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Do you ever find yourself scratching your head, trying to understand if your content efforts are actually working?
Maybe you often end up trying to negotiate for more resources and budget, without enough data backing up your claims.
Learning how to forecast SEO growth can help solve those problems.
Here, we’ll take you through the six steps you should take to forecast SEO growth effectively.
Discover a suite of best-in-class editorial tools with the Originality.ai Content Optimizer, Grammar Checker, and AI Checker.
First up, let’s quickly explain the concept of SEO forecasting. As the name would suggest, SEO forecasting is the process of predicting the future performance of your SEO efforts, mainly focusing on organic traffic growth, keyword rankings, and sometimes even revenue or conversions.
It may seem tricky for SEO beginners to implement effective forecasts, but having something to compare with actual performance is important for benchmarking and establishing the value of your content efforts.
Keep reading to get insight into how you can incorporate SEO forecasting into your content strategy with simple, actionable steps.
SEO forecasting is important as it allows brands to set realistic expectations for growth.
In content marketing, for instance, it can identify potential keyword growth, website traffic increases, projected search rankings, and more. This, in turn, can help plan budgets and resource allocation, and measure success throughout the year.
With that in mind, let’s take a look at the steps you need to take to forecast SEO growth effectively and efficiently.
The first thing you need to do is establish the content marketing metrics that truly matter to your brand and strategy. For some, that might be traffic to your website. For others, it may be conversion rates.
This metric will ultimately depend on where you are within your marketing journey and what industry you are in.
For example, if your brand earns revenue by getting website visitors to click on affiliate links or ads, then focusing on traffic volume would be a top priority.
Alternatively, if you’re running a company that sells products or services, you may want to focus more on conversions.
Unless, of course, you are focusing on growth and brand awareness, in which case, prioritizing traffic would again be a key metric to focus on.
Now that you’ve identified the metrics that are the most important to your brand, it’s time to take a more in-depth look at historical data.
Use tools like Google Search Console and Analytics, Ahrefs, or your CRM to look at previous performance and understand how the brand has performed historically based on your chosen metrics.
You can also use the Originality.ai Predictive SEO Tool to get insight into the content optimization scores of your articles and where you can make improvements.
From that historical data, try to collate it into a clear narrative, looking at any potential growth trends.
That means comparing performance month-on-month (MoM) and year-on-year (YoY), and also based on other important factors like seasons, key dates, and even Google algorithms.
Consider these questions:
These are factors that must be considered as part of your forecasting.
While conducting your SEO efforts, it’s important to also factor in any SEO activity you have in your content pipeline.
After all, if SEO wasn’t a key step in your editorial process previously, it needs to be factored into the results you expect to see.
Then, factor in your content production plans and the competitors at the top of the SERP by conducting a competitor analysis.
Use the Originality.ai Predictive SEO Tool to identify the top-ranking competitors for the keywords you’re targeting on a specific article and how your content optimization score compares. Then, optimize your content to get ahead of the competition.
Now that all that is in place, you should have a pretty good idea of what you’re expecting to achieve with your upcoming SEO work.
However, sometimes things can get in the way, and objectives aren’t quite met. Equally, sometimes you excel beyond all expectations!
That’s why we recommend building out three forecast models: a Conservative Scenario (lower results than you expect), an Expected Scenario (the most probable results), and an Aggressive Scenario (when it would exceed expectations).
If you are pitching your ideas to stakeholders, it’s helpful to be able to provide a range of expectations.
Lastly, simply creating your SEO forecast is not the end of the journey. As with many aspects of content marketing, the best results come from monitoring your forecasting and adjusting it as you go.
That means tracking actual versus projected results, identifying any discrepancies as they pop up, and keeping an eye out for new SEO strategies to implement.
Overall, SEO forecasting is an extremely important process and one that is often overlooked.
However, effective SEO forecasting can help you create an effective strategy and benchmark that you can continue to adjust and modify based on metrics over time.
For a content optimization tool that predictably drives better search rankings, try the Originality.ai Predictive SEO Tool today. Plus, Originality.ai offers a complete editorial toolkit, so you can also check for AI content and check for plagiarism at the same time to streamline your workflow.
Then learn more about predictive SEO and SEO forecasting in our top resources:
