SEO often involves a significant initial investment with a longer ROI than other channels. And once you let SEO slide, the recovery budget can be even more taxing.
However, the ROI from an investment in SEO is generally higher than in other channels.
You know this, but do your stakeholders?
By displaying the right strategic investment in SEO, your brand will come through a period of economic uncertainty in a much stronger position – poised for growth.
I want to help you prove that to stakeholders.
It’s your responsibility as the expert to ensure that SEO is a priority.
This can be done through strategic planning that your clients and stakeholders can trust.
Let’s look at two ways you can do that:
Your first step to building your SEO strategy is to choose your goals and objectives.
These goals should be the north star that every part of your strategy works towards.
You’ve probably had to answer questions related to business objectives such as:
Using SEOmonitor’s Forecast, you’ll be able to answer these questions and secure your value as a thought leader.
Also, you’ll be able to explain these metrics, set expectations, and provide insight into where best to invest your marketing budget.
With the answers to those questions in your pocket, you’ll be able to start building the foundation of a highly-understandable SEO strategy that stakeholders will love.
As I’m personally a fan of the “SMART objectives” framework, I recommend you use it to build out your strategy, as it forces you to consider if your objectives are truly measurable and achievable.
One example to guide you can be: “Increase non-brand organic search traffic by X% within 12 months and Y% within 24 months while improving the website conversion rate for our agreed conversion goals by Z%.”
Let’s look at an example to understand how forecasting helps create and explain these measurable and specific objectives.
In this example, I’m working on a real estate and property website, which I’ll call “Property Search”.
Property Search gets around 5 million organic search sessions a year.
My potential goals are to:
What I need to answer next:
Now that you have your questions in mind, you can use SEO forecasting to help you make sure those metrics and goals are truly attainable.
Define Your Keyword Data On A Granular Level
The more granular you structure your keyword data, the better.
Define your information architecture and group strategic clusters of search phrases together.
SEOmonitor provides a folder and group structure, which helps you set up the level of granularity you need.
This level of granularity lets you create different forecast scenarios based on your selection of specific folders or groups. That’s how you can validate relevant metrics against different objectives.
In order to forecast metrics for my first objective – “to maintain and grow non-brand organic search traffic the site is already receiving” – I start the forecasting process in SEOmonitor with the folders and groups I have structured that relate to “Property Search’s” current organic search footprint.
Create & Test A Reliable SEO Strategy Scenario
The SEOmonitor forecasting solution provides you with all the key variables you need to create a reliable scenario:
A key part of the forecasting process is the ability to adjust the conversion rate in the SEOmonitor forecasting algorithm.
Sometimes, when you’re familiar with a brand, your expertise can help you tailor the forecast toward a more accurate prediction.
For instance, an issue I have come across in the past is conversion data in Google Analytics not matching up to the data in internal systems, in some cases by 20 – 30%. In this instance, adjusting the conversion rate that you are forecasting gives far more accurate metrics in the final forecast.
The resulting forecast scenario provides me with all the data needed to answer the questions mentioned above, validate my first objective, and provide valuable insight to my client.
Building on this initial forecast scenario, we can now move our attention to the second objective I outlined: “to grow non-brand organic search traffic for new areas of opportunity.”
After extensive research into new areas of opportunity for “Property Search”, and identifying clusters of keyword phrases that related to the business, we identified achievable gaps in the competitors’ landscape.
We consider gaps achievable due to the business’s level of authority in the competitive landscape.
Working with the Sales Director at “Property Search”, we were able to use the data in the two scenarios to forecast revenue generated from the site based on the increase in conversions.
Based on the estimated increase in non-brand traffic, we are also able to consider the uplift to their display advertising revenue from advertisers on their site.
All of this impacts the ability to forecast better commercials and make decisions at the board level as to the best areas of investment in marketing.
On a final note, you may be wondering why we did not group these two forecast scenarios together, which is a good question.
The reason for this is that the two objectives we had both required different tactics to achieve success for them:
Being able to assign these objectives to specific stakeholders within the “Property Search” team enabled better accountability and clarity on who was responsible for delivery in each area of our strategy.
Forecasting SEO based on keywords and desired ranking targets enables you to set clear, measurable objectives and make a solid business case for:
That further translates into potential business outcomes that clients and stakeholders care about.
It’s how you turn the conversation from SEO as a cost to SEO as an investment.
With SEOmonitor’s Forecast, which considers all key variables influencing your keywords and ranks (device segmentation, search data including seasonality and year-over-year trends, CTRs, and conversion rates), you can check every calculation and trust the data.
Join us if you want to create greater value for your clients and stakeholders with more transparency and precision.
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