world, not some arbitrary useless calculation.

Let's do some math.

Add up all the keyword volumes. The hardest part is getting accurate data.

Ahrefs for example varies, BUT, it varies in both directions. Sometimes global volume is close, sometimes it underestimates by a LOT, sometimes it overestimates, but, we don't always know if it's overestimating. Just because a page has X impressions in the search console, doesn't mean that's the global amount.

For that reason we can assume that if we sum up the ahrefs volumes, we have a fair estimate.

Ok, so sum them up. Let's say in this example that comes to 500,000 vol.

To be on the safe side, let's take 70% of that.

That's 350,000 vol.

Now, let's calculate some ranges.

Number 1 positions traditionally, get around 30% of clicks. This is +- an error range, where the error range depends on how many features are in that serp. AI, snippets, shopping, ads etc.

You can estimate this yourself depending on your own niche, and based on your own data.

It varies so much these days in real world data. I'm seeing some keywords at #1 get ctr's of 3%.

Look at this one for example - best email marketing software

Now bare in mind, this screenshot is on a vertical resolution of 1440, so this is big. 4k is 2160 height. HD is 1080 height.

1746483250083.jpeg


I mean lol. 1200 or so pixels of google ads.

Then if we scroll down.

1746483301776.jpeg

Just stupid. The #1 spot is 3 HD screens from the top, and then after the #1 spot we have PAA.

They'll probably still get some decent clicks because for that particular term people will probably not want ads as much, but compared with 3-4 years ago? Decimated.

#2? Not even worth it. They'll get about 1-2% ctr.

So choose based on what most of your keywords look like.

I wouldn't even bother going after serps that look as bad as that though.

For info go for an average of 15% for #1.

For ecom 20-25% for #1.

So, we have 350,000 vol.

For info, if you got #1 for everything, that would be 0.15 * 350000 = 52,000 per month.

For position 8, it would be 2%, so 0.02 * 350000 = 7000.

To be perfectly honest. I would say info is basically over.

I don't even see the point in discussing it anymore at this point. Pure info sites are dead.

Look at this.

1746483823691.jpeg


16 months. You see the number of clicks there? 672K. That's a monster site.

It's a DR66. Currently has 20k traffic on ahrefs. Actual clicks over the last month is 20k funnily enough. :-)

This site used to have 100k+ traffic.

It's HIGH quality content.

They've gone from 1% ctr average to, today, it's sitting at 0.2%.

That's FIVE times less clicks.

5 times less traffic, and 5 times less clicks..

The only time info is going to be decent is if you have a super sophisticated AI content system and can leverage scale/low cost.

Let's focus on services and ecom. It's my opinion now that Google really wants to kill info sites and replace them with AI and force all ecom/services into adwords. I don't know the future, but something at some point has to give. It's not sustainable. Something will pop in the next 5 years.

Let's continue with ecom here.

So 350k vol.

ecom ctr for no 1, call it 20%.

Call no 8, 2%

Your range is 0.2*350000 = 70k to 0.02*350000 = 7k.

That means, if you can average position 8 on all pages, you've got 7k traffic.

Let's add another scaling factor here to make that more realistic for our low-ball figure, which is what we want here.

30% of pages average rank position 8.

THAT is your baseline. It's your absolute minimum you want to achieve.

That's 0.3 * 7000 = 2100

ecom rpv ranges from $0.25 rpv to $50 at the high end rpv.

Since we're dealing with larger volumes here, it's likely going to be much lower, like $0.25 to $5 rpv.

So that's $525 to $10500 per month.

That's your investment figure depending on your rpv.

Your goal here is to invest every month, the minimum your site can make if you get 30% of your pages ranking on average position 8.

You might have higher vol pages ranking lower, and lower volume ranking higher. In general this is ok because we're being conservative with the 30% figure and position 8.

But to make this more accurate, you can segment into vol groups.

Ie, 5k+
2k-5k
500-2k
100-500
under 100

Then you might go for

average position 12 for 5k+
average position 9 for 2k-5k
average position 7 for 500-2k
average position 5 for 100-500
average position 4 for under 100

This is going to give you a more accurate figure.

We can think of this terms of graphs.

1746486389578.jpeg


The x axis is the number of visitors, and the y axis is the difficulty to reach the average position that'll get those.

The blue curve is polynomial. That's the difficulty curve. So it's a much lower investment/difficulty to reach 200 visitors a month than it is 3300.

Ie, it's not a straight line. 2000 is not 10x harder than 200. It's maybe 25x harder

This is why it's diminishing returns at the top.

The investment to go from 50k traffic to 100k is WAY higher than it is to go from 0k to 50k.

The 3 straight lines are 3 different ecom sites with 3 different rpvs.

If we look at the purple one, they are profitable up to about 1500 visitors. The investment required to go beyond that becomes a loss for them.

orange is profitable up to 2500 and green up to 3000.

That's why if you pick a starting figure that's lower, with much lower estimates on traffic(average rankings per volume group), you have a better chance of reaching profitability with your investment.

On this graph, if your site is green, and your entry point is investing based on 1000 visitors, then move your finger to the pink 1000, move up until you touch green, then move right in a straight line until you touch blue, and THAT is where you're going to land. Then move UP from that point until you're at green again, so for example

1746486726955.jpeg


Like this.

If you invest too little, your profit margin is small, then it grows as you invest more, then it starts to shrink again.

What we have is a bell curve for investment against profit. It looks like this.

1746486780511.jpeg


And of course, the HIGHER your SEO EFFICIENCY, the less extreme that blue curve above is, and consequently your top of the bell is much higher. That's why it's important to be SEO efficient and not burn lots of cash on useless links.

SEO is very much about utilizing as high a % of your budget as possible on the SEO actions that will yield results.

Ie, the 80% of budget in the 20% of actions that yield growth.


Type 2 Site Calculation

I went pretty deep and detailed on type 2.

So I won't go as deep here for type 2 because the theory and graphs apply here too.

But this is the main difference.

You are going to split your investments up into groups, rather than one general SEO plan for your whole site.

If you have 10 hot high profit money pages, you're going to do the above calculation except for EACH money page. All the keywords that they can rank for. Do the same calculations, and potentially split them into groups of under 100 vol, 100-500, 500-2k, 2k-5k, 5k+ and pick an average rank goal for each group.

Everything else applies.

The only difference here is you're creating a budget for each page.

That budget will include strong direct links to the pages

Building a silo/hub around the pages.

Medium to strong links to the silo/hub pages.

The more profit potential a page has, the more budget it gets.

Remember, you CANNOT hammer pages with links!

If I have a $5k/mo budget for 1 page, vs $2k/mo for another, you know what I do?

I buy STRONGER links for the $5k one. Not MORE links.

You can't just hammer a page with 100's of crappy links and expect it to rank. You should in general be spreading your links out, but you can send the stronger ones to the important pages.

That's about it.. Feel free to ask questions. I'll answer for a bit, but I am extraordinarily busy these days, but I will answer for a few days any questions people have then I'll have to get back to work :)


SUMMARY OF CALCULATIONS

This won't make sense until you've digested the above, but here's the summary.

Method 1(Less accurate because average rank doesn't account for volume differences)

1. Add up search volumes. Multiply total by 70% to account for overestimation. Conservative.
2. Choose average rank. I recommend 8 and 2% -- You can play about with this if you know your niche.
3. Choose % of pages that should have that average. Be conservative, so 30%.
4. You have 70% * total volume * 30% * 2% ( If total volume is 100,000, that gives you 0.7 * 100000 * 0.3 * 0.02 = 420 visitors.
5. Multiply by your RPV. Revenue Per Visit. If that's $2, then you have 420 * $2. That means your investment budget is $840/mo either for your site, or the page depending on whether it's type 1 or type 2.

( Quick note: This is why ecom and services smoke info. Their entire budget can go into links. Info sites need to split between content/links, AND they make less money.)

Method 2

Same as above, except group your search volumes and give each an average rank

could be

0-100 - av 4
100-500 av 5
500-2000 av 8
2000-5000 av 12
5000+ av 16

Then calculate for each. pos 8 is about 2%, or at least that's what I use as an average. Decide your own averages for your niche. Always on the conservative side. You want to UNDERESTIMATE, not overestimate for the first run. You can always increase later.
 

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Great guide, bookmarked it.
This kind of post makes this forum a true goldmine
 
When you treat SEO as a measurable traffic acquisition asset, your investment decisions become way more grounded. You're not guessing based on your competitors' backlinks — you're calculating based on your own revenue per visitor, conversion rates, and how efficiently SEO can bring those users to your site.
That’s how high-ROI businesses operate. They don’t ask “how much does it cost to rank?” — they ask:
“Given my margins and my conversion rates, how much traffic do I need to hit my goals — and is SEO the most efficient way to get there?”
 
Insane content right here, and all for free?

Now I'm hoping the chance to use the knowledge learnt here in the future, so far in my time working in SEO I've never had the opportunity to even get close to doing analytics like this.

Thank you for sharing!
 
insane guide! This is pure gold for folks new to SEO.
from my experience, calculations are pretty important or I should even say crucial especially when it comes to BH seo. Some people just invest invest and invest without seeing any postive ROI but they just suck at that step which is why they just cant be profitable.
 
insane guide! This is pure gold for folks new to SEO.
from my experience, calculations are pretty important or I should even say crucial especially when it comes to BH seo. Some people just invest invest and invest without seeing any postive ROI but they just suck at that step which is why they just cant be profitable.

Not just for blackhat SEO, but any SEO.

You can apply these principles to other areas in marketing too like ads.

The same curve applies.

People in ads will know that, throwing more and more money at something results in diminishing returns, until eventually you cross into a loss.

The same curve applies in fact to all business.

There's an optimal tip of the bell curve in all investments.

Too little and you don't get enough back, and too much, and you get back less and less relative to your investment.

It doesn't apply to the stockmarket obviously.

It applies to investing into businesses.

Ie, if you're building a restaurant, compare investing too little, vs just the right amount, vs a stupidly high amount where you get the best chef, tables, furniture, massive marketing budget etc. You're going to burn more than you make back.

It can apply to hiring staff.

A 100 person team isn't 10 times more productive than a 10 person team, and a 1000 person team certainly isn't 100x more so.

While in SEO, we have different curves for different levels of SEO ability, the same applies to management techniques in business. Better curves for better systems of management and operational systems.

But ultimately they are all bell curves, when you're plotting the difference between the investment curve and the profit curve.
 
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