Forecasting Your SEO Efforts

Unlike many other marketing channels, with SEO, it’s difficult to give very accurate predictions on the kind of effect your efforts and budget will have. For example, while with PPC you know how much you’re paying per click, with SEO, attaining similar insights is much harder.

Some metrics you can use to shed some light on what kind of results you can expect from your SEO efforts include:

• Historic traffic - ideally from the last four years
• Last 12 years’ keyword volumes
• Google Trends
• Rankings - current rankings as well as glass ceilings for each keyword
• Brand/non-brand split

The best way to start is by calculating the predicted glass ceiling (max. achievable) rankings for your keywords. To do this, you can use current rankings, combined with data, such as search volumes, keyword difficulty and marketplace analysis. Marketplace analysis can help you figure out who is currently performing well in any given category and what you can look to achieve on a product or category level.

After this, you can calculate the predicted search volumes for the year ahead by combining keyword volumes and Google Trends data. Using these, you can calculate the average monthly changes in search volumes for the year ahead.

To read more about building and implementing a strong SEO strategy, have a look at this guide by Yard.