There are many aspects to SEO forecasting, and several reasons why you might want to try to accurately forecast future SEO performance if you’re an ecommerce brand.
In this guide, we look at various SEO forecasting techniques and why accurate, data-driven predictions can be so important in ecommerce.
Jump to:
- What is SEO forecasting
- Why SEO forecasting matters in ecommerce
- Challenges in SEO forecasting for ecommerce brands
- Techniques for SEO forecasting
- How accurate is SEO forecasting?
- How do we forecast SEO performance?
What is SEO forecasting?
SEO forecasting is essentially using one or more techniques to help predict the future organic performance of a website.
Effective forecasting tends to be based on a number of different data sources that include everything from keyword research to analysing past and current organic rankings, traffic figures, user behaviour and value, click-through rates (CTR), sales, revenue and more.
The outcome of good SEO forecasting should be a realistic prediction of organic performance that ladders up to your wider business goals e.g. a percentage increase of sales/revenue. When done right, forecasting SEO performance provides a great guide on where an ecommerce brand should focus organic search strategy to maximise both the impact and the return.
Why SEO forecasting matters in ecommerce
Being able to forecast organic search performance can have a few different purposes, like:
Helps to unlock buy-in for SEO budget from stakeholders
Getting buy-in for SEO at any level can be a challenge, as can securing the budget needed to make a genuine difference to performance and deliver the growth needed.
A data-based SEO forecast that is communicated in the right way can go a long way in helping you get the support needed from decision-makers, providing a strong business case for additional support from an SEO agency or for internal resources to drive the changes needed to make your brand’s approach to organic search deliver results.
Helps to shape SEO strategy
Effective SEO forecasting uses past performance and expected future search trends to help you set achievable targets that are based on data and informed insights.
The process of forecasting will highlight strategic areas such as:
- Which search terms will attract the most relevant potential customers to your website organically if you improve rankings (and revenue).
- What search-led content is likely to drive the most conversions.
- How many more organic visitors you need to achieve your revenue goals (based on conversion rate data).
- Which competitors you need to gain organic market share from and how to achieve it.
Effective SEO forecasting essentially provides not only targets but, in the right hands, can also deliver the insights needed to develop the roadmap that gets you there.
Gives your brand a competitive edge
While many, if not all, of your competitors will have their own SEO strategy and activity, in-depth SEO forecasting can help to highlight opportunities that others might not be taking advantage of.
You’ll also be analysing what they are doing as part of the forecasting process, which helps you pinpoint areas in which you can surpass their efforts. For example, this could include:
- Hidden gemse., categories, keywords, and products that aren’t performing for your competitors, but have big opportunity to drive additional conversions and revenue
- Low hanging fruit – keywords that you’re ranking for, maybe within striking distance of page one, but that could be optimised as a quick win
- Understanding their strategy – learning from their strengths and weaknesses across SEO, from their on-site content to how they approach off-site signals (brand performance and how they’re earning links with digital PR). Understanding them inside-out allows you to see the opportunities to steal market share.
Helps you show tangible and measurable ROI on SEO
Using data-based SEO forecasting enables you to estimate the actual financial return that SEO will bring to the business, which is usually music to the ears of stakeholders.
Understanding the short and long-term value of customers can help ensure you focus your SEO strategy and budget in the areas that will drive the most organic growth and revenue over time.
Provides benchmarks to measure performance and SEO success
SEO forecasts are never likely to be 100% accurate, but they provide a very useful benchmark for comparing actual performance, along with a range of other SEO metrics.
An effective forecast sets expectations based on what’s happened in the past, seasonality, market trends and some informed assumptions about the future. If your real-world outcomes are close to the forecast, it shows how the data-based SEO strategy is working as expected.
On the other hand, if your organic performance isn’t close to the forecasted levels, it can highlight areas of your strategy that may need to be reviewed and tweaked to achieve full potential – or even uncover barriers or challenges that your brand needs to overcome before those numbers can be achieved.
Challenges in SEO forecasting for ecommerce brands
SEO forecasting isn’t without its challenges, which include:
- Search engine algorithm updates – All of the major search engines are constantly evolving, for example, the last 18 months has been increasingly volatile, with 13 updates. This can sometimes mean that SEO forecasts need to be revisited after every Google core update.
- Other players in the market – If your competitors change their SEO strategy, it can have an impact on your forecast too. So it’s vital to constantly monitor your market and direct competitors.
- Changing user behaviour – The terms that people use to search in your specific niche can change over time, which has an impact on keyword search volumes and how visitors may or may not engage with your content.
- External factors – Anything from trends (like social media and celebrities) and the state of the economy, to inflation rate changes or new regulations that affect online shopping can have a major impact on buyer behaviour. This may mean you need to tweak the SEO forecast at some points to keep it as accurate as possible.
- Internal factors – From challenges around your CMS and current tech-stack, to prioritisation and available internal resources. All of this can impact your ability to deliver against the forecast, but that forecast can also help overcome these challenges by offering a clear view of revenue opportunity – Giving you the perfect business case to drive change!
Techniques for SEO forecasting
There is no one true path when it comes to SEO forecasting, but it often comes down to a combination of keyword research, analysing historical data, competitor comparison and utilising SEO tools and expertise to help bring all of the first-party and third-party info together.
If you’re trying to forecast for a totally new website, it will be a very different process to SEO forecasting for an established site. New websites don’t have the past performance data to leverage, so forecasting for them relies more heavily on competitor research and potential audience size.
We’ve summarised two of the most common ways of forecasting for SEO, which are:
1. SEO keyword forecasting
This is a way of estimating how much organic traffic a website will get using keyword search volumes (i.e. the potential audience for a specific keyword) and the current rankings and click-through-rate (CTR) from organic search results.
The formula for this is to multiply the search volume by the average CTR of the SERP positions you’re aiming for.
For many websites, using this method for SEO forecasting means calculating the estimated traffic for every page (or at least every important transactional page) based on the keywords being targeted by that page and current rankings.
You can use Google Search Console (GSC) to pull the data relating to average rankings and CTR, along with your keyword research tool of choice to find volumes.
You can include keywords that you already rank for as well as new ones you may be targeting within the forecasted period.
As an example of how the formula works, let’s take a page on your website:
- Targeting two keywords that have a combined monthly search volume of 10,000.
- The page is currently ranking in position 11 for both terms, with a CTR of 0.5%.
- Your current organic traffic if nothing changes would be forecasted at around 50 organic visitors a month to that page via these two keywords.
- If your SEO strategy can help move those rankings to position 4, which historical and industry benchmark data tells you could hit a CTR of at least 5%, that traffic forecast jumps to 500 organic visitors a month.
You can take this further than organic traffic alone, by calculating how the forecasted traffic would translate into sales/revenue or leads (using your site’s historical conversion rate (CVR) data and average order values (AOV) as well as lifetime values of customers/clients), giving you an estimated ROI for each transactional page.
2. Historical and trend data SEO forecasting
This type of SEO forecasting involves analysing your website’s historical data to predict future results. Using past data can help to highlight any patterns and seasonal fluctuations that seem to affect organic performance, either positively or negatively.
This insight can help you to estimate organic performance in the coming period, especially if you take current trends into account.
For example, many keywords have fluctuating demand throughout the year, and some keyword volumes can grow quickly over time due to increasing demand. Google Trends can provide a top level view on this, but for a more tangible monthly/yearly breakdown of keyword volumes historically, you’ll usually need a paid subscription to a tool such as Keywords Everywhere or Semrush.
This screengrab from Google Trends shows that “Air Fryer” search demand peaks every late autumn/early winter. For small kitchen appliance retailers, this indicates that you can maximise the potential SEO results by prepping earlier in the year, so peak performance hits at just the right time to capitalise on demand.
Utilising data from the past can help you to develop informed forecasts for upcoming organic performance that better reflect both past performance and predicted changes in user behaviour throughout the year.
How accurate is SEO forecasting?
There is no 100% accurate way to conduct SEO forecasting because there are many things that are out of our control as marketers and businesses.
We can use the data and formulas we have to make informed estimates about organic traffic, conversions and revenue, but they will never be exact metrics.
Markets change, search engine algorithms evolve and many other factors can affect SEO performance, but forecasts can still be a very useful benchmark to indicate achievable organic growth and highlight really strong indications when based on real and reliable data.
How do we forecast SEO performance?
At No Brainer, we have various ways of SEO forecasting, depending on your objectives and the metrics that matter to your specific business.
The most accurate approach for ecommerce (and most loved by our clients) is via our proprietary tool ‘Navigator’, which enables us to identify projected revenue from organic search, rather than just estimating traffic or rankings.
By reviewing thousands of keywords, then using Navigator on the data, we generate a clear plan and a forecast that is based on the revenue opportunities available.
Our forecasts offer additional insights and data on search volume seasonality and more. This brings real clarity to our ecommerce clients on when to prioritise optimisation on key focus areas in order to unlock peak levels of organic traffic and revenue.
If you’d like to talk to us about ecommerce SEO forecasting or want other support with your organisation’s SEO strategy, we’d love to hear from you. Get in touch using the form below.
