Predicting SEO Performance – Accurate SEO Forecasts And Projections

(This is the transcript from our new video so it may not read as well as a normal blog post would)

One of the biggest challenges in the industry is creating accurate, meaningful SEO projections. So today, I’m going to show you how. First, you need to understand the keyword landscape so do your research. This takes time, and you need to put the time in to make the projections meaningful. From this, you can develop your keyword strategy, analyze the competition, identify the authority gap, and be realistic with your goals. We want to ensure that we’re accounting for seasonality. So we look at the seasonal trend in available traffic for your group of target keywords over the past few years.

As an example, you shouldn’t have much trouble selling Christmas cards in December, but I wouldn’t imagine this is going to be particularly lucrative in the height of summer. You need to benchmark where you’re at right now. For example, are you established or coming from a standing start? We want to establish your brand and non-brand split. SEO is about improving your generic non-brand visibility not brand, which is effectively just lazy direct traffic. Because people are just typing your brand name and close variations into their browser.

On the brand side, we don’t want to take credit for organic traffic is driven by above the line activity like print, radio, TV, out of home. We want to take credit for non-brand because that’s the real SEO traffic that we can really influence and grow through raising your organic visibility. Google has been encrypting organic searches since 2013. This means that in Analytics, most of the organic traffic is labeled as not provided. We want to uncover your not provided traffic in Analytics to fully understand your organic traffic segment.

We map together landing page data from Google Analytics and Google Search Console to achieve this. The common element between the two profiles are your landing pages. We want to redistribute your organic traffic from Analytics back to the keywords that generated it, which also shows us how many conversions each keyword currently generates. That way, we can fully understand what keywords you currently rank for, what’s your current average positions, what is the available search volume for each keyword, what’s your current click through rates, how much traffic are you getting, how much traffic are you then missing out on, and what additional traffic expects if we improve your visibility. And then based on your current conversion rates and average order value, what additional sales revenue could you make with an effective SEO strategy in place?

Meaningful and reliable SEO projections come from having a robust series of processes in place that make measuring SEO and it’s true impact on your sales and revenue possible. Producing projections is time-consuming when it’s done right, but it’s absolutely essential that a forecast’s done properly to make sure is accurate and provides a solid business case showing the future potential within your marketplace. If I had a pound for every time I’ve seen a forecast that’s completely unsubstantiated, I’d be a very rich man. I hope that’s helpful, and if you’d like to have a chat about an SEO forecast for your business, just give us a shout.