Calculating estimated organic traffic volume

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

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  Dave Elliott: Your not quite right....
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  Vedra Kex: Dave Elliott lol that’s exactly why I’m here. 😅🤷🏼‍♀️
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  Dave Elliott: Monthly search volume ÷ click through rate for the position you are trying to obtain. https://www.advancedwebranking.com/ctrstudy/
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  Dave Elliott: I always used to do it for both #3 and #1 position....even this isn`t infallible though cause adverts/featured snippets etc or if branded or blah blah blah. But will do for an estimate.
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  Vedra Kex: Dave Elliott Thanks for this. It seems that it takes some time until the data is processed to be able to give estimates. Is there a way for me to calculate it oldschool way?
  
  From what I read, it should be keyword monthly search volumes x CTR (found somewhere, some say Ahrefs) and consider ranking number. Still don`t really get it how.
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  Dave Elliott: If 100k msv for keyword then if you are number 2(or predicting you will be shortly)
  
  100, 000*0.156 = 15600 monthly visits.
  or if #3...
  100000*0.098
  
  there are some good ways of doing this in bulk. If you have good excel skills then you can do an IF Match formula ad have all the conversion rates for each rank in a separate table..
  
  If your excel isnt great(mine isn`t good enough to figure that one out without stealing it!) then the easiest way is to make a copy of your rankings collum and then find and replace "2" with 0.156 and "3" with 0.098 etc.....
  
  Hopefully that makes sense, not the easiest thing to explain without a screen with a spreadsheet on!
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  Vedra Kex: Dave Elliott Omg this is amazing! I added keywords last night and already generating data, mostly for brand but still waiting for the non-brand which are the most important as we don`t rank well for them. Thanks a lot! 😃
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  Vedra Kex: Dave Elliott Yes I read another article about calculating this, same way with the avg if, I`ll check that out as well, thanks a lot for taking the time to explain and give example, I really appreciate it. 🙌
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  Frank Watson: Google`s Keyword planner may help with estimates
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  Vedra Kex: Thanks a lot, forgot about that.
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  Col Burt: Consider ranks vs ctr too
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  Col Burt: Also seasonality
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  Tran Xuan Huong: For the longest time, my keyword research methodology for organic SEO has been to:
  
  a. Look at the keywords the client thinks they want to target
  b. Look at the keywords their competitors are targeting
  c. Look for additional keywords the client may have missed
  
  After I compile a master list - with columns for avg monthly search volume, total # of search results, and keyword difficulty - I would sort the list into 3 groups:
  
  1. Primary keywords (the "money" keywords that need to be targeted regardless of keyword difficulty)
  
  2. Secondary keywords (less traffic, less action focused, but still relevant)
  
  3. Disregarded keywords (too little traffic, not relevant enough, etc...)
  
  Until now, that process has served me well. In the company I work for now, however, the person I report to is very numbers driven and he wants quantifiable justification for every keyword I choose. I can`t get him to understand that evaluating keywords isn`t as black and white as that.
  I use SEMrush tool as my main SEO for keyword researching. I have low budget so I buy SEMrush account at cheap price from this service http://groupbuyexpert.com/node/124?a=380 for just $10 and it works great.
  
  There are keywords that, using keyword difficulty as a metric, the numbers say we should ignore because the difficulty is too high yet I know we need to rank well for those keywords regardless.
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  Vedra Kex: Thanks a lot, makes sense. Your boss doesn`t sound like a legit person though. 😅 Yes I use semrush as well, for the main pages I took highest volumes terms that are relevant, both medium to high difficulty, as you say, because we want those commercial terms, then there are lower volumes but also very relevant. 🤔