Utilising SEOmonitor for your forecasting needs

For those of you who have worked with eCommerce businesses (and I am sure other businesses, too), you’ll understand the pressure and need to deliver an SEO forecast for the work you are proposing before you even start making changes and implementations. This is an essential component for Heads of eComm, business owners and internal stakeholders – without it, you’ll struggle to get buy-in for your proposed work. 

The common approach to SEO forecasting is a blend across a variety of tactics:

• Using legacy performance data to understand correlation and causation.
• Using MoM and YoY % change to forecast the new year.
• Applying growth assumption percentages to the data based on point 1.

Everything you see above is unrealistic. Using last year’s performance as a baseline when forecasting is wrong, as you’ll end up saying you’re going to achieve X growth on top of X growth – resulting in over-estimation and severe underperformance against goals – and likely a lost client, too. 

SEOmonitor can help you forecast more accurately

SEOmonitor is an incredibly useful tool that bridges the gap between under-estimation and blue sky over-estimation, taking into account the following:

• • SEO timeframes.
  • Keyword positions.
  • ROI.
  • Progress speed.
  • Seasonality.

• & a load of complicated formulas and processes that we don’t need to see*.

All the calculations are transparent and can be back-tracked using the “detailed keywords’ view.

For SEOmonitor to deliver a forecast, many components are factored into the calculations, such as: 

• Long-tail effects (moving keywords would have on ROI.)*
• Conversion rates (for your client)& AOV.
• Target positions (set by you for the set of keywords you’re forecasting.)
• Device segmentation.
• Search volumes & YoY trends.
• CTR values that take into account all SERP features and combinations.

*SEOmonitor’s long-tail effect algorithm takes into account what other keywords go hand-in-hand with the selected keyword and will generate additional sessions. E.g “how to make easy chocolate cake” is a variation of “simple chocolate cake recipe”.  If the website improves in rankings for the main keywords, it also improves on other keywords with the same search intent and long-tail keywords. 

The tool takes into account so many different variables while giving you the ability to customise the output based on your strategy. For example, setting clear target positions (e.g. 1-5 or 1-10) for your primary target keywords, setting a timeframe based on the contract you’re working to, e.g. six months, 12 months, etc., you can forecast by category (grouping keywords into groups and uploading) – all of which allow you to see how many additional sessions and conversions you’d get once you achieve targets. 

During the setup process, you can  see an up-to-date calculation of ‘goal chance’, which allows you to choose the correlation between your keywords’ target ranks and the likelihood you’ll be able to achieve your targets within the set date range.

SEOmonitor is also a very good rank tracker, too

We use SEOmonitor for forecasting, rank tracking and tracking performance against goals. SEOmonitor allows us to do that very efficiently and very effectively. 

1. You can find potential keyword opportunities by segmenting by page type.
2. Filter and segment keywords by rank, e.g. top 10 or top 100.
3. You can use Smart Grouping, which updates daily, moving keywords into groups if it should fit the criteria. Recently introduced is a feature which groups keywords automatically based on main categories through AI categorisation. 
4. Measure your performance over time for a group and set of keywords – especially useful for your DPR activity and target set of keywords.
5. Understanding the monthly search volumes and quickly comparing the search volume YoY.
6. Outlines the number of SERP features available for a keyword.
7. Shows your rank, keyword trend and visibility over time (see below).
8. Gives you an opportunity score based on the priority of the term.
9. Emphasise whether your keyword is seasonal, e.g. if it is seasonal, you want to be optimising that keyword on or before said period (not a converting term all year round).

Final Words

As you can see, at NOVOS, we use SEOmonitor in a variety of ways, leveraging the forecasting tool to make our forecasts as accurate as can be, aligned with the SEO strategy in place for our clients, and including individual forecasts for target keyword clusters, making our forecasting abilities significantly more holistic. 

Utilising SEOmonitor for forecasting and rank tracking ensures that we have an up-to-date view of our target keywords’ performance at all times. We can also easily and quickly adjust our forecasts based on strategy pivots, e.g. seasonality recommendations, reactive changes to business needs, etc. 

LINK: https://links.seomonitor.com/seo-forecasting-and-tracking 

In partnership with SEOmonitor