What is SEO Forecasting and Why Does it Matter?

Did you know that for a massive 68% of internet users, the online experience begins with search browsers? This is precisely what makes search engine optimization so important. Search engines are the first resource for your audience, and you want to be there when they search for products and services you can provide.

To that end, advanced audience research and best SEO practices have been developed that let brands maximize search exposure. SEO forecasting is one of the methods that let businesses “see” a little into the future search trends so their online channels would be optimized and ready to tap into the new opportunities.

Many businesses hire SEO experts to help them execute this smoothly. Let’s understand the subtle nuances of SEO forecasting.

What is SEO Forecasting?

“Forecasting” encompasses the activity of predicting certain metrics for the immediate or short-term future based on historical data. Similarly, SEO forecasting is the process of analyzing historical search trends on your online channels and search engines to identify and highlight search trends and patterns that repeat over time.

Identifying these search patterns, for example, search terms used exclusively during the holiday season (like “best Christmas gifts”), helps a business prepare for the predicted corresponding future traffic in the following ways:

• Ensuring that servers are available for the anticipated load
• Creating marketing and sales campaigns ahead of time
• Keeping the inventory updated for possible predicted sales
• Optimizing the website and all business channels to be able to cater to the anticipated traffic

These are only a few activities that depend on SEO forecasting. The capability of transforming unstructured web data into actionable insights that impact future strategy is vital for the growth of a business. SEO forecasting is an extremely important part of growing your online business today. In fact, 61% of the businesses prefer outsourcing their content marketing activities to professionals, to drive better results from the SEO ecosphere.

More and more businesses are investing in SEO forecasting today because of the invaluable insights it delivers.

Why Do You Need SEO Forecasting?

SEO forecasting is key to understanding the impact of your prevailing marketing and sales strategies on the bottom line. The results that this activity generates help your business prepare for the near future better, in terms of online and digital presence. It is known that over half of the website traffic is driven by organic search – your business needs to have actionable, measurable data at hand to help you strategize to leverage this traffic.

Here are a few compelling reasons you need to engage in SEO forecasting at the earliest.

Develop Better Strategies

Before the advent of data processing and analysis, businesses used to rely on assumptions and trends to base their marketing decisions on. Today, SEO forecasting is helping them strategize with insights that directly display the performance and impacts of deployed strategies. “A stitch in time saves nine,” is true in its purest essence, here.

When your decision-makers are equipped with data that spells out how the business is performing currently, what it should anticipate, and how it could possibly prepare for a change, the decisions they make are sound and more transformative.

Most of your consumers are online today, this very moment. SEO forecasting can help you visualize how they will “behave” in the near future with respect to interacting with the touchpoints you have created.

Predictive Analysis

Predictive analysis has become extremely reliable today with the advent of modern technology like AI.

Every department of an organization gets to operate on a budget, which may be fixed or flexible. SEO forecasting generates usable information that lets the sales and marketing department estimate the resources they would need in the future to cater to the predicted traffic.

Predictive analysis also helps in measuring how your selected keywords would perform on the web.

Developing a Marketing Strategy

Marketing and advertising aren’t siloed departments anymore. The same set of SEO data can inform both your marketing and sales strategies and inform them equally for synchronized efforts. For example, the keywords that perform well on marketing and searches can be leveraged for PPC campaigns as well. Furthermore, SEO forecasting can help you see the impacts of these experiments clearly.

Feasibility Study of Objectives and Goals

SEO forecasting is breaking down the boundaries between departments. The results from forecasting activities are wholesome enough to cover SEO impacts on marketing returns, sales activities and generating scenarios that determine feasibility of each SEO strategy with respect to the set goals and objectives.

Intelligent Spending of Budgets

SEO forecasting is a view into the immediate future. Your business is made capable of positioning itself, resource-wise, in a way that allows it to spend budgets in places that are forecasted to generate maximum returns. For example, predicting the rise or fall in keyword usage can help you design PPC campaigns smartly.

Access to 1^st Party and 3^rd Party Data

When you have your own SEO forecasting module in place, you are an owner of high-quality 1^st party data from search engines and your own marketing and sales campaigns. The insights derived from this data would thus be more reliable than gathering second-hand information from the market.

Conclusion

SEO is becoming more cutting-edge with time. Its importance is increasing with each passing day. Merely knowing the present status of your online marketing efforts isn’t enough any longer – a long-term, predictive model is required now in order to stay ahead of the competition. SEO forecasting is the answer to pushing the boundaries of search engine optimization today.