How to Eliminate Bank Account Stress with SEO

Mar 1

As a business owner, there’s nothing quite like those private moments when you nervously log into your bank account. When things haven’t been so consistent, you peek at the numbers with one eye closed, hoping that you’ll have enough money to cover everything.

Or, if your bank account is stable, but you want to invest in your business, it’s hard to know exactly when to do that. Psychology Today is inconsistent, your referral stream can dry up at any time, and no one is asking for a consultation in your DMs. Although you have enough money to live and pay your bills, it’s hard to know when to save for a rainy day or when to invest.

One of the items on my laundry list of why I recommend SEO for therapists is predictable growth. We have data that we can use to predict how many clients will contact you per month. We can then combine those metrics with other numbers to predict how many of those clicks will turn into clients.

In this post, I’m going to explain the exact formula I use to predict growth with SEO. Note that this doesn’t include leads from Google Business.

Let’s dive in!

How to estimate clicks to your website on Google

Monthly search volume

Keyword research tools provide us with a handy little metric: monthly search volume. This number is the estimated number of searches that a keyword gets per month.

Click-through-rate

After we have en estimated monthly search volume, we can take that number to predict how many clicks you will get. This is when we add another metric: click-through rate, or CTR. CTR is precisely how it sounds: it’s the percentage of times that a potential client sees your website on Google and then clicks.

Generally speaking, you can expect a (CTR) of 15% to 30% in spots 1 through 3. In spots 4 through 10, you can expect a CTR of 5%.

Sidenote: in Google Analytics, you can track your CTR! It’s pretty awesome :)

Conversion rate

Just because someone clicks on your website doesn’t mean that they’ll contact you. That’s when conversion rate comes in. Conversion rate is the percent of people who contact you when they’re on your website.

Generally, in a service-based business, we can count on a conversion rate of 10% (unless your website is lackluster or broken).

The formula

So, our formula looks like this:

[monthly search volume] x average click-through rate (5-10%) → average clicks x average conversion rate (10%)

Let’s use this formula in an example.

Example

Let’s say that you want to rank for a keyword like “therapist in Sacramento.”

Our research shows us that there are a few similar keywords like “therapist sacramento,” “therapist sacramento ca,” and “sacramento therapist” that we can target at the same time on one page.

Our keyword research tools tell us that in total, these keywords are searched 260 times per month.

You rank in spot #1 (yay!). If we assume only a 10% click-through rate, you are getting 26 clicks per month.

We also assume that of those 26 clicks, around 10% will contact you, which is around 2 to 3 people.

So if you maintain your spot #1 ranking, you can safely expect 2 to 3 new clients per month.

That’s not so bad, right?

Grow your practice with SEO

Yeah, yeah, yeah… you know what I’m going to say. SEO is the best way to grow your practice predictably and consistently.

If you’re ready to go from stress about your bank account to glee about consistent client leads, we should talk :) Get a copy of our Investment Guide to get started!

Kristie Plantinga

Kristie Plantinga is the founder of TherapieSEO, an SEO and content marketing agency specializing in the therapy and coaching industries. Kristie has been featured on Holding Space for Therapists, Private Practice Skills, the Entrepreneurial Therapist, The Private Practice Pro, Holdspace Creative, and Mind Money Balance. When she’s not working on her clients’ websites, Kristie can be found snuggling her terrier Winston and watching true crime.