Many in-house SEO teams are having trouble predicting their upcoming goals for traffic. Given the fact that traffic is the essential base for measurements in metric, it is important to be somewhat accurate when it comes time to predict how much traffic a website will receive in the upcoming year.
While it may be easy to run towards the Google Keyword Tool for answers, there have been a lot of unanswered questions about how accurate those tools are which means that it may be time to look over what type of SEO tools are out there on the market.
Taking a closer look at the Google Keyword Tool, the version that is based on Legacy/API is quite different than the new Beta version which is why a few experts decided to run an accuracy test. While it is still not clear which is the more accurate choice but word on the street is that the Beta tool is the newest although this does not always mean that it is the best choice.
Even if you give out the Keyword Tool that is part of the Adwords campaign you will still not get much better indepth results and even worse, results that are hard to interpret on a business level since the number of searches does not relate exactly to traffic calculations.
After that review, likely the question is if the tools don’t work then how can you set a traffic goal for the next year? The answer is that if you want to get a truly accurate result you cannot place your goals on one ranking report but instead consult a variety of sources and compile a larger list of data. Of course, since Google is the main driver, the next question is how to find additional sources for comparative sources.
Some of the best tools outside of what is available from Google are Keyword Spy, Word Tracker, and the new KW Tool because if you add these results into what you get from Google you can start to see a trend. You also will be able to guess how many impressions come in every month which will help you gear your results on a month to month basis and then identify a potential year to year average. Of c course, the downside of the additional tools is that they do not have exact info match results, but it is a good start.
If this is not a solid answer for you, then it may be time to think about running a PPC campaign. This is because a PPC campaign allows you to get accurate traffic numbers over a specified period of time. Using a PPC campaign you can select five or six keywords and then see how the results pan out.
By seeing how many times your ad gets clicked, you will get an idea of what type of keywords are more popular among the browsing audience and as a bonus you will get some extra sales possibly.
After you get a basic idea of how many impressions your site makes on a monthly basis, you can start to look closely into where the same corresponding keyword falls organically on the ranking skill. Although it is impossible for PPC campaigns to show the click through numbers there have been a large amount of studies that have proven that the amount of impressions an organic page result garnishes is highly related to its overall ranking.
Using both the impression numbers and the traffic results from the Google and keyword systems you can get an honest image of how much traffic to expect monthly from every key phrase.
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