More and more, SEOs and small business owners are realizing that you cannot pay the electric bills or rent in rankings, and often times, traffic.

Google Analytics or other site analytics packages can tell you your most profitable keyword broken down into a dollar value, however, what if you’re not ranking for the keyword but still want to assign a dollar value to it?

If you can assign a dollar value to a keyword, you can better understand the investment and potential profit of a keyword before going after it, right?

For instance, if a keyword is worth $5,000 in annual revenue at #2 on Google, it would make sense to invest a $500 in an infographic to build links to the page you would like to rank. Your return on investment (not considering time / labor) would be $4,500 dollars, right? Therefore, you can justify the business investment to rank #2 before tackling the keyword. If it’s going to cost potentially $6,000 to rank for that term, then you should move on.

We’re talking about making business decisions in the keyword research phase of SEO.

How do we do this? Well, I’m happy to help answer that question.

Introducing the Keyword Valuizer.

Input keywords, search volumes, identify competitors, average conversion rate, conversion value (stuff you should already know) and it will tell you the value of each keyword based on the highest possible ranking position.

What do I mean by highest ranking position?



Often times we don’t consider the top ranked competitor, rather the benefits of being #1 or #2 when #1 or #2 are unattainable.

For instance, if we are a small online shoe retailer and we would like to rank for “camper shoes men,” we’re not going to outrank Camper, Zappos, Endless, Amazon or Yahoo, but we could outrank http://www.raffaello-network.com/, therefore, if we were to go after this keyword, the highest rank we could achieve would be #6.

To start making projections about being #1 or #2 doesn't make too much sense if we're never going to get there.

Seasonality, variations in click through rates, algorithm updates and other variables that make up our end revenue are definitely subject to change.

We are using Slingshot’s click through rate study to get a rough estimate on the projected traffic and revenue of a particular position. Of course, branded terms like "camper shoes mens" likely have a different click through rate than say non-branded terms such as "mens shoes."

We are scraping 10 Google SERPs using Chris Le’s Google Scraper, which means you could hit a captcha or if Google changes their SERPs, you could get an error. If this happens, you’ll have to make another copy and start over or contact me on Twitter (@ethanlyon).

The data represents a projection, not fact. However, the data should help you make more informed business decisions at the keyword research level.

1. Log into Gmail
 

2. Go here: http://bit.ly/yR1tUY.

3. Go to File and make a copy of the sheet.
 

4. Copy and paste 10 keywords and search volumes into cells B5:C14.

5. Insert the average revenue per conversion and average site conversion rate in cells D5 and E5, respectively.

6. Move over to the “Competitors” tab.

7. Use the drop downs in column C to tag the domains. You can copy and paste cells in column C so you don’t have to click 101 times. Also, you can use the Chrome Extension, Link Clump to review the domains more quickly.

8. Copy the domains from column B and C.

9. Right click on cell D5. Copy and paste values.

10. You can delete the tags in column C if you’d like. So, your sheet should look like this:

11. Now, let’s see what keywords have the most value in the "Keyword Value" tab:
 

The beauty of this tool, is everything is based on your highest ranked competitor, so you won’t inflate your traffic / revenue projections. As you can see below, the ability to be ranked higher could have a more positive effect on revenue than search volume:


 

We could add Moz metrics to each domain to help you evaluate each competitor against your website. One of the reasons I did not include it here is you could be looking at potentially 100 sites and even with Chris Le's SEOMoz Data for Google Docs, it could time out and add many more steps. Feel free to put all of your websites in Chris's tool or integrate it with the above tool.

With that being said, I’d love to get your feedback.

Thanks and I hope this helps you make more informed business decisions during the keyword research phase of your SEO campaign. Follow me on Twitter for updates and other tools I'm working on: @ethanlyon.