Position Value Calculator

Enter impressions, current position and a target, and get the traffic delta, priced on a real measured CTR curve rather than an industry average. The calculation that tells you whether a quarter of link building is worth it.

How to use it

  1. Enter the monthly impressions for the page or cluster, its current average position, and the position you are aiming at.
  2. Use the built-in measured curve, or paste your own from the Search Console Analyzer. Your own curve is always the better input, category behaviour varies enormously.
  3. Read the delta as clicks per month, then compare it against the work required. This is the calculation that decides whether a quarter of link building pays for itself.

What the numbers mean

Why average position is misleading
Average position 8.42 sounds like you are nearly there. It usually means a scatter of positions across many queries, most of which are far from page one, and the average is hiding the distribution rather than describing it.
Why industry CTR tables mislead
They average across categories that behave nothing alike. In the reference dataset, the same site at position 4.82 in one country earned 32.93% click-through, while at position 12.99 in another it earned 1.55%. One curve cannot describe both.
The position 8 ceiling
Getting from invisible to roughly position 8 is an on-page problem you can solve alone. Getting from 8 to 3 is an off-page problem requiring other people to link to you. The value of that jump is what this calculator prices, and it is usually larger than people expect.

Questions

How accurate is the forecast?

It is arithmetic on your own curve, not a prediction of whether you will rank. It answers "if this page moved from 9 to 4, what would that be worth?", which is the question that decides where effort goes. Whether the move happens is a different problem.

Where do I get my own CTR curve?

From the Search Console Analyzer on this site. Drop your export and it derives the curve from your own rows, then paste it here.

Should I target position 1?

Usually not, at first. The book’s argument is that at low authority you win on lack of supply rather than demand, position 4 on an unserved query beat position 13 on the biggest query in the category by 138× in the reference dataset.

Guides that use this tool

Other free tools