Today, a lot of organizations rely on search forecasting operations to help them find prospective clients. It helps them discover new information and particular target groups of consumers based on their interests, demographics, and behavior.
Let’s take a look at why search forecasting is essential and how it can help you plan an effective marketing strategy for your business.
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So, What Exactly Is Search Forecasting?
Search forecasting is a technique used to predict how your organic traffic will look in the future. This insight helps you understand whether and how you need to adjust your current marketing strategies to keep up with changes in your web traffic.
Search forecasting allows you to gauge your SEO efforts and optimize them for the future.
Why Is the Practice of Search Forecasting Important?
It’s crucial to accomplish this so that you can appropriately design your marketing strategy. Ensure your website is optimized for optimum conversions to help you avoid costly marketing errors.
Search Forecasting is never perfect and doesn’t hit the bullseye, ever. But, it tells you if you are somewhat on track to success in the future. The practice lets you figure out where to focus your SEO efforts to get better results.
The Problem with Search Forecasting
Google and other search engines have an algorithm that is constantly changing to deliver the most relevant results to their users.
This makes it difficult for websites to stay on top of the changing algorithm and deliver the best results every time. This is the reason why Search Forecasting is never exact. However, this technique can make significant improvements to your website.
What Metrics Does This Technique Use?
Search Forecasting uses data like CTR, Seasonality, Keyword Volume, and organic traffic (monthly) to predict future traffic.
Based on these metrics, algorithms are available to decide your future rankings and relevance.
How To Perform Search Forecasting?
There are two forms of Search Forecasting; each one has a different procedure –
Keyword Forecasting
1) You need to run an initial search analysis to identify your site’s top-performing keywords.
2) Next, you need to track how your current ranking for these keywords changes over time.
3) Finally, you need to use keyword forecasting algorithms like the one SEO monitor offers.
4) Look at the reports to see if these keywords will go up or down in ranking based on your provided current data.
Statistical Search Forecasting
1) You must thoroughly collect your website’s historical data to understand which factors affect its rank.
2) Feed the collected data to a statistical model that can help predict your website’s performance in the future. Numerous statistical programs are available that can analyze your data and give you important information about the success of your website. Kevin Indig provides an Excel Sheet Template for sites to plug in their data to forecast their traffic growth. He has also provided an in-depth tutorial on his website, so be sure to check it out.