SEO practitioners and marketers often wonder about the ways to organic traffic. The reason is that this prediction can let marketers know about the effectiveness of their SEO strategies.
One thing worth mentioning here is that SEO is not an exact science. There are many things related to SEO that keep changing and make it difficult to predict organic traffic. But still, it is an important prediction to make.
Why is it important to predict organic traffic?
There can be various reasons the heads of companies and heads of departments may ask the marketing teams for SEO projections. A couple of main reasons may include the following.
- They want to be certain about the investment in SEO.
- They want to balance the costs by having estimates about the costs of SEO and costs of paid search.
Is it OK to agree to provide predictions?
If you are an SEO consultant, you are going to answer this question sooner or later. And you may know very well that it can be quite risky to predict organic traffic because SEO is an exact science.
In some situations, the person asking you for prediction may be the one with sufficient amount of knowledge about SEO. You are going to have flexibility in that scenario. However, the person asking you this question may not have sound knowledge about how things work, as in most of the cases.
No matter who is asking you to provide predictions, there are a few things that you need to have in order to predict organic traffic.
- Monthly data of organic traffic. You will need the data of last 12 months.
- You will also need report of monthly sessions form other channels. Although this information can help you understand the full picture of traffic on the website, it is not going to help you make calculations.
- Important events that point at the requirement of extra investment in paid search.
- Seasonality and information about other key periods which are directly relevant to the amount of traffic on your site.
Based on this information, you can make realistic prediction about the amount of search traffic a website is going to receive in the upcoming months.
Method to predict organic traffic
The methods of predicting traffic are mainly associated with the type of tool that you are using. The method which we are going to talk about in this blog post is The Holt-Winters Method. This one is the simpler method for predicting organic traffic. For this method, you will first need to download:
We are going to use ‘R’ language to create projections here. Here, you are going to have to open the R Studio and download the following libraries:
- Highcharter
- GoogleAnalyticsR
- Forecast
Install these libraries using the command install.packages(“LIBRARY_NAME”). Replace LIBRARY_NAME with each of the libraries mentioned above.
Make sure that you have an ID of Google analytics in order to extract Google’s traffic data.
Here, you are going to need to run a code in R Studio. Make sure that you have replaced the placeholders with your own data for Google Analytics view ID and for the dates that you want to be analyzed. The code is as under:
# Load up the libraries we need
library(highcharter)
library(googleAnalyticsR)
library(forecast)
# Set the view ID that we’ll be using.
view_id <- XYZABC
# Authorize Google Analytics
ga_auth()
# Get the data from Google Analytics
gadata <- google_analytics_4(view_id,
date_range = c(“YYYY-MM-DD”, “YYYY-MM-DD”),
metrics = “sessions”,
dimensions = c(“yearMonth”),
max = -1)
# Convert the data to be officially “time-series” data
ga_ts <- ts(gadata$sessions, start = c(YYYY,MM), end = c(YYYY,MM), frequency = 12)
# Compute the Holt-Winters filtering for the data
forecast1 <- HoltWinters(ga_ts)
# Generate a forecast for next 12 months of organic sessions
hchart(forecast(forecast1, h = 12))
Method to Predict Organic Search Traffic
SEO practitioners and marketers often wonder about the ways to organic traffic. The reason is that this prediction can let the marketers know about the effectiveness of their SEO strategies.
One thing worth mentioning here is that SEO is not an exact science. There are many things related to SEO that keep changing and make it difficult to predict organic traffic. But still, it is an important prediction to make.
Why is it important to predict organic traffic?
There can be various reasons the heads of companies and heads of departments may ask the marketing teams for SEO projections. A couple of main reasons may include the following.
- They want to be certain about the investment in SEO.
- They want to balance the costs by having estimates about the costs of SEO and costs of paid search.
Is it OK to agree to provide predictions?
If you are an SEO consultant, you are going to answer this question sooner or later. And you may know very well that it can be quite risky to predict organic traffic because SEO is an exact science.
In some situations, the person asking you for prediction may be the one with sufficient amount of knowledge about SEO. You are going to have flexibility in that scenario. However, the person asking you this question may not have sound knowledge about how things work, as in most of the cases.
No matter who is asking you to provide predictions, there are a few things that you need to have in order to predict organic traffic.
- Monthly data of organic traffic. You will need the data of last 12 months.
- You will also need report of monthly sessions form other channels. Although this information can help you understand the full picture of traffic on the website, it is not going to help you make calculations.
- Important events that point at the requirement of extra investment in paid search.
- Seasonality and information about other key periods which are directly relevant to the amount of traffic on your site.
Based on this information, you can make realistic prediction about the amount of search traffic a website is going to receive in the upcoming months.
Method to predict organic traffic
The methods of predicting traffic are mainly associated with the type of tool that you are using. The method which we are going to talk about in this blog post is The Holt-Winters Method. This one is the simpler method for predicting organic traffic. For this method, you will first need to download:
We are going to use ‘R’ language to create projections here. Here, you are going to have to open the R Studio and download the following libraries:
- Highcharter
- GoogleAnalyticsR
- Forecast
Install these libraries using the command install.packages(“LIBRARY_NAME”). Replace LIBRARY_NAME with each of the libraries mentioned above.
Make sure that you have an ID of Google analytics in order to extract Google’s traffic data.
Here, you are going to need to run a code in R Studio. Make sure that you have replaced the placeholders with your own data for Google Analytics view ID and for the dates that you want to be analyzed. The code is as under:
# Load up the libraries we need
library(highcharter)
library(googleAnalyticsR)
library(forecast)
# Set the view ID that we’ll be using.
view_id <- XYZABC
# Authorize Google Analytics
ga_auth()
# Get the data from Google Analytics
gadata <- google_analytics_4(view_id,
date_range = c(“YYYY-MM-DD”, “YYYY-MM-DD”),
metrics = “sessions”,
dimensions = c(“yearMonth”),
max = -1)
# Convert the data to be officially “time-series” data
ga_ts <- ts(gadata$sessions, start = c(YYYY,MM), end = c(YYYY,MM), frequency = 12)
# Compute the Holt-Winters filtering for the data
forecast1 <- HoltWinters(ga_ts)
# Generate a forecast for next 12 months of organic sessions
hchart(forecast(forecast1, h = 12))
There you go! You have got the projections for next 12 months.
There you go! You have got the projections for next 12 months.
