Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Again, many thanks for your answers and your time in looking at these results. I hadn't even noticed that the first listing hadn't actually claimed their place page (which does surprise me).

When you say that a company could achieve the same results by doing appropriate SEO on the local and organic level, I take it you mean SEO on the Places page and local targeted SEO on the main site?

Many thanks for your help and advice on this. I wanted to gather as much information regarding this area within the local search before committing to the client.

I have done a great deal of research about local search and SEO but was unsure of what was making Google actually rank these sites where they're ranking them.

Regards,

Michael

Hi and thank you for your answer. From your experience, looking at the top two results, would you say they are most likely to be ranked where they are due to strong organic SEO  of their site AND optimization of their places page?

I have a clients site which, due to way it is set up, cannot compete with the number one site from an organic SEO point of view but I could easily compete with its Places page.

Thanks,

Michael

I'm trying to clarify something about search results which contain local listings.

Here is the search string for Google that will give you the same results that I am seeing -

http://www.google.co.uk/search?&q=letting agents glasgow&pws=0

Of the results that are returned, some of them have data which seems to be related to their Google Place page but the "title" links directly to their website.

What I wanted to know is, "Is it their actual website that has given them those rankings" or "Are they listed where they are because of a well optimized and ranked Places page?

The traffic to the site will generate leads for the company who owns the site. If they already have a website that converts then they will know what content to put on this site to create that conversion rate.

The buyer is buying the site knowing the potential that the site will have when it comes to generating business for them.

I've looked at is as the first page results of Google are a line of shops. The shop at #1 is seen as the shop which gets the most visitors to it. Now imagine that shop is currently being refitted - people can still see the shop and what it sells but are unable to actually enter the shop to buy anything.

Now, the person who owns the shop further down the street (i.e is ranked #10 or #12 or #15 etc) - he really wants to own that shop which is being refitted and he knows how much that shop is worth to his business if he owned it after the refit is completed.

Although the site I have created is a basic canvas, all it needs is branding by the new owner and it will then perform as well as their current site when it comes to conversion rates.

Does that make sense with explaining the view point I am taking on this project ?

And again, the finer points of how to sell the site are something that i have covered from all angles. The part of making the sale and closing the sale isn't an issue.

I appreciate the feedback from everyone here but doubt I'm going to find someone who can actually answer the question of "how to value organic traffic". The matter of the niche or if the potential client already has a site or an SEO company is by the by and not part of the issue. I can deal with all of those parts.

Market Samurai makes a calculation for organic traffic value by taking the average PPC cost and multiplying it by the amount of traffic the site will receive if it was ranked number one on Google.

My question really should have just simply been asked as "How accurate is that figure" ? , <- that's all I needed answering.

Oh I did my research on this and looked at the service providers who already have website ranked in the top 30 as well as all those who are currently using Google AdWords.  The service providers already understand the value of an online presence, I'm just trying to work out what that value is.

Thanks Ben, thanks for your answer.  I have thought about different payment options from a "one off - hand it all over" option to a "monthly payment" where they 'rent' the site. Or even break the cost down in to a deposit payment followed by monthly payments until the full amount is paid. Once it's paid I would then sign over the domain ownership.

The main sticking point is calculating a price for the site in the first place.

Hi,

I'm currently creating a number of sites which target the wedding market. Each site is localized and specific to a niche within the wedding market.

The intention is to create the site, rank it in the top position of Google and then sell it to a local business within that niche and area.

The problem that i am having is that I don't know how to place a value on each site. I have factors taken from Google (using Market Samurai) so I know the broad and phrase match traffic details as well as the Google PPC average prices.

My initial thought was to use the Google PPC price and multiply that by the number of organic visitors the site would receive if it was ranked #1 on Google. I appreciate that the PPC figures may be higher than what an advertiser would actually pay per click so I conservatively halved the Google PPC figure given in Market Samurai.

Is this a good way of valuing the site or do I need to look at the value per customer to the business that I am trying to sell the site to and work from a conversion factor based on the number of visitors that the site would receive.

If the site received 500 visitors per month and 5% of those became customers multiplied by the average profit per customer - that would give a monthly value of the website.

I am very unsure as to what the best approach is here and look forward to hearing any advice and ideas from fellow members.

Thanks,

Michael

I use Market Samurai for rank tracking. You can use it to generate all possible keywords that your client may (or is trying to) rank for and then import those keywords in to the rank tracker module. It keeps a full history of all rank checks and placements. It's a handy tool.

The same thing confused me to begin with when I first started using these tools. I found that this issue would be raised when I checked a newly published post. It turns out that as I use the "recent posts" widget on my sidebar then the tool would see the title text and link as an issue and flag it up.

Is it really such an issue? Eventually that post won't be shown in the widget as more posts are published. Based in that do you think it's OK to ignore the issue in this instance?

TBH if the first place ranked site gives a bad user experience, as you mentioned, then a lot of people who go to that site first will click back out and move on to the second placed site instead.

User experience plays a large part in the number of people who come to your site. I know for a fact that people come to pages of my site that are ranked in 8th place on Google.

Based on information that has been published about 'hardly anyone will visit your site if it's ranked in the lower half of the first page' then the fact that your site is offering information that the user is actually looking for must play a factor in the number of visitors that come to your site.

Again, we can use the TITLE tag to attract visitors to our sites as I'm sure people must use that info to make a decision about whether to visit your site or not.

So if you can only get  #2 ranking than make sure you use the TITLE tag to snag the traffic to your site rather then the #1 ranked site.

I have often used the phrase "click here" on the meta description. I know Google tends to use it's own chopped up version of the content that you place here but I thought I'd test it to see what happens. It is early days and the results are not yet in but I have placed the words "Click Here" at the start of the text.

The title tag is a great place to convince people to click your listing rather than your competitors.