SEO projections can provide valuable insights into how investments can bring more business results. However, with so many uncontrollable factors affecting their results, most search engine optimization practitioners don’t know how to do an SEO projection.
That’s fair, and, to be frank, we also needed to refine our SEO company’s projection methodology so our clients get a clear picture of where their investments are bringing, whether they ask for it or not.
Today, we’ll walk you through that exact process so you can estimate the returns from your efforts accordingly.
Checklist: How to Do an SEO Projection
Creating accurate projections entails a systematic and detailed data-gathering and analysis process. If you neglect or misread one element, your computations could go wrong, resulting in under- or overestimations.
Thus, having a handy step-by-step checklist to guide you helps you arrive at realistic projections. We outline and describe the steps below.
1. Identify and gather the high-value keywords of your brand.
Accurate projections rely on identifying the high-value keywords the brand you’re working with is currently ranking for. When doing this, it’s also essential to avoid irrelevant terms so you can work efficiently—compute only for projections on high-value keywords.
Your keyword list will then end up looking like this:
Table 1. Tabulating your keywords this way can already give you a quick idea of how search volume also indirectly influences your ranking. That is why high search volume keywords are typically considered high-value and more challenging to rank for. Image courtesy of The Ad Firm.
Naturally, this list could be longer or shorter depending on how many priority keywords you’d like to focus on for your projection. But for efficiency, again, it’s essential to keep the list tight and concentrate on high-value keywords.
Once you have this list, you must total the monthly searches for all your keywords.
2. Get a rough estimate of the Click-Through Rates for each keyword.
Click-through rates (CTRs) are critical engagement metrics on search engines. It represents the rate at which a searcher clicks on a page link if it comes up for a specific search term. CTR also tends to be directly related to ranking.
As you can see from the table below, the Estimated CTR is highest for the top one result and drops along with the ranking. This is because search engine users are most likely to trust and click on the top-most results or explore further until they get the answers they want.
In our SEO projection process, we’ll use CTR to compute the Estimated Monthly Visits (EMV) you’ll get for a specific keyword over time.
Table 2. Google Organic SERP CTR Curve based on organic traffic. Image courtesy of AWR.
3. Calculate your Estimated Monthly Visits (EMV).
With a rough estimate of CTR and MSV for your priority keywords, we can now determine your EMV based on your current ranking or how high you aim to rank. EMV roughly equates to the traffic you’ll get from your SEO efforts. Your formula should look like this:
Let’s see how EMVs would look like in the example below.
Note that these figures are just estimates. When preparing projections, always approach them with a “trust but verify” mindset, comparing them as much as possible with historical performance and industry benchmarks. Doing so will help you come up with accurate estimations.
4. Forecast traffic and rank improvements.
In SEO, many implementations you will work toward are based on an operating hypothesis or, as they say, an “educated guess” on what results specific actions can bring. This hypothesis also serves as the guiding principle for our hypothesis.
Here’s an example that illustrates this:
Example #1: Increasing Keyword 1’s ranking from 3 to 1 will help increase Estimated Monthly Visits.
From this hypothesis statement, we can begin to compute the forecasted growth for Keyword 1 with the formula we use to calculate EMV. It should look as follows:
A few things to note in this example that you shouldn’t miss:
- We calculated the additional new visits more accurately by subtracting the current EMV from the new EMV. This subtraction shows the precise amount of growth we can expect instead of an estimated overall figure.
- SEO is a long game, so ground your expectations on timelines. 303 additional EMV may be the growth we expect when we rank up for a keyword, but that doesn’t happen overnight. In SEO, even when you reach the top spot for a keyword, these projections will more likely represent cumulative growth for weeks to months of maintaining that rank.
You should repeat this step for all the keywords you aim to rank for and add up all the new visits expected from each keyword rank improvement, as these will guide our next steps for the projections.
Following our case example, it should look like this:
5. Define metrics like conversion rate and average conversion value.
Every effort made for SEO and digital marketing for a business should translate to concrete results, ie. conversions. Conversions are visitors’ desired actions that translate to real value for companies and vary on a case-to-case basis.
For an ecommerce site for retail, for instance, conversions equate to successful purchases; for a health clinic, these could mean appointment bookings; for a real estate agent, this could mean leads, and so on. But whichever the case, all those conversions would be impossible without traffic.
Thus, an SEO projection that helps stakeholders understand its value to their business is one that can connect the importance of website traffic to these conversions. In our projection activity, we will need two things to calculate an accurate projection:
- Conversion Rate refers to the percentage of visitors to your website who take a desired action, such as making a purchase, signing up for a newsletter, or other. It measures the effectiveness of your website and SEO efforts, as it directly reflects how well your site is turning visitors into engaged customers.
- Conversion Value, on the other hand, represents the monetary worth of a single conversion. This could be the average amount spent per transaction or the estimated lifetime value of a new lead.
Typically, the current value of these metrics can be gathered through third-party analytics tools or are provided by stakeholders upfront. Together, conversion rate and conversion value provide a comprehensive view of how much revenue websites generate and the potential impact of driving additional traffic through improved SEO performance.
In our guide, let’s say:
- Conversion Rate = 1.5%, and;
- Conversion Value = $200.
6. Compute the average Conversions from Traffic.
Using the figures we established in the previous section, we can gauge the number of Conversions we can get from the new monthly traffic volume. We do this by multiplying the additional EMV by the Conversion Rate.
Let’s try a sample computation of Estimated Conversions with our sample keyword list:
With a conversion rate of 1.5% from this computation, improving rankings and traffic for Keyword 1 will help the client generate around 4 Conversions from Traffic. The same logic applies to all the keywords on our list.
But Conversions tell only one-half of the value story. To better understand what a business gains from traffic and conversions, we must compute the potential revenue.
7. Translate Traffic and Conversions to Revenue.
Conversions have value for each business and vary depending on a brand’s website’s (and its pages) historical performance for a particular keyword. For focus and clarity, we will leave that discussion for another article.
Let’s think back to the value we pinned down for our sample projection. Earlier, we supposed the Conversion Value we worked with would be $200. This figure represents the revenue we can gain per transaction. Revenue is computed by multiplying the Conversion Value by the Est. Conversions we arrived at.
Computing this for our list of keywords, it should look like:
Finally, we’ve arrived at the concrete monetary value of our efforts to improve the rankings and traffic for our keyword list. We also estimated the total potential revenue by summing the estimated revenue per keyword.
Naturally, this amount varies depending on the number of keywords you’re aiming to rank for or improve your rankings in. By following this simple projection method, you can present concrete data on how SEO efforts bring value to businesses. But it doesn’t or shouldn’t end there, as business growth must be sustainable.
8. Ground your projections on historical performance.
Thus, the last thing you want to do is to ground your projection on historical data and your business timeline.
You can connect your projections to first-hand data on a business’s growth trends and refine your forecasts accordingly. During this process, you’re asking questions like:
- Does the brand have seasonality regarding pulling in traffic and conversion rates?
- What external factors from an industry and search perspective could affect the growth timeline?
- What other online efforts are helping to bolster SEO efforts to pull in traffic for the brand’s website?
We ask these questions because we must remember that digital marketing channels don’t operate in a silo—it’s far from it. Digital marketing is like a web where each thread has a ripple effect resonating from the spokes to the core of a business’s goals.
In asking these questions, we better refine our forecasts by providing month-on-month breakdowns of potential growth and making sense of circumstances where we fall short of achieving goals.
Final Tips for Projections
SEO projections are never set in stone. There are always greater uncontrollable variables at play that might result in actual results skewing away negatively from our estimations. However, there are ways we can keep it from skewing drastically and for the positive. Here are some tips to keep it realistic:
- Gather as much information as possible. These impact a brand’s goals, from historical business performance to industry trends and search trends. But by factoring them in from the beginning, we can keep projections and expectations realistic.
- Trust your data, but always verify. Double-check all the figures you’re computing by comparing them to historical and industry benchmarks. An estimation that skews too far from these often ends wrong, and you might over or under-promise.
- Always contextualize your figures. Be prepared to have an answer for how you arrive at certain estimations. Digital marketing is measurable, and brands have come to expect partners to be data-driven and systematic—remove the guesswork as much as possible.
Final Thoughts: Creating Confidence in SEO Projections
SEO projections are an invaluable tool for demonstrating the potential value of search optimization efforts. By taking a structured, data-driven approach, you can present stakeholders with clear and actionable insights that connect SEO activities to measurable business outcomes.
However, we must acknowledge the inherent limitations of any forecasting model. Variables like fluctuating search engine algorithms, competitive shifts, and implementation timelines can all impact the accuracy of your projections. Transparency is key—ensure that stakeholders understand the assumptions behind your calculations and emphasize that projections are estimates, not guarantees. Providing this context builds trust and sets realistic expectations from the outset.
Partnering with a professional SEO agency like The Ad Firm can eliminate the complexity of creating reliable projections. With our expertise in data analysis, strategic planning, and performance tracking, we craft projections that are accurate and aligned with your business goals.
Let us help you turn insights into results, ensuring your SEO strategy drives sustainable growth and delivers maximum ROI. Reach out today to start building your path to success.
