SEO forecasting is a crucial part of any search engine optimization strategy. It helps you make smarter content decisions based on a combination of factors like seasonal changes, customer traffic, and buying behavior. And to stay competitive in today’s digital world, you need to follow an efficient approach for SEO forecasting in 2022. And how do we do that? Let’s find out!

What is SEO forecasting?

SEO forecasting is the term that refers to the process of analyzing data from previous search traffic and assessing whether there are certain patterns or trends that keep repeating over time. This helps businesses to predict future results and thus decide which strategies to use or modify for the best possible outcomes.

In simple terms, forecasting SEO traffic will help you anticipate future profits while identifying the areas that need more attention for improved results. Irrespective of the size of your establishment and the type of your industry, SEO forecasting is a crucial task for the success of your business and enables you to make decisions that fall in line with the big-picture goals of your brand.

Why is SEO forecasting important for your business?

Let’s get straight into it! SEO forecasting is important because it helps your business make informed marketing decisions that drive leads, traffic, and conversions. Changes in seasons can affect the performance of your search engine optimization strategies and conversion rates. Therefore, it is necessary to develop data-backed SEO forecasting in 2022 that can make web traffic predictions based on the changes in seasons and other phenomena.

Benefits of SEO forecasting

Apart from improved decision-making prowess, SEO forecasting provides you numerous other benefits. Here are some major advantages of forecasting for SEO:

• It helps you determine whether your business goals are realistic and  practical.
• Enables you to allocate your digital marketing budget judiciously.
• Helps you understand and assess your data, identify patterns, and use it to your advantage.

How to collect data for SEO forecasting

Now that you have a better idea of what exactly SEO forecasting is and what are the benefits it offers to your business, it is time to understand how forecasting for SEO will help your brand in the long run. You need to remember that there are two major aspects to consider in the process:

First-party data

First-party data usually comes from Google Analytics or other additional SEO reporting tools that you use like MozPro or SEMrush. This type of data lets you know what is working well for your website, especially in terms of growth and optimization.

Third-party data

Third-party data includes data from your competitor’s website and their business goals. Simply speaking, it is your way of finding out what other companies in your industry are doing to achieve similar results to what you want to achieve.

In order to get a complete picture, you need to combine the results from both categories and assess the benefits. This will give you a clear focus on how to go ahead with and what strategies to use further.

How SEO forecasting works

While it might sound like it is the most difficult part of your SEO forecasting journey, analyzing the data is quite easy – especially if you have the right knowledge and tools. There are different ways to approach SEO ROI forecasting. Take a look at them below and find out the one that best suits your business objectives and goals.

Keyword performance forecasting

One of the most beneficial ways to utilize SEO forecasting is to predict the performance of your keywords. This can be further used to predict how your current keyword rankings will deliver results in the future. It is thus the best way to manage your website traffic forecasting.

Setting a benchmark

Using SEO forecasting tools, you can get an idea of where you stand in comparison with your competitors. Setting your data and predictions as benchmarks, you can set specific and measurable goals. This gives you a better insight into where your investments performed well and where they didn’t.

SEO ROI forecasting

Leveraging SEO to predict ROI is highly popular because it enables businesses to know how exactly their marketing strategy will pay off. It is also highly useful in determining when you can achieve those predicted results.

To do this, first, you need to clearly understand your attribution model and the costs associated with each of your SEO efforts. You need to take into account the data accumulated from multiple touchpoints of a customer’s journey. You also need to consider the cost associated with the development of a new resource as well. Combine that with your keyword forecasting and you can determine the amount of traffic you will generate.

Predict opportunity cost

Forecasting for SEO ideally should take the opportunity cost into account. This ensures that you are making the most informed decision possible when you have all the relevant data. This is particularly useful for marketers who are on a tight budget. Find out the search engine marketing strategy that works best and invest more into that.

While these are the most popular approaches to go about SEO forecasting in 2022, you can build a customized strategy that works best for your business. Similarly, you can go about it with your own in-house team or rely on the services of an expert. Make sure you collaborate with an experienced digital branding agency with specialized teams for SEO, SEM, and social media.

Remember: SEO forecasting is difficult because…

While the benefits of SEO forecasting are many, we would like to also note how SEO forecasting can be challenging sometimes and may not always deliver the expected results. More often than not, organic search forecasting is suited for estimating ROI for content creation as it is based completely on keyword predictions. Marketers also often face difficulties in predicting keyword trends. Therefore, it is not a holistic approach as it is impossible to predict all the keywords that a website will rank for.

Since Google does not provide keyword data in the Google Search Console and Analytics pages, it is not possible to accurately predict the exact keywords that are driving conversions on your website.

Top 5 SEO forecasting tools

There are numerous basic and customizable SEO forecasting tools in the market that help marketers build the best possible SEO strategy for their businesses. Here, we have listed a few such names that we have found to be well-designed and user friendly.

Google Data Studio

It is an online data visualization software that generates informative and engaging reports (as well as predictions) from raw data. It connects to multiple data sources such as Google Analytics, Google Ads, Google Search Console, SEMrush, and many others to pull data from. With that data, it enables you to create interactive dashboards with charts that can be customized and shared.

Prophet by Facebook

It is an open-source library developed by Facebook’s Core Data Science Team that lets you make predictions for univariate time series datasets. It looks at yearly, weekly, and daily seasonality (including holiday effects) for website traffic forecasting using Python or R API.

Ahref’s Traffic Site Forecast

It is considered one of the best SEO software suites for business intelligence experts, data scientists, and digital marketers. Its tracking abilities will help you forecast future performances based on previous website traffic and keyword rankings, among other metrics. Although there are some pre-made scripts available in the public domain, you might need some coding experience to create custom snippets on the platform.

SEO Keyword Forecasting by SEOmonitor

It is a keyword-based SEO performance forecasting solution that lets you enter your desired rank and the time period to produce insights on the effort that is required to achieve that rank. This software uses data models that take into account a variety of variables to predict how some specific keywords and the products related to them will perform over a pre-set period of time.

SEO Forecasting with seoClarity

It is an SEO forecasting tool with a custom interface and a customizable traffic potential template that gives priority to ROI-centric reporting. It uses predictive traffic modeling that collects crucial traffic, CTRs, conversion rates, and other data forms to build a traffic prediction and highlight improvement opportunities.

Build your SEO forecast today

As you see, forecasting is extremely valuable in assessing the impact of your SEO and estimating ROI. So, if you have clarity on what your website traffic will look like in the near future, you can make some better marketing decisions.

Having said that, we would like to reiterate that SEO forecasting is not always accurate and is unique to each business model. While the tools we have mentioned will definitely help you stride through the whole process, it is better to rely on the services of SEO experts who are well-versed in data collection and analysis.

As an experienced web development and digital marketing company, we have a talented team of data experts who can help you calculate and make the most accurate prediction for your business, and thus consequently develop the most effective online marketing strategies. Contact us to know more about our services and find out how we can help you!