SEO Forecasting: How the SEO Professionals Feel

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Yesterday I shared the results of some discussions we had with SEO's and a survey around the topicof SEO Forecasting. The survey gives a nice indication of how the industry looks at and usesForecasting. For this exercise we also reached out to industry professionals to ask them how theyfelt about the importance of SEO Forecasting.

Image source: http://www.caughtoffside.com/2012/12/05/darts-live-stream/

Here are the results!

David Sottimano -- (Twitter)

"Forecasting in SEO is extremely important. Forecasting provides you with a general idea of howmuch organic will contribute to the business as a channel, where to focus your efforts, and how hardyou need to push to hit targets. While I don't necessarily put 100% faith in the numbers, I'd muchrather have an idea than nothing at all.

It's extremely easy to forecast organic and conversions from organic based on historical data, and itcan be done in minutes. Forecasting SEO activities is much, much more difficult as we all know. Forexample, trying to estimate growth for canonical tag implementation is silly, but trying to estimatepotential traffic gain by targeting new keywords isn't so crazy."

Paddy Moogan (Aira) - (Twitter)

"The importance of Forecasting varies a lot from client to client. Some clients really need you to doforecasting in order to get budget sign-off from their bosses whilst others don't worry too much. Ifforecasting is important to a client and it's required to get sign-off on an idea or campaign, then Ifeel it is important. However, I'd rather focus on objectives and what we're shooting for over thecourse of 6-12 months rather than worrying about exact forecasting. We should have a target towork towards, put a strategy in place that works towards this, and then do it!

It's worth it if it helps a client get sign-off. However, the nature of what we do means that there aremany factors at play which can make a forecast useless after a few weeks. There are too manysignals that can affect you, many of which you may not even control. So forecasting with so manyvariables in play can make you look very silly, very quickly!"

Louis Venter (Mediavision) - (Twitter)

"Forecasting is hugely important. We have two levels of forecasting, one that is client facing and onethat is internal. The internal one is aimed at what we feel the results would need to be to be awardworthy and we set all our internal expectations around that. The client facing is agreed with theclient and still aggressive but often quite a margin lower than the internal targets.

It is definitely worth it. Our aim is to deliver work that our peers would be impressed with so

forecasting is an essential part of that process. It also helps trigger performance reviews if we arelagging well before clients become unhappy which helps retention too. It also highlights gains basedon targets and helps clients justify and highlight your efforts to their team. We take forecasting astep further and include it in our new business pitches which often unlocks a strategic decisionhigher up to reallocate budgets based on ROI."

Gianluca Fiorelli - (Twitter)

"Forecasting is still important, but - IMHO - less important than it could be in the past because:

1) Not provided;

2) How SERPs have changed (hence the CTR value)

3) Semantics and Hummingbird

Actually I tend to use Organic Session Conversion Value as KPI, as well explained by Ian Lurie here:

Forecasting more and more I consider is worth the time spent!

Barry Adams (Polemic) - (Twitter)

"Forecasting is a tough one. Clients want you to forecast what they'll get from their investment, butseasoned SEOs know it's an almost entirely futile exercise. Personally I don't bother withforecasting; clients pay me for my effort and my expertise. Results are implied but there's no way Ican make guarantees. We're aiming at fast-moving targets after all with too many variables to makeforecasting even remotely accurate.

The SEO forecasting models that I've seen are indeed time consuming and based on a lot ofassumptions and wishful thinking. I don't believe that's worth the effort, as inevitably the actualresults will be vastly different. Instead I believe it's smarter to focus that effort on educating theclient and showing them what does in to good SEO, so that they get a good understanding of exactlywhat your added value is."

Bill Hunt - (Twitter)

"SEO Forecasting is still important as many companies will not allocate development or copywriting

resources unless they can see some sort upside in traffic and/or revenue just justify the allocation.

SEO Forecasting, while time consuming, and sometimes nearly impossible to do, it is the only way tojustify resource allocations in many companies."

Mark Jackson (Vizion Interactive) - (Twitter)

"I will tell you that unless/until I can project an ROI for a prospect or client (at least determine ifthere's a possibility of an ROI and/or determine if the client is willing/able to wait out theapproximate time it might take to achieve it), I will walk away from the opportunity.

Projecting is extremely important.

Now, forecasting specific results is very challenging, if not impossible. As much as we might like tothink that SEO is akin to an assembly line approach, where you do A, B and C and get D result, itsimply doesn't work that way; at least, not under most circumstances (there are still some easy winsout there if, for example, a site has technical roadblocks to their success).

What we can do, as SEOs, is project the possible reach of an effort and calculate the possiblenumber of visits that can be gained. From there, using historical data, we can project - based onexisting conversion rates - what we might anticipate in growth of sales/leads. There are also anumber of great tools that can highlight the relative success of competitors and provide insight as towhat may be possible, and identify how competitors got there (content/links, etc.). Often times, thisis enough insight into the possibilities that clients can at least understand the obstacles/challengesand make a determination as to how any gaps can/will be addressed. While you can't project thesame results by "X" date, you can project what is possible and what it might take to get there."

Simon Heseltine (AOL) - (Twitter)

"Forecasting helps to solidify the editorial calendar for a site, if you know when a particular topic isgoing to start to take off, or when it's going to peak, you can be prepared with content that'll get youas much of a share as possible."

Daniel Bianchini (White.net) - (Twitter)

"Forecasting for SEO can be a double-edged sword. If done well, and understood it can be powerful,but conducted badly, it can be very damaging. With so many different factors and changing variableswithin SEO, forecasting can be very difficult to predict."

Kristine Schachinger (The Vetters) - (Twitter)

"Forecasting is a very difficult process, that is typically inaccurate and highly dependent on theindustry, vertical and the level of involvement you have in the planning of a company's internalefforts.

While it makes sense to spend time forecasting when you are an internal SEO, as it affects manyaspects of the business organization including staff and resources, it does not make much as muchsense to provide future forecasting when your role is external consulting or support without effectiveprocess control. In these cases, you have too little ability to affect the outcomes to predict the futureand it becomes more of a guess.

In our case we know the strategies, the plan, our ability to affect change and the likelihood ofsuccess based on previous experience with similar scenarios. The past predicting the future is oftena much better indicator of outcome, than guessing at an unknown future with thousands of unknownvariables.

However, if you do decide to work with forecasting it is important to understand the guidingprinciple must be based on the uncertainty of the effective environment. Be like a tree, know whatdirection you are growing, but you must be willing to adapt on the way."

Read more about the survey results on the post I wrote yesterday here and here.

Kirsty Hulse

Kirsty Hulse is Head of SEO at Found and has six year's experience defining search strategies forsome of the world's biggest brands, as well as small E-commerce start ups.