SEO Forecasting

Now that you have all the background know-how of SEO forecasting, let us get into the actionable part.

After all, the benefits and types of forecasting are fine, but when you get to it, how do you actually go about carrying out SEO forecasts for your business website?

Well, there are simple ways and complicated ways to go about the process, but in this guide, we will talk about the two major approaches that you can deploy.

Approach 1: General Estimation

The first forecasting approach is actually quite straightforward — you consider historical data and benchmarks to analyse and estimate the future performance. The logic behind this is to collect indications of what will happen in the future if the same efforts that you put in the past are consistently maintained.

For instance, if you have been able to see that your website’s organic traffic has grown by 10% in the past year, you can confidently say that the SEO efforts that you have been undertaking have been successful. So, if you consistently carry out the same efforts and actions, you can predict similar results from your website in the future.

We are fully aware that the example that we have mentioned right now does not include any competition-related data or insights, which would be otherwise considered in the process. We simply emphasised on the aspects that you could look into if you use just first party data.

However, you can also use popular SEO tools such as Ahrefs and SEMrush to collect third-party data about the recent trends, and competitors so that you can equip your SEO forecasts with even more useful data.

Let us now look at a five-step process that you can follow to successfully implement the General Estimation approach to SEO forecasting.

Step 1: Create a Keyword Cloud

Your business keyword cloud is one that contains all the keywords and phrases that your potential customers are likely to use to search for your business or the products/services that you are offering.

So, if you have an HVAC services business called ‘ABC01 HVAC Company’ in Canberra, your keyword cloud is likely to contain keywords such as “ABC01 hvac services canberra”, “hvac services in canberra”, “top hvac services in canberra”, “hvac duct repair services in canberra”, and more.

While you will be able to attain a wealth of keyword data from popular keyword research and SEO tools, you should also rely on your client-facing teams for more specific information. You may also want to stay clear of too much jargon, and talk to your customers to understand their search behaviour.

More importantly, to get the best insights, delve into the keywords that your website is ranking for over the past 12 months, and assess the current performance. This will help you figure out how these keywords are likely to perform for your website in the foreseeable future.

Step 2: Collect Traffic and Search Volume Related Data

Once you have your most crucial keywords narrowed down, you want to dig deeper into the data around it, through the SEO tool or keyword research tool of your choice. 

One of the key factors that you want to consider in this regard, is the average search volume associated with these keywords that you have selected. This will let you know just how much of your organic traffic you can increase by capitalising on these keywords. Keep in mind that the keyword search volume will also fluctuate based on purchase trends and seasonality.

For example, a term like “christmas ornaments” or “christmas gift ideas” might spike around December, but remain low for the rest of the year.

The Cost-per-click (CPC) data associated with your keywords are also major indicators of the market value of these terms. But keep in mind that this data will not give you much of an outlook on your business. You will also want to get a better idea of your organic CTR for these keywords, and deduce the potential traffic volume that you can attain by leveraging them.

Step 3: Calculate Your Conversion Rate

Now that you have a fairly good estimate of your potential search volume, you can go ahead and start determining what counts as a conversion for your business. For every business this differs slightly. For a SaaS business, getting subscriptions may count as a conversion, whereas for an eCommerce business, conversion may be in the form of a product sale, or a signup.

Specific actions that describe what you want your website visitors to take, that will generate revenue or value for your business, can be counted as conversions.

The percentage of visitors or users that take these specific actions on your website will add up to your conversion rate.

Step 4: Trace the Journey from Conversion to Sales

As we just discussed, conversions can take different forms and may look different for your business than it does for others. Leads are important but they do not always turn into sales, and the journey from the point of conversion to getting a sale is an important one. This is the part where you want to nurture and closely guide the customer towards making a purchase decision.

To get a better idea of this, find the percentage of leads generated by you that actually turn into paying customers. You may also want to consider the lifetime value of your keywords at this point. 

A few critical questions that you may want to address in this regard are:

• How much revenue does your business earn when your leads make a purchase?
• Do your sales take the form of a one-time purchase or repeat transactions?
• What is the motivating/demotivating factor for your leads while making purchase decisions?
• How much do your customers spend on each of your purchases?
• What is the lifetime value of a specific lead that has turned into a paying customer?

Considering all of these aspects, will also give you a better idea of the potential results that you will be able to generate from your SEO campaign.

Step 5: Create an SEO Forecast Accordingly

By the time you calculate your conversion rate, you will have a bunch of crucial numbers to work with. Once you have the calculations ready to be mapped over a certain period of time, you will be able to make safe assumptions and predictions about your SEO performance in the future.

However, keep in mind that these are merely predictions based on the data that you have collected, and not accurate performance indicators. These are just one of the many outcomes that may be generated in the future.

Take the performance of your key SEO metrics at their face value, as your actual performance may be better or worse depending on other factors. Ensure to tailor your expectations based on the estimates that you generated as a part of your SEO forecast, as well as your business and revenue goals.

Whether you are managing your SEO campaigns in-house or through an expert SEO agency, try to standardise this process to make your forecasting easier. In this process, you should also consider your content marketing efforts, analysis of competitors on the SERPs.

Follow this aforementioned 5-step general estimate forecasting process for a simple yet elegant SEO forecast to empower your marketing and business decisions.

Excel/Google Sheet Template For Forecasting

The other approach that you may want to consider for generating an accurate SEO forecast is by creating a template for forecasting. As such, even if you follow the other approach, it is recommended that you create a standard template format, however, this approach requires advanced spreadsheet skills and may require an expert to implement.

You can consider this approach in case you have an in-house SEO expert, or have associated with an SEO agency for implementing your strategy.

Remember how we talked about the two methods of SEO forecasting namely, keyword forecasting and statistical forecasting. Well, when you work with Google Sheets/Excel to come up with a template, you can truly leverage the powers of both the approaches.

Before you start creating a template, make sure you have the prerequisite tools ready to use. You will need Google Analytics and Google Search Console. You will also need an additional web analytics tool such as SEMrush or Ahrefs to do other analyses that might be required to create a comprehensive forecast report.

It also helps to keep some of the data ready before you start with the template. Here are the three crucial types of data that we have discussed about, that should be included in the template:

• CTR (Click-Through Rate)
• Organic Traffic
• Keyword-related Data

You can also include additional parameters that you deem important such as data related to backlinks and competitor analysis.

Now if you are all set with the prerequisites that we have jotted down so far, let us get on with creating the template.

Step 1: Set up Your SEO Forecast Template

When you are creating a spreadsheet to standardise the way you conduct and record your SEO forecast, you need to have a standard format that you can consistently follow and expand upon.

Make a copy of this SEO forecast template to get started. You will see that there are three worksheets that will help you track the three major parameters that we discussed earlier.

Step 2: Collect Your Historical Data

Once you have the template set up, it is time to start utilising it and start going through the data that you have collected from various tools and sources.

Next, open up the forecasting template, and go to the “Historical Data” worksheet. Here, you will want to update the periods that you want to track for your business, as well as the organic traffic in those months.

You will be able to find your organic traffic from Google Analytics, and adjust it for each month while removing the bot traffic.

To be able to draw up a good and comprehensive forecast, you will want to consider and compile data from at least two to three years. Of course, you will not have this much data at your disposal if your website is relatively new, and in this case, you should consider as much data as you can find.

Step 3: Consider Seasonality and Other External Influencers

When you want a fairly accurate picture of your SEO forecast, you need to consider important factors such as seasonality and other externalities that might influence your future SEO performance.

For understanding the impact of seasonality, start with asking yourself if your website experiences fast and slow months. This will depend on the business you run, so if your website sells sweaters and snow boots, you are likely to see your sales spike up during winters, whereas summers and other seasons will be comparatively slower.

You may also want to pay attention to specific outliers which are basically data points that are significantly lower or higher than the rest of your data set. These outliers may be present for many different kinds of reasons. For example, you may have run a successful online marketing campaign that may have caused a sharp boost to your traffic and sales. Or your website might have been hit by an algorithm update, causing your ranking to plummet, and with it, your traffic.

Since such events are singular instances that may not take place again, you would ideally want to eliminate them from your data set. Your SEO forecast will turn out to be quite skewed or inaccurate if you do not get rid of this data.

Alternatively, you can also replace that data point with a more realistic one based on the months leading up to it or after it.

Step 4: Draw up an As-Is or a No-Change Forecast

A forecast can be termed as no-change or as-is, if it denotes the kind of future performance you are likely to generate if you do not change anything major in your SEO strategy. Basically, this forecast will let you know the kind of performance your website can generate if you keep your SEO strategy exactly the same.

You will be able to get the no-change forecast in the “Forecast” tab of your SEO forecast template. Simply copy your dates and traffic from the “historical data” tab and adjust them based on the month that you would want to initiate your forecast from.

Step 5: Include Average CTR and Keyword Volume

While drawing up a no-change forecast requires you to leverage statistical forecasting, we will add keyword forecasting only at this stage. You have the option of leveraging the CTRs mentioned in the CTR tab of the spreadsheet, or you can also update them on your own with more numbers with the help of your website data.

You will now update the CTR tab of your spreadsheet with your target keywords, and along with it, include your monthly search volume, and your current position in the respective columns.

Step 6: Draw up a Traffic Forecast for Various Ranking Positions

The organic traffic to your website can be gauged once you start ranking on the SERPs for your targeted keywords. You can calculate the organic traffic by deriving the product of each keyword volume and the CTR of each position.

It is important to keep a track of your keyword movement, and smooth out the growth trend of your keywords, by adding the accurate positions into the forecast and monitoring it over a specific period of time.

With the help of this data, you will also be able to calculate the estimated traffic that you can get using each keyword, which will further help you draw up a traffic forecast for each position.

Step 7: Integrate your total potential traffic from Keywords

Revisit the “Forecast” tab on your SEO forecast spreadsheet and update the column of “Keyword movement” by adding the total keyword movement to the no-change forecast. The decision of the numbers that will be added at this point will completely be in your hands and you can make these calculations by reviewing the data that you have collected so far.

You can keep updating the performance that you predict from your website over a certain period of time in the specific columns that mention numbers, and this movement will be reflected and represented in the chart inserted within the template.

You will keep updating the numbers associated with the keywords in the search results, based on the actual performance in the search results. You will also want to make adjustments accordingly to your click-through rate.