You know how important SEO (search engine optimization) is for your HVAC business, but what about SEO forecasting? If you’re not paying enough attention to historical data, you could be at a serious disadvantage regarding website traffic and keyword rankings.
Good SEO strategies should include a plan to forecast organic traffic data, predict average conversion rates, and identify trends. Unsure where to focus your SEO forecasting efforts? Let our HVAC SEO agency help with this beginner’s guide to SEO forecasting for HVAC companies.
What Is SEO Forecasting?
SEO forecasting involves looking at historical search traffic and using that forecast data to predict future SEO performance. SEO and keyword forecasting sounds like something a large, multi-million dollar corporation would do, but small family-owned HVAC businesses can also take advantage of this tactic to boost their SEO efforts.
Why Is SEO Forecasting Important?
Have you ever spent hours staring at Google Search Console or Google Analytics in an attempt to learn where your SEO strategy went wrong? If you don’t use SEO forecasting, trying to decipher click-through rate (CTR), search rankings, and search volume data can feel like you’re looking at a foreign language.
If you’re struggling to understand all of that historical data, SEO forecasting can help. Here’s how.
Helps You Predict Revenue and Future Organic Traffic Growth
How much future traffic will your website get? How many qualified leads will you have next month, and how many of those will turn into sales for your HVAC company? If you’re not using SEO forecasting, it’s impossible to know for sure.
SEO forecasting can answer questions like those above, plus:
- What’s your average monthly search volume for specific keywords, and how does that play a role in future performance?
- How can you choose relevant keywords to rank highly in search engine results pages (SERPs)?
- How much is your average order value?
- What does user behavior reveal about search intent?
- What’s the traffic potential of link building for your chosen target keywords?
Gives You an Advantage Over Your Competitors
If you’re competing with other small family-owned HVAC companies, there’s a chance they may have never even heard of SEO forecasting (or SEO itself, for that matter). This can give you a huge leg up in the search engine algorithms.
Forecasting allows you to see potential SEO results well before they’ve happened. Does your forecast indicate you’ll lose search engine visibility to a competitor or stop ranking for your target keywords? With the help of an accurate forecast, you can switch up your strategy to avoid pitfalls like these.
Enables You To Make the Case for More Resources
Let’s say you run the content team at an HVAC company. You’ve read Search Engine Journal and know all about the importance of keyword research, search volume, and how your SEO efforts affect website traffic. It’s your job to create blog posts with the help of a keyword research tool.
You realize you could use another writer to help you publish more frequently. However, Bob from the social media team decides to ask for an assistant at the same time. Your boss can only afford to hire one person. Who wins, you or Bob?
This is where SEO forecasting can come in handy. By analyzing historical data such as keyword search volume, you can prove that the business would benefit more by hiring an additional writer rather than an assistant for Bob.
Helps You Refine Your Marketing Efforts
If your organic search game isn’t on point, Google Ads can be a great way to get more website visitors. With this marketing platform, all you have to do is choose a few keywords, place your bid, and wait for traffic to come flooding in.
It’s not quite as easy as it sounds. Without the help of a keyword tracking tool, you could end up bidding on keywords with poor search volumes and wasting a lot of money. Keyword difficulty is another factor to consider. If keyword difficulty is high, you’ll have to spend a lot to win the bid.
Again, SEO forecasting can save the day. With this strategy, you can forecast SEO results for specific keywords to learn how they’ll perform for your ads. This tactic can help you understand keyword rankings, click-through rates, estimated monthly traffic received through your ads, and much more.
Common Calculations and Terms Used in SEO Forecasting
Any SEO forecasting model is going to involve a little bit of math (sorry). But don’t worry; it’s not the difficult kind. The following are a few common calculations used to forecast SEO:
- Organic traffic: Average organic click-through rate x monthly keyword search volume
- Conversions (leads): Average conversion rate x forecasted organic traffic
- Sales: Average lead-to-sale rate x forecasted organic search leads
- Revenue: Average order value x forecasted sales
Understanding what some of these terms mean in more detail can be helpful. Here’s a brief explanation:
- Search volume: How many monthly searches a keyword gets
- Keyword difficulty: How hard it is to rank for a keyword (difficulty rankings go from one to 100)
- Average order value: The average amount per transaction
- Conversion rate: Percentage of visitors who become leads
- Lead-to-sale conversion rate: Percentage of leads who become paying clients
- Organic click-through rate: Percentage of searches that lead to clicks for your site
How To Accurately Forecast SEO Growth
So, you’re convinced keyword forecasting is just what you need for your SEO strategy. Great, but how exactly do you do it? Here’s everything you need to do for a perfect SEO forecast.
Collect SEO Data Points From Multiple Sources
Before firing up your SEO forecasting tool, you must gather as much historical data as possible. Without this data, you’ll have a very hard time estimating organic traffic, leads, sales, rankings, and anything else you want to predict.
Google Analytics and Google Search Console offer a treasure trove of historical data you can use for your SEO forecasts. Be sure to set the historical view as far back as Google Search Console and Google Analytics will let you. The goal here is to get a birds’-eye view of organic traffic and other historical data, which will help you uncover trends.
First-party data (data from your website) is very important, but don’t discount third-party data (information on your competitors). This data allows you to get a better idea of what your competitors are doing and why it works for them.
Unfortunately, tools like Google Analytics won’t tell you anything about the competition. For that, you’ll need to use a third-party tool, such as Ahrefs.
Keep track of any data you want to use with Google Sheets (it’s free).
Consider Outside Factors That May Have Affected Search Engine Rankings
Now, you’ve got the data you need from Google Analytics, Google Search Console, or some other source. When looking over the data, you may notice unusual peaks and valleys.
What can cause blips like these? Common factors include:
- PPC advertising campaigns that your HVAC company ran during certain times of the year
- Google algorithm updates, which can change keyword effectiveness
- Certain seasons when your business is in more demand (for HVAC businesses, the summer and winter seasons tend to be busiest)
- Key shopping dates, such as Black Friday and the weeks leading up to the holidays
Use SEO Forecasting Tools
It’s time to plug the data you’ve gathered from Google Search Console and Google Analytics into your favorite SEO forecasting tool. SEO tools can vary quite a bit, so providing a single set of instructions for this step is impossible. Note that if you haven’t chosen an SEO tool yet, you’ll find a list of some good ones below.
Generally, when you boot up a forecasting program, you’ll have to choose a timeframe for which you want to predict organic traffic. For instance, let’s say you want to predict organic traffic from 2024 to 2025. In that case, you’d enter a range from 1/1/24 to 12/31/24 in your program.
The program should show you a graph with a line stretching from one end to the other. This line may go up, down, or both ways. This graph represents potential dips and rises in your traffic based on the data you entered.
Keep in mind that this traffic isn’t set in stone. Given the data provided, it’s simply an estimate of what could happen. Forecasting isn’t an exact science, so one cannot predict results with 100% accuracy.
Analyze Your SEO Forecast Results
Now, it’s time for the fun part: analyzing your results. You’ve got your SEO forecast, but what does it really mean?
Let’s say your trend line shows a few big rises a couple of times a year. This could mean:
- Those rises happened right before summer and winter, so you’ll likely experience them again next year.
- Your HVAC company usually runs an ad campaign at those times. The software predicts you’ll do so again next year, accounting for the rises.
What about dips in the trend line? These could represent:
- Slow times when you historically don’t get a lot of business compared to other months
- Possible algorithm changes that can hurt your performance
- A competitor outranking you for certain keywords
As mentioned above, it’s important to remember that this isn’t an exact science. The goal here is simply to give you an idea of possible outcomes so you can get ahead of potential problems and take advantage of trends.
SEO Forecasting Example Case
It’s possible to calculate forecasts manually if you’d like. Here’s an example that shows how to predict the revenue your HVAC company will get from sales volume:
1. Let’s say you choose a keyword with an average of 200,000 monthly searches. You estimate this keyword will get you a 4% CTR on average.
2. Next, you’ll multiply those monthly searches by the CTR to get an estimated 8,000 monthly website visits.
3. Your website has a conversion rate of 3%. Multiplied by 8,000 visits, that gives you 240 new leads.
4. You have a lead-to-sale rate (the number of leads that become sales) of 7%. Multiplied by 240 leads, you estimate you’ll get 17 new sales.
5. You figure the AOV for those sales will be $500. Multiply $500 by 17 to get $8,500. That’s how much revenue you could expect to make by choosing the keyword from step one.
The Best SEO Forecasting Tools
Google Search Console is one of the best SEO forecasting options because it’s not just powerful; it’s also free. Just launch it and click “Performance” to see in-depth data such as:
- Average CTR
- Average position in the SERPs
- Total clicks through to your site
- Total impressions (how many times users viewed your results in the SERPs)
You can easily export all of this data to Excel or Google Sheets.
Google Analytics is another great free tool to try. It’s ideal for finding conversion rates and analyzing user behavior on your site (for instance, how long users stay on specific pages, most popular links, and so on). It shows data points such as total unique users, conversions, and revenue generated from conversion events.
A third free tool to consider is Google’s Data Studio. This tool pulls together data from sources such as Google Analytics, Ahrefs, Semrush, and many others. Once you’ve plugged in your data sources, you can create robust reports and dashboards that are easy to share with the rest of your team.
You may want to check out a few third-party tools for even more advanced metrics. Semrush’s Keyword Magic Tool is one of the best ones. This tool provides all the data you could ever want for keyword research.
It’s easy to use, too. Just enter a keyword, choose your region, and you’re off to the races. You’ll be greeted by an almost overwhelming amount of data on your chosen keyword. You can narrow things down with filters such as:
- KD%: How difficult it is to rank for this keyword
- SF: The number of SERP features on search engine results pages
- Intent: The typical intent for this keyword, such as navigational, commercial, or informational
- Volume: How many monthly searches the keyword gets on average
Ahrefs’ Traffic Site Forecast is another fantastic option. It’s not free and requires a bit of custom coding, which could be a drawback if you’re not technically inclined. Still, the data it provides is second to none.
Next, we have SEO Keyword Forecasting from SEOmonitor. This is another paid tool, but it’s very user friendly and does practically all the work for you. Plus, it automatically sends forecast results right to your inbox. If you’d rather not spend hours puzzling over complicated forecast reports that seem to require a data science degree to decipher, this tool could be just what you need.
Need Help Making Sense of Your SEO Forecasting Results?
SEO forecasting can be incredibly powerful, but knowing how to do it right is tough. Instead of spending ages studying keyword research and SEO tactics, reach out to us here at Relentless Digital. We can conduct a no-fuss SEO audit of your HVAC company’s website and teach you how to position yourself for greatness in the search results.
Schedule your free strategy session with our pros today and see why we’re Arizona’s top choice for SEO, email marketing, Google Maps marketing, and so much more!
