Mr Happys online journal

Projections are one of the most important things that an SEO will ever do in a campaign. They tell clients what we think we can give them as a return on their investment. Which is nice. The problem is that if you’re not careful when doing projections you can often portary scenarios that may never arrive – just to make the numbers look even better.

If you think about it the client relies on us to give them an accurate portrayal of what we think is achievable on a specific budget. And it is encumbent upon us to be realistic rather than just give them the numbers they want to get back. Below are a couple of things to make sure you actually do projections and do not prophesize what will be delivered.

1. Remember all projections have an error factor - I’ll usually work to between 5% and 15% on projections just to be safe. Think about it you’ll be using projected visitors coming from projected positions (search volume isn’t constant and neither is the likely CTR) and converting at an average conversion rate and buying at an average CPA. Any of these four could change – price rises minimise conversion, the brand loses traction, universal search kills your CTR , chameleon search etc can all interfere with your numbers so be careful,
2. Use Historical Information – analytics is a great place to start. Which products do people buy most, what is the sales cycle over the year, what visitors does brand vs non-brand drive, what is the conversion on brand vs specific product traffic terms, what has PPC historically done. All this gives you the insight to understand where to focus your efforts. We all know that one word optimisation is a real pain – if your campaign is only going to work with one word phrases you’re going to be in trouble from the outset use your knowledge to locate niches which can be exploited on the way.
3. Take into account the product range – I’ve been bitten on this one before. Optimisation works best where you have a range of pages to optimise. It gives you more chances to win the positional battles and it gives you opportunities to attack whilst you wait on the big money terms coming in. Its all about incremental growth and incremental value. If you only have one product and a limited number of phrases to go after there is going to be little plan B – making the projections less likely to happen should the search engines update, should the client redesign their website etc.

Right I better get back to my projections for the day and see if I can remember to do these top three things for SEO projections.