What is SEO Forecasting?

SEO forecasting is the prediction of keywords' future traffic, search engine rankings, and other metrics by examining their historical data. Looking at past rankings and search traffic helps estimate (or forecast) the organic performance of these keywords, and helps website owners determine how much organic traffic they can anticipate.

Why is SEO Forecasting Important?

SEO forecasting can help businesses understand what their customers are looking for, and what kind of content engages people. This understanding of how organic traffic (or lack thereof) influences and will influence business performance can be a crucial differentiator from your competitors.

SEO forecasting can also help you develop realistic goals for your business, and you can use forecasting data to support a shift in business strategy, or an increase in budget or resources for organic projects.

SEO Forecasting Metrics

Below are some of the most useful metrics to examine when forecasting SEO performance. Some of these metrics are historical data about your website’s current rankings for a keyword, while others can look at keyword performance as a whole.

• Keyword Search Volume: How many searches a keyword is receiving in a given time frame
• Keyword Difficulty: The competitiveness of a keyword, or how easy/difficult it is to rank for a given keyword.
• Impressions: The number of times your site appeared in the search engine results for a given keyword
• Average CTR: The number of clicks your site received divided by the number of times your site appeared in the search engine results for a given keyword
• Average Position: Your site’s average ranking in the search results for a given keyword

SEO Forecasting Tools

Here are some of the best tools you can use to predict organic or keyword performance.

• Keyword Magic Tool:  Users can enter a keyword and receive a list of related keywords and their search volumes, keyword difficulty ratings, and more.
• Ahrefs Keywords Explorer: When a user enters a target keyword or keywords, they are provided with matching terms, related questions, and related topics. Ahrefs also provides a list of keywords that top-ranking pages for your target keyword also rank for.
• Google Search Console: Users can examine “Queries” that caused their website to show in the search engine results. Search Console provides Clicks, Impressions, CTR, and Average Position for these Queries.

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We hope these tips helped you understand how you can use SEO Forecasting to optimize your organic performance. Interested in learning more about our SEO services? Reach out to Relevance Advisors today!