How To Forecast SEO Outcomes With Better Precision & Accuracy

Do you need to prove the ROI of your SEO proposal?

Will your leadership team only approve an offer if it offers clear business value?

You know what it takes for SEO to be successful, but how do you prove the way to get there?

SEO forecasts can come in handy.

Align sales, SEO specialists and clients with proven, transparent, accurate and reliable SEO forecasts.

On August 31st, I moderated a webinar with Anca Țenea, Community Manager at SEOmonitor, and Edward Coram James, Chief Executive at Go Up.

Țenea and James demonstrated how SEO forecasting can help you solve your company’s specific business problems.

Here is a summary of the webinar. To access the entire presentation, fill out the form.

Why forecast SEO?

SEO forecasts are made for clients to help them understand how much revenue to expect from organic search.

As part of your sales process, you can use it to test whether you should accept a customer.

[Learn how to get great clients with stress testing] Access the webinar immediately →

SEO forecasts help to discover exactly:

• Agency profitability.
• churn.
• The need for a larger marketing budget and sales team.
• Select customers who stay much longer.

When it comes to well-chosen clients, we even recommend that you do an internal forecast for a prospect, just for yourself or your agency.

When you run the numbers, you know what it will cost to get measurable results for the client.

[See the SEO forecasting client selection process] Access the webinar immediately →

At this point you have a great pitch for your prospect that will help you:

• Deliver results that make customers happy.
• Allow you to retain the customer for a longer period of time.
• Gain more profitability and business for you.

When to forecast SEO

Existing customers: Make a forecast after three, four or five months of an active campaign.

At this point, you’ve filled in a whole bunch of keywords, which means you can trust the final number.

[See this in action] Access the webinar immediately →

New customers: Predict SEO before registering it as internal stress test and qualification test as mentioned above.

What belongs in a reliable SEO forecast?

A reliable forecast validates each opportunity from two perspectives:

• Assess the customer’s potential.
• Evaluation of the budget and ROI of the campaign.

These two endpoints will help you get all the information you need to explain the tangible success of SEO to your team and stakeholders.

[Easily see what’s included in a SEO forecast] Access the webinar immediately →

So you need to consider these five aspects:

• Intention.
• Data.
• Conservatism.
• traceability.
• Accuracy.

To get there, you need to enter two main controllable metrics: Keywords and Ranks.

How to create a successful SEO forecast

The following steps will help you better understand data modeling and explain your plan to stakeholders:

Step 1: Set your desired ranking goal.

[Find out what ranking target you should choose] Access the webinar immediately →

Step 2: Determine which keyword variables can affect your overall forecast:

• The average CTR curve.
• Search volume, annual trends and seasonality.
• device segmentation.
• Past conversion rate.
• long tail effect.
• Additional unbranded organic traffic improvements.

Step 3: Plug the data into your favorite SEO forecasting tool and watch the forecast appear.

[Watch SEO Monitor’s use case] Access the webinar immediately →

By approaching forecasting this way, you can:

• Validate the SEO opportunity and budget required.
• Quantify the impact of SEO efforts on a longer-term basis.
• Align expectations between sales, marketing, and other stakeholders.
• Gain confidence in the possible future outcomes.

[Slides] How to predict SEO results with better precision and transparency

Here is the presentation.

Join our next webinar!

Boost organic and paid traffic: How to bring your SEO and SEM teams together

Are you Team SEO or Team SEM? How about joining forces to make your marketing campaigns surprisingly better?

Learn the strategies and benefits of aligning paid and organic efforts to maximize your marketing team’s ROI.

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photo credit

Featured image: Paulo Bobita/Search Engine Journal