Unlike paid search advertising, search engine optimization doesn’t charge you a cost per click, but that doesn’t mean it’s free. You need to invest time and money in SEO to compete effectively for valuable keywords. Like many areas of business, the greater your investment in SEO, the greater the rewards. An SEO return on investment forecast can help you decide how many keywords to target and which audience segments to prioritize.
What Is an SEO ROI Forecast?
An ROI forecast for SEO is an estimate of the results you can reasonably expect from future organic search marketing efforts. Businesses use these forecasts when planning SEO strategies for the next six to 12 months. Predicting your ROI from SEO is part math, part art, and part experience.
Factors That Affect Your SEO Forecast
There’s always some guesswork involved with digital marketing, and SEO is especially hard to predict, simply because there are so many factors to consider:
- Your industry and target market
- B2C vs. B2B differences
- Changes to Google search ranking algorithms
- World events/trending topics
- How much your competitors invest in SEO
Put simply, SEO trends can change a lot in the six months it takes for your efforts to pay off. That said, as long as you do your homework, SEO forecasting should get you in the ballpark.
Helpful Tools for SEO Forecasting
If this isn’t your first rodeo, you can probably find all the data you need by analyzing Google Analytics and Google Search Console metrics for your website. There are also fantastic SEO research tools — some free and some paid — that display granular details about your traffic, target audience behavior, conversions, and similar details.
How Does SEO Forecasting Work?
Any SEO forecast should start with high-quality research. The process is a lot like panning for gold. From a large volume of possibilities, you extract a smaller result. Then, you repeat the process several times, filtering down to the actual returns on investment.
Now it’s time to show you how to create an SEO ROI forecast step by step.
1. Calculating Organic Traffic
The first step is to calculate how much traffic you can expect from your planned SEO campaign. The calculation for this is total search volume multiplied by your average click-through rate.
Here’s how to gather the information you need:
- Create a comprehensive list of the keywords you want to target.
- Research each keyword and note its monthly search volume.
- Add up the monthly search volume figures for all the keywords, and write down the total (“fig. A”).
- Write down your website’s average click-through rate (“fig. B”).
- Multiply “fig. A” x “fig. B”.
- The result is a good estimate of the traffic you can expect from your efforts.
With Google Search Console, discovering your average CTR is a breeze. There’s a column called “Current CTR” that shows you the average for each keyword. If you use a different tool, calculating CTR means dividing your total impressions by total clicks.
Sort by average rank to see your likely ROI for the top three and top 10 positions. Your average rank has a huge impact on CTR, especially considering that the number one position gets almost 40% of the clicks and the top three capture almost 70%.
2. Anticipating Challenges
The tricky part when it comes to estimating keyword traffic is that not all keywords are made equal. You need to factor in keyword difficulty.
When using keyword research tools, try to gauge the level of KD you’re currently dominating. If you ace KDs of 39, then you can probably expect to get in the top spots for keywords with a KD of 40 to 45.
Depending on how detailed you want your SEO ROI forecast to be — and how many keywords you’re aiming for — you can also look at historical trends for search ranking volatility. Try to target terms that have relatively even performance as opposed to rapidly spiking keywords.
3. Forecasting SEO Leads
Next, calculate what percentage of your traffic will end up converting. At first, this seems easy: Just look at your historical conversion rate, or total leads generated divided by total website sessions.
Unfortunately, SEO conversions are rarely this straightforward — unless you’re sticking to the same keywords as last year. Countless factors come into play:
- Content quality
- Bounce rate
- User Engagement
- Target audience needs
- Top of funnel versus bottom of funnel
- Type of keywords (informational, transactional, etc.)
The closer your target keywords align with your audience’s interests and needs, the higher your conversion rate. You may need to make an educated guess.
4. Predicting Sales
It’s time to dig into your company’s sales statistics. You need to find your average lead-to-sale rate. In other words, the percentage of converting visitors (leads from landing pages, email signups, whitepaper downloads, etc.) who end up becoming paying customers?
The formula is total sales divided by total lead volume, multiplied by 100%. For example, if your capture form generates 200 leads, and 10 become customers, your lead-to-sale conversion rate would be 5%.
Now, take your predicted leads from SEO and multiply them by the lead-to-sale conversion rate. If you estimate that your new keyword strategy is going to bring in 2,000 leads, and your conversion rate is 5%, you can expect about 100 new sales from the campaign.
5. Estimating Revenue From SEO
The last step in your SEO ROI forecast also requires sales data. This time, you want to multiply the number of estimated sales by your average order value. With an AOV of $95, you could expect to make $9,500 from those 100 new sales.
Not sure how to find your AOV? Just divide your annual revenue by your total orders in a year.
What Does an SEO Forecast Look Like in Practice?
It’s easier to understand the steps of an SEO forecast with a practical example. Let’s go through the process one more time with figures from an imaginary business called Example21:
- Estimate the total monthly search volume of your target keywords: The new keyword list for Example21 has 300,000 average monthly searches.
- Calculate potential traffic based on your CTR: Based on industry data, Example21 estimates a CTR of 6%. That means 300,000 searches x 6% CTR = 18,000 monthly visitors.
- Estimate new leads generated: Considering past results, Example21 thinks that a conversion rate range of 3% to 5% is reasonable. So, 18,000 visitors x 3% (or 5%) = 540 to 900 new leads.
- Calculate the number of new sales: Example21 has a fantastic 15% ratio of email leads to new sales. SEO can generate at least 540 x 12% = 65 new leads.
- Forecast the estimated revenue from the campaign: The AOV at Example21 is $150. With 65 leads, the total revenue would be at least 65 x $150 = $9,750.
All that’s left is forecasting the ROI. The formula is total revenue minus the cost of investment, then divided by the cost of investment. Let’s say Example21 plans to spend $8,000 on the SEO campaign. The ROI would be $9,750 – $8,000 = $1,750 / $8,000 = 22%.
What Trends Affect Your SEO ROI Forecast for 2025?
For your forecast to be accurate, you need to stay up to date with emerging SEO trends.
The Need for E-E-A-T
It seems like every new ranking algorithm update aims to filter out the tide of gen AI spam from articles that show experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness (E-E-A-T). E-E-A-T is part of Google’s Search Quality Rater Guidelines which assesses the quality of content on websites and is used by manual reviewers to evaluate the success of Google’s algorithm updates.
It’s important because it helps Google minimize misinformation, increase the amount of useful content, source reliable information, and hone in on how people look for information.
The #TLDR: to stand out, you need high-quality content, not just keywords.
Site Crawlability
Search engines are prioritizing websites that deliver a great user experience. Pay attention to technical SEO essentials such as image alt text, clean redirects, and a streamlined sitemap. Spending time on schema markup can help you rank for Google-rich results and SERP features, including image carousels, videos, FAQs, and product reviews.
User Intent More Than Keyword Usage
Search engines are increasingly looking at user intent to rank web pages. That means using keywords naturally and focusing more on answering the questions your audience has with clear information.
Mobile UX and Mobile-First Design
In 2024, over 60% of all internet users were on mobile devices. The time is over for “mobile optimization.” Now, the goal is mobile-first design. Build your content so it’s easy to read and scroll with one hand. Choose images that are expressive, vertical, and quick to load.
Video SEO Optimization
In 2024, Americans spend almost an hour more watching YouTube videos than TV programs. That’s nearly four hours a day on average.
This comes back to how SEO is evolving in 2025. Search rankings are starting to involve how your audience wants to consume content, not how you think they should connect with your business.
To look for video SEO opportunities with good ROI, check which of your target keywords have video carousels. Prioritize video content for those topics.
Make Plans To Maximize Your SEO ROI in 2025
At Digital Neighbor, we believe in quality over quantity. Our professional SEO services never go out of style. Our team can help you adapt to 2025’s trends while prioritizing time-tested strategies. We can help you create an accurate SEO ROI forecast built around the needs of your business and your customers.
Sound like too much? We are your helpful neighbors—let us do it for you! Schedule a call to discover how we can help your pages rise to the top.
