Welcome to this week's edition of Whiteboard Friday. I'm Tom, Director of Organic Performance at Croud. Today, we're going to talk about SEO forecasting and more specifically how you can do it. With digital budgets being more scrutinized than ever, there's a lot more pressure to demonstrate the value of your SEO activity back to your business or your client organizations.

So today, we're going to spend some time talking about the process that I go through in order to do that forecasting and demonstrate that value. Now, I will say it's not an exact science. We're effectively trying to predict the future, which is quite difficult.

But there are processes that you can go through in order to begin to quantify that predicted SEO value.

What do you need for SEO forecasting?
What do you need for SEO forecasting?
So before we kick off, there are a few things that you'll need in terms of data in order to build your forecast. Firstly, 12 months traffic data.

So this is effectively you can use your analytics platform or you can use Google Search Console to pull down 12 months' worth of organic data by month. Secondly and most of the time you're working within a business or you're working with clients, you will be set a target of what that predicted future SEO performance needs to be.

So that's incredibly important to bring into your forecast as well. Thirdly, the keywords that you'll target across the course of your campaign, that's really important to help try and demonstrate the incrementality that you're going to be building for your business or your clients. Then, finally, the click-through rate model that's somewhat linked to point number three here.

Click-through rate model allows you to start to reverse engineer by each keyword how much traffic they are driving and, by improving those keyword positions, how much additional traffic you're going to be driving through to your website. So those are four things that you'll need before you set out on this journey. What we'll end up with, when you've gone through this process, is a graph like this.

So effectively, a very clear demonstration of what we've achieved over the last 12-month period from that traffic data that you've got up here and then some different scenarios. So firstly, your baseline. This is effectively what we think performance will be if we don't do any value-added SEO activity.

Then we've got our forecast in the green here. So using all of that keyword data that you have, what we think the incremental value will be from your SEO activity improving the positions for those keywords. The black dot is the target that you need to work towards.

So very quickly what you can start to see is where you've got that gap from the keywords that you're targeting against that initial target that you've been set by your business or your client organization, and that will start to tell you, actually, there are probably more keywords, more expansion that we need to do within our SEO strategy to close that gap.

Then, finally, as that year progresses and you progress through your SEO campaign, what the traffic is that you're actually generating and how that tracks against the forecast that you've built. So this, ultimately, is what we'll end up with, which you can show to your superiors, your client organizations to demonstrate the value of your SEO activity.