Finding SEO Opportunities using Forecasts
Determining the best SEO opportunities for a given campaign comes down to many factors. What is your client selling? What does the competition look like? And what is the amount of output required on your end to give your client the best results? An SEO opportunity analysis is the first step towards understanding what possibilities are out there to take advantage of. Here is your chance as an SEO to select the keywords and put the strategies in place to help your client grow over the coming months and years, but where to begin? Let’s start by explaining the key components of an SEO opportunity analysis and how you can craft the best for success.
Everything begins with an in-depth competitive analysis looking at your competition’s keyword rankings, determining which pages are driving their traffic, and how your client’s website can best position itself to grab a share of that traffic.
To start, perform a simple Google search for a few of your top search terms. See who is ranking and start looking up each competitors’ traffic analytics (using a research tool).
Google searches are an easy, and free, way to identify top competitors to research. You can also ask the client for their competitors, but clients won’t always know this from an SEO standpoint. Who they think is a competitor often differs from who is ranking.
A competitive analysis looks at several factors from an opportunity standpoint.
Keyword Rankings
What are all the keywords your competitor is using to drive traffic? Besides the obvious high-level terms that you assumed you’d need to rank for, there are likely many diamonds in the rough that you didn’t realize were important.
For example, a local roofing business might assume that “san diego roofer” is the paramount term they need to rank for, but a competitive analysis could reveal that “metal roofing in san diego” is also an important term. Your SEO strategy would then need to accommodate this term on its own page to keep up with local competitors.
So in fact, keyword rankings aren’t just about your 1-2 main keywords, they are about finding the “supporting keywords” that will drive additional traffic to your other pages.
Try to avoid the search volume trap. Keyword research isn’t just about selecting the terms with the highest volume, it’s about picking keywords that have commercial value and can tangibly drive traffic.
Let’s say your client is a water damage restoration business, well the term “water” more than one million monthly searches. So by the search volume logic it’d be a good term to optimize, right? Not.
It’s cost per click (CPC) is just $1.91, whereas the keyword “water damage restoration kansas city” has a small fraction of that search volume but a CPC of $26. From a commercial standpoint, a Kansas City based water restoration company would want to rank for the latter term.
This also plays into the concept of search intent. Some keywords might seem attractive on paper but don’t garner the right kind of clicks.
The size of the SEO opportunity is also based on your competitors’ backlink profile. Backlinks have a lot to do with the strength of a domain, or as Moz famously calls it ‘domain authority.’
By understanding where your competitors are acquiring their links, you can get a better idea of how much budget and time will be required to match them.
Depending on the size of each competitors’ backlink portfolio, you will have to forecast projections accordingly. The amount of quality links you can build will also be affected by your client’s budget parameters. Be careful forecasting too many links per month if you know the client’s budget won’t allow it.
Traffic Growth Potential
Based on the total keyword volume of all of your prospective search terms, you can start to formulate a traffic growth potential model.
This is a little more challenging when doing it manually, so we’d advise using an automated SEO forecasting software tool to assist you.
The goal is to figure out how much traffic growth the site will experience assuming that you are able to increase keyword rankings to page 1 and beyond (ultimately to spots 1-3).
It’s important to keep in mind that ranking in position 1 drives at least one third of all SERP traffic, oftentimes more.
Since it’s impossible to make an exact prediction of SEO results, growth predictions should include a range of outcomes. This will help show the client what’s possible without forcibly committing to a number that may not be reached.
An automated software like ZISSOU helps a lot when it comes to showing data across ranges. With ZISSOU, you can show your client a forecast across three ranges to help them understand that different outcomes are possible based on their monthly spend and the natural volatility of SERPs.
Can you crunch all these numbers manually? Sure, but why would you want to spend the time? Zissou’s estimates are generated automatically based on your preselected inputs which speeds up the forecasting process tremendously.
Even though clients pay you to find new opportunities for them, a lot of clients have their heart set on certain keywords from the getgo.
Of course you want to try and convince them that there might be better keywords available, but ultimately the client has the final say.
This is where SEO forecasting can play a huge role. If you process their desired keywords through your forecasting tool and can show the client that they lack value, the client will likely be responsive to want to change them. Breaking your SEO forecast into dollars and cents will go a long way towards convincing clients.
Show clients the size of the SEO opportunity by using graphs and charts. This is another advantage of using an SEO forecasting tool, as you can rely on visual cues to sell your analysis.
In the end, the client just wants to see increased ROI from SEO. As long as you can articulate these gains, they won’t care as much about specific keywords. They will be open to your suggestions if it means boosting their bottom line.
If you are new to SEO and trying to figure out the best industries and types of clients to pursue, an SEO forecast can be beneficial.
You can discover new opportunities by researching a variety of keywords across your prospective niches to hone in on the most profitable types of clients for you.
Using an automated SEO forecasting tool like ZISSOU, you can easily upload a keyword list from prospective clients and determine how long it will take to rank them. This can be a useful step when it comes to closing clients. By showing them proof that you can rank their site within a certain time period (weeks or months), they will be much more likely to sign on with you.
Transform your SEO business with more precise opportunity analyses.
