Forecasting SEO can be a difficult task made easy with the right data. Learn to estimate web traffic, revenue and return from your investment in SEO. Read the full post here: http://www.snapagency.com/blog/4-ways-to-forecast-roi-from-seo/

1. 4 ways to
forecast
your ROfrom
SEO

2. 1
Estimate Web Traffic
from SEO

3. 1. Choose 1 product or service your
company offers
2. Develop a list of 10 to 15 keywords
that potential customers may use to
search this product or service
3. Head over to Google’s Keyword
Planner and enter the list of terms
4. Filter by geographic area
5. Hit ‘Get Ideas’

4. 6. Look at the search volume trends and find an average monthly search
volume for your keywords
7. Repeat the steps above for your other key products and services.
Combine the average monthly search volumes to arrive at the size of the
total search market.

5. Your rank in search results is a large
determinant of the number of clicks
you’ll receive. The table to the right
shows the average click-through-rate
for the top 10 search results.
Being the first result means you’ll get
17% of searchers to click through to
your web page.
Clearly it pays to be near the top!
8. Estimate your monthly web traffic
by creating your own table based on
these numbers.
See the next slide for an example.

6. Average Position X Average CTR (%) = Monthly Web Traffic
1 17.16 (6000 x 17.16%)
2 9.94 596.4
3 7.64 458.4
4 5.31 318.6
5 3.5 210
6 1.63 97.8
7 1.09 65.4
8 1.04 62.4
9 0.44 26.4
10 0.51 30.6
*based on a search market of 6,000 monthly searches

7. 2
Estimate Revenue
from SEO

8. 1. Determine your website’s conversion rate. If you don’t know it, use
these numbers.
Ecommerce: 2%
Lead Generation: 5%
2. Find the dollar value of your average sale
3. Find your close rate. What percentage of leads does your company
convert into sales?
4. Using the table below as an example, calculate your monthly revenue.
Take monthly traffic from the results in Method 1. Try this formula for
various traffic levels and conversion rates.
Monthly Traffic x Conversion Rate x Close Rate x Average Sale = Monthly Revenue
97.8 5% 30% $7,000 $10,269

9. 3
Estimate Profit from
SEO

10. Now that we have an estimated
revenue, determining profit is the
next step. All we need is to
understand the cost of investing in
SEO.
Where does your company fit?
Tier 1: $250-$500 per month.
Small business with limited geography. However,
you’ll find a lot of swindlers and black-hat SEOs and
this price point.
Tier 2: $700-$1,500 per month.
Small to medium size business with a limited
geography in a decently populated market.
Tier 3: $2,000-$6,000 per month.
A regional, national, or international company with a
niche product or service and limited competition.
A small to medium size company that does business
locally in a high competition market.
A small to medium size company that does business
locally in a metropolitan area.
Tier 4: $10,000+ per month.
A national or international company that markets to a
wide audience. ven if the cost of producing that content
is quite high.
Take your revenue, subtract your
anticipated budget. And you’ve got
your profit.

11. 4
Estimate the Timeline
for Results from SEO

12. mo. 3 mo. 6 mo. 9 mo. 12
RESULTS
TIME
What a Successful Search
Strategy Looks Like

13. Months 1 – 3: Technical SEO, site performance
enhancements and general best practices
have produced a small, yet measurable
increase in the website’s search engine
optimization.
Months 4 – 6: Minor victories, such as a blog
post that gets some attention on social,
produce temporary spikes in traffic. However,
visibility in organic search results change very
little during this time. Websites with extremely
low competition might be an exception.
Months 7 – 9: Pieces of content produced early on
in the SEO strategy now have some longevity.
Impressions from organic search have risen
considerably and more searchers are clicking
through to the website. Activity is increasing,
however conversions are lagging.
Months 10 – 12: The website is generating
significantly more leads, depending on the
seasonality of the business. Clear content winners
in organic search are consistently funneling traffic
to the website. Going forward, the SEO strategy
will produce results more frequently due to the
incoming data from the last year.

14. Organic search marketing is a
long road with huge payoffs.
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