SEO Forecasting for Beginners

“With SEO, how much growth can we expect?”

This maybe one of the most important questions a client might have in mind….

The ROI of SEO is not the same as PPC and therefore cannot be simply measured in the same way…

But that doesn’t mean there’s no way to show various stakeholders, what potential results to expect if they invest time, money and effort into SEO!

One way to demonstrate the value of SEO is to show how much impact a small set of valuable keywords can make when optimized for properly.

In other words, let’s ask the right question, and give a good answer…

“What would happen if we improve our rankings for a sample set of important keywords by 1 or more positions?”

If you answer this question, people will be able to understand the big picture….?

Because obviously this is not the only keywords you will be optimizing for… there are tons of keywords+variations…. plus… this is just a forecast, you may even do better!

Here’s a simple example on how to do this:

• Choose few keywords that are important to the business (GSC), and make sure you choose keywords that have purchase intent or bottom of funnel keywords as with generic keywords you cannot assume that all potential clicks are going to drive sales.
• Get their search volume (SEO tools)
• Get current rankings (GSC or SEO tools)
• Get the conversion rate for desktop and mobile (GA).
• CTR for mobile and desktop traffic. You can use research data for estimated traffic per position.

Source: https://www.advancedwebranking.com/ctrstudy/

Now all you need to do is:

• Calculate estimated traffic from desktop and mobile as per current ranking. [Search volume * Research CTR for mobile] & [Search volume * Research CTR for Desktop]
• Multiple each by the conversion rate (desktop conversion rate and mobile conversion rate respectively). For the sake of simplicity, I made the conversion rate 2.5% for both in the example below. [Est. traffic for mobile * Conversion Rate for mobile] & [Est. traffic for desktop * Conversion Rate for desktop]
• Now you have the estimated number of conversions of mobile and desktop organic traffic….
• Repeat the above process for the improved ranking (for example CTR from ranking 7 instead of 8).
• Compare!

Here's an example of how this would look like:

Spreadsheet template can be found here.

More resources:

• How to Forecast SEO Potential With Google Data Studio
• SEO Forecasting in Google Sheets