Planning to launch your next marketing campaign or choosing the best SEO keywords for your brand? Making these decisions is a daunting task when you can’t see the results immediately. Thankfully there is a way to predict your SEO campaign success that gives you an idea of the ROI you’ll get from your efforts.

In one of their recent webinars, Search Engine Journal shared a five-step formula to predict your SEO success which we are presenting here in the below sections. So, let’s get started.

How to measure SEO Performance and Results?

Before diving into the 5-step formula, one should understand what SEO forecasting is and why is Return on Investment (ROI) important. Let’s dive into it.

The goal of SEO forecasting is to predict the ROI of your efforts. With the data you’ve collected with the SEO forecast formula, you can predict the traffic you’ll get from the next campaign or a rough picture of what your business stands for in the future. But if you don’t have background data related to your business (your past performance data, past campaign data, etc.), you can’t make predictions.

To collect the background data, you can use Google Analytics and Google Search Console. Once you have the data like CTR, conversion value, sales rate, and price per sale, then multiply the values to get the forecast results over the next period.

Search Engine Journal even shared a formula to forecast the SEO Results in their recent webinar along with the stepwise process. Follow the five-step process listed in the below sections to predict your SEO success.

Search Volume * Organic CTR x Conversion Rate * Sales Rate * $ Per Sale

5 Steps to SEO Success

Predict your SEO Success with this 5-Step Formula

Determine your Target Keywords
Collect Search Volume and Traffic Data
Define your Conversion Action
Determine your Sales Close Rate
Determine a reasonable Forecast Outcome for your business

Determine your Target Keywords

As a first step, you need to identify the keyword universe. It is the collection of keywords and phrases people use while searching for your brand or services or products.

Use keyword tools and identify the main keywords. Based on that, analyze your current site performance, and identify the top phrases on your pages over the last year. This will give you an idea of the top keywords people are searching for related to your business.

Collect Search Volume and Traffic Data

Once you have the list of keywords, find the average monthly search volume using keyword tools. Then check organic CTR for these terms and multiply them with the average monthly search volume to get the traffic data. Also, collect the CPC data if you’re about to start a new paid ads campaign.

Define your Conversion Action

Once you have the set of keywords, search volume, and their traffic, define what a conversion is for your business.

If you’re in an e-commerce business, your conversions could be purchases of your products.
If you’re in a lead generation business, your conversion actions could be clicks, form submissions, pdf downloads, etc.

So, whatever action your website visitors are taking, consider it a conversion. And the conversion rate is the percentage of website visitors that convert according to your conversion action.

Determine your Sales Close Rate

We all know that not every conversion or lead becomes a sale. So, to determine your sales close rate, find the percentage of leads your website generates which convert to paying customers.

Then determine how much visitors spend on each purchase. When you have the search volume, conversion rate, CTR, Sales Close Rate, and cost per each sale, multiply them to forecast the SEO results.

Determine a reasonable Forecast Outcome for your business

Now, you are ready with your calculation. Remember, the values you got are the predictions based on the data you’ve collected. Take a look at them and get an idea of your SEO campaign results.

There you have the five-Step formula to predict your SEO success. Now, it’s your turn to predict the ROI of your next content marketing campaign. Reach out to the team at Perficient for any help in developing your brand’s SEO potential. We will help you with our action plan which is customized as per your requirements.