What you lose while you skip SEO

The free and fast way is Google Suggestions - type your niche's main word into the search box and the drop-down list will show you directly how people phrase their searches. This list requires no tool at all and is constantly updated.

Once you have collected 20-30 phrases, move them into Google Keyword Planner - it will assign a monthly volume to each one. The total number you get is exactly the "monthly searches" figure to put into the calculator's first slider.

CTR depends on position, not on wishful thinking. The average picture from public studies looks like this: the first organic position ~28%, the second ~15%, the third ~11%, and the bottom spots of the first page less than 2%.

So 25% describes the case where you plan to reach the Top-3; if you are only talking about getting onto the first page for now, 8-12% is a more honest figure. On branded searches CTR is much higher, and on informational phrases it is lower, because Google often shows the answer itself.

This is not a forecast - it is an illustration of the price of waiting. The model assumes that while you wait, an active competitor strengthens their position by ~12% every month: new links appear, content accumulates, along with behavioural signals that you cannot speed up with any budget.

The practical conclusion is simple: after half a year of waiting, winning back the same spot takes roughly twice as many resources as starting today. If you switch the toggle off, ×1.0 remains - that rare case where nobody in the niche is working on SEO.

The calculator shows the upper bound - the scenario in which you hold the stated positions and win back the given share of traffic. The real figure is adjusted by the density of competition, the technical state of the website, brand awareness and seasonality.

So you use it to gauge the scale of the decision, not as a promise: if the monthly loss is two or three times the SEO budget, the question is no longer "is it worth it" - the only question is the start date.