When your clients ask you, “Can you predict how much traffic your agency is going to bring for my website?” you are often clueless. This SEO tutorial and whitepaper on solving the website traffic puzzle will immensely help SEO professionals in their career.”
— Satyendra Mishra, CoFounder, DigitalBerge a leading SEO Company in Delhi NCR, India
Before we begin discussing the entire approach to predict organic traffic, I would like to tell you that at the end of this exercise, you will be able to see the results as follows:
Hello guys!
As an agency owner, every time I meet a prospect or an existing client, they ask me the same questions and the most frequently asked question is:
“What would I get if I implement all of the things you have suggested for my website? or predict the exact relevant monthly organic search traffic I’ll receive”
The answer is simple — You will see growth in terms of search engine rankings on different keywords and therefore assured and predictable organic traffic.
However, most of the clients have no clue how keyword rankings are going to help them. They are basically interested in exact relevant monthly organic search traffic and conversions an SEO agency could increase for their website.
Also Read: Successful Hacks To Increase Organic Traffic To Your Website
The Traffic Puzzle
To predict monthly organic search traffic, earlier I used methods like historical traffic stats of a client and gave a blind prediction based on industry trends, which is somewhere around 10-30% month over month.
Theoretically, it might sound okay, but it hardly reflects in terms of real growth stats. Many SEO consultants fail at this point as they have no sound reason to give when they fail to achieve what they promise.
The Moment of Shame
When these SEO professionals face their clients in review meetings, their heads get down as they are generally not able to achieve the monthly organic search traffic they had predicted in the beginning.
Bodhisattva’s Moment of Enlightenment
I have spent many sleepless nights over it. Then one day, an idea popped up in my mind. Why do we not consider keywords while predicting traffic??
In fact, there are a number of things you need to take into consideration to predict exactly monthly organic search traffic.
Just wondering if you have any idea or wild guesses?
The above situation gets worse when the client asks “How much traffic/revenue growth can I expect in a particular category i.e. in electronic, footwear, or fashion etc.?”
But then every problem has a solution. One fine day, we developed a method through which we could predict monthly organic search traffic from organic keywords with approximately 90% accuracy.
Step by Step process to predict the exactly monthly organic search traffic, you could bring by promoting a particular set of keywords or analyzing how much total traffic a particular set of keywords could bring on your website.
Step 1 – Know the Complete Search Universe – The most important thing is that you must have access to a comprehensive list of keywords a particular niche has. This list will be different if you are a global leader or serving a local market as per your business needs.
In order to meet your clients’ objectives, you need to narrow down the list of keywords. To do this, you need to take help of some popular SEO tools available in the market. I’ve listed them below for your reference.
Create a comprehensive list of keywords using these tools; remove all the duplicate keywords, repeated words, and non-related keywords.
Step 2 – Categorize the Keywords – Group keywords according to their niche. This will help you in understanding the total potential of those keywords in a particular category. The word “potential” here means what you are going to get by promoting a particular niche/category.
Step 3 – Predicting Keyword Ranking – To predict traffic you need to know how the keyword ranking will move over a period of time. If you know the industry trends and the budget in hand, this could easily be predicted.
To do this, we should take the following steps:
3a. Calculating Competition for Each Keyword
What is the overall competition for a particular keyword? How do you know the competition for a particular keyword?
Before you calculate this, you must know whom you are going to compete with and how many sites are fighting for a particular keyword.
i. Enter the keyword and see the total number of results coming in the search. But, this doesn’t indicate the competition for that keyword. Rather, it is the number of times that particular search term appears on the web indexed by Google.
ii. Some people do search the keywords in quotes, i.e. “top 7 healthcare blogs” to explore the competition for a particular keyword; however this is also not the right way.
iii. The people who are seriously competing for a particular search term must put it in “title” of that particular page.
You should pay attention to the number of results appearing when you hit a query in the Google search field in the following manner:
• Allintitle: Your Keyword
iv. This will give you the number of web pages actually competing for that particular search term
v. But typing such keywords one by one and jotting down the numbers displayed in search results, is again a tedious task. Isn’t it? Huh, not to worry friends. With the help of Google Spreadsheet, you can easily do this.
Click the following link:
Step 4 – Now, you have a list of keywords, with competition mentioned against each keyword
Step 5 – Sort keywords as per competition in the increasing order, this will help you to know which keywords have relatively low search volume and which keywords are really hard to rank (high competition keywords).
Step 6 – Keywords which have (competition<500) low competition, could be easily placed in top 10 search results within 2-3 months of time. {SEO people are smart enough to do this}
Note: You’ve to take other factors in consideration while predicting keyword rankings. Some of these factors are listed below.
Step 7 – You need to have a rough estimate of rankings of the keywords, your team would be able to achieve in the next 3 months, 6 months, 9 months and 12 months time.
Step 8 – Now you have an Excel sheet, which will look something like the one below that I’ve created for demonstration purposes.
Now, you’ve all the ingredients for your recipe. Your process of traffic estimation will start now.
Click through Rate for particular keyword positions: CTR is not equal for every position, it varies drastically. CTR is higher when you are ranking high and CTR is low when you are ranking on 2nd page, 3rd page and likewise.
CTR also varies from industry to industry. For some industries, you might get clicks even when your keywords are ranking on 3rd or 4th pages, while for others, you will not receive any clicks, if you are on 2nd page or 3rd page of Google search.
To have a fair idea of the CTR, login into your Google Search Console and see how your website is performing in terms of CTR for various positions.
Step 1: Write the name of categories in Column “A”. We have to do it manually—such as “Your Category 1”, “Category 2”…and so on.
Step 2: To bring in the sum of all the keywords in column “B”, we have to use the formula given below:
=SUMIFS (‘Name of Tab Containing keywords’!E:E,’ Name of Tab Containing keywords ‘!B:B,A2)
Where:
Note: Make sure the names of the categories are same as mentioned in the original Spreadsheet.
Step 3: We’ve ranked categories in decreasing order of total search volume of keywords in that particular category.
To do this, use the formula mentioned below in column “C”
Now, we have to establish a relation among Rank, Category and Search Volume. In order to do that, we need to replicate all the values in column “A” and “B” to Column “D” and “E” as mentioned below:
Step 4: Create a New Tab in MS Excel named as “Purified View”, something like this:
I hope you’ve noticed the column “A” having value “1” in it. This is the Order by Value assigned to Category 7.
Step 5: We need to “vlookup” search volume and name of category from the tab named as “rules” using the below mentioned formulas:
Enter these formulas:
Formula to bring name of category
Formula to bring search volume
Now, your Excel sheet will look something like this:
Step 6: Okay, now we’ve to bring in
To do this, you need to use this formula in Excel:
You simply need to copy and paste this formula in all of the cells of niche 1, niche 2 and so on… If you implement things correctly, you’ll have a spreadsheet like this:
To calculate the traffic, we need to multiply the search volume of each month with respective CTR.
So, values in F3 will be multiplied with E3 to get a spreadsheet like this:
In this example, you will get “894” for Month1 in Category1, similarly for Month2, you will get “961” and so on…
To reach to a conclusion regarding the total predicted traffic for a particular month, you need to add monthly numbers.
Total Traffic = Traffic in Month1 in Category1+ Traffic in Month2 in Category 2+ Traffic in Month3 in Category 3 +….
Final Words
This is the proven and one of the most reliable and accurate methods to predict traffic on month on month basis. Only an inexperienced and inefficient SEO agency will say that they can’t predict the traffic accurately or that traffic is unpredictable or it’s out of the scope of SEO. In this era, when organic traffic mainly depends on your website’s rankings, you can predict future traffic with a high degree of accuracy using your projections about anticipated rankings. In case you have any difficulty in traffic prediction Digitalberge SEO Company in India is here to help you with.
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Your comments are most welcome. If you know some other tactics to predict traffic, please feel free to share it here.
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