How much traffic will I get after 6 months of SEO? If you are working for an SEO agency you must be familiar with this question. We are often asked this question by our new or an existing client. Clients want to know in the starting itself how much traffic they’ll be getting on their website after 3-6 months of SEO. So, what numbers to propose to a client, how much percentage of increase should you propose? How to do that calculation. This is a mind boggling question, but if you have data handy you can do it.

We tried to get answers from our SEO team. We asked the same question to our SEO experts; how do they propose 6 months or 1-year traffic projection to clients and how do they calculate it?

Below are their interesting answers.

Tarun Says:

Most of the time clients are not interested in the activities that we’ll do to propose a traffic or to achieve a traffic target because they don’t have much idea of SEO. They are only interested in the numbers, what can they expect after 3 months and after 6 months.

So, the projection starts with a SWOT analysis

Strength:

Weakness:

Opportunity:

Threats

After analyzing all the aspects, I project the traffic for the upcoming 3-6 months to my clients and a plan to achieve it. Traffic growing plans mostly involves must have/essentials and add-ons activities. We need to ensure that we keep in our plan the new tactics that Google gives the highest priority and should not be ignored. Nevertheless, to say, this will be impacted by Google's upcoming updates.

Manmohan Says:

We can only drive the traffic from search engines when we are ranking for keywords. Based on the ranking we can predict the traffic numbers.

Narender Says:

This is how I do my calculations while giving traffic predictions to a client

I would need YOY, MOM data to make predictions. After that, I would create a plan to achieve the traffic. For example, X number of tasks should be done in the first month and X number of tasks in the second month and so on.

Vijay Laxmi Says: 

Traffic predictions to a client depend on the followings:

Based on the analysis I can easily give a traffic projection to a client.

Once the analysis is done, with the help of targeted keywords search volume and rankings proposed after 6 months of SEO, we can easily give the traffic projection to a client.

Rakhi Says:

First and foremost, we look at that the technical aspects, followed by on-page factors including content and off-page factors mainly links. We start with a quick site analysis. 

Every Point will have cases:

Case 1:
For a new site with SEO essentials done, we assume initial 100% growth, but for an older website that is not optimized, basic SEO health check and implementation help to a greater extent. At the same time for websites that are already optimized strategy would differ. For a recently migrated website, we need to check if the site migration was done successfully, proper redirection is implemented or not, any lost pages, and so on.

1. Checking Year on Year and Month on Month traffic
2. Target keywords current ranks, search volume and traffic trends
3. Specific events for traffic spike or downturn, if noticed
4. Competition for the targeted keywords
5. Competitors' analysis
6. Content analysis
7. Links to the website
8. To increase traffic, we need to see the scope of

Case 2:
The target market and industry are taken into consideration. For any market or industry, we check that localized content helps. We need to know the competition in the given industry and market.

Conclusion

After hearing from 5 of our SEO experts, we can say that to give a traffic projection, analyze the scope of improvement, conduct the gap analysis between your client’s website and those of his competitors (that is content gap, link gap analysis), give a ranking projection based on the planned tasks, and based on the ranking projection. This way, you can easily give the traffic projections to your client. You need to follow the steps carefully, do not forget to analyse the seasonal trends, industry updates, and be honest.  There are many unknown calls, so always try to share multiple point forecasts. The best approach is to share a lower limit forecast, upper limit, and ideal forecast as each level or task might have an uncertainty factor attached and will have a margin for error. Remember, Traffic Forecasting and Rank Forecasting is money and by sharing a forecast, you are quantifying your efforts and showing the results the client is happy to see as ROI. If you are keen to know your website traffic after 6 months, request for a quick SEO audit of your website.

About author

Saurabh Kumar

A marketing enthusiast with a fascination for technology, an interest in tinkering with data and systems, and 4+ years of experience at ebookers, Saurabh Kumar Founder Envigo, a digital marketing agency, in the year 2007. His passion for Digital Marketing led him to launch a data-driven digital marketing solutions agency.

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