Today you’ll learn to accurately predict SEO success or failure, before spending a single dime.

Sound good? Cool, read on:

Most SEO initiatives fail due to unrealistic expectations.

Meaning they don’t actually fail. They just aren’t given enough time to succeed, or prioritization goes out the window for shiny objects.

“We want to rank for XYZ keyword that our competitor has been ranking for, for the last 5 years, in the next 6 months!”

This isn’t a strategy. It’s a goal, but it doesn’t help you predict how, where, and when that success will hit, leaving you scrambling with no plotted timeline, no KPIs, and no realistic expectations.

That’s what today’s newsletter is for.

Here’s how to do a normally painstaking, 30-hour+ SEO campaign forecast in 20 minutes or less, using SEOmonitor’s SEO Forecast tool.​

Step 1. Launch forecast tool

Head to the SEO forecaster tool, make a free account, and plug your (or a client’s) website URL in.

Step 2. Set targeting details

Choose your location and market based on your ideal customers and where you do business. Set your currency to get a clear picture of monetary keyword values.

Step 3. Input keywords

You can choose two options here. I recommend letting the tool find keywords for you, because you can add your own keywords later. And SEOmonitor does a great job at categorizing keyword intent, so you’ll certainly uncover new gems by just letting it run.

Step 4. Choose smart groups

In this step, SEOmonitor does the heavy lifting by sorting keywords with parameters.

For example, “keywords with issues” can be things like: branded search of competitor, cannibalization, poor relevancy to convert.

In this step, select or ignore specific keyword groups based on your campaign goal.

Step 5. Competitive analysis

Enter competitors you want to benchmark against. This is a key step to map out historical ranking patterns and your true potential to rank against competition.

Be intentional here.

Step 6. Goals

Set goals for your campaign, from start to finish and provide a desired timeframe.

You can always adjust this later. The best part of this tool is that it will give you legit data and tell you if you’re being unrealistic, allowing you to adjust timeframes, keywords targeted, etc, to make sure your campaign is achievable.

Step 7. Run it and analyze!

Here is an example campaign I forecasted for some internal SEO we’re doing, and one we are literally acting on.

This left-column is gold. You’ll see potential traffic volume, whether that search traffic is increasing or decreasing YoY, and most importantly…

You’ll see CTR, helping you weed out keywords that don’t drive clicks.

Lastly, analyze the “Goal Chance” sector. This is where the tool benchmarks your site and topical authority against keyword selection and timeframe to determine real expectations.

Play around with the algorithm (yep, you can literally customize how the forecast works if you want to nerd out like me!) and various keyword clusters.

We’ve been doing this for our internal projects and clients, helping us prioritize keyword clusters that can rank the fastest.

What used to take 30+ hours and thousands of dollars from an experienced SEO takes just 15-20 minutes to model. This means more testing, more experimentation, and less guess and check work.

Alright, now go forecast a sweet SEO campaign.

-Jeremy

(big thanks to SEOmonitor for sponsoring this newsletter edition – as you know, I rarely accept sponsors, and only do so if I’ve genuinely used and found value in the product).