Google tools for forecasting of your traffic – Google’s Traffic forecasting tools

Google tools for forecasting traffic: The beginning of each SEO project should deal with the question of what keywords a website should be optimized. SEO campaigns can only focus on a limited number of keywords. Therefore it is so important to make an informed keyword selection, which means that predicting traffic numbers is going to play a key role in your selection.

If you are optimizing your website correctly then in many cases with you are going to be dealing an enormous amount of keywords. A manual keyword selection is virtually impossible without something to help you narrow the field. Picking targeted keywords is good, but if they are unlikely to be searched for in the next twelve months then what is the point?

Google Tools for traffic forecasting

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Google Keyword Planner

The monthly search data function has been removed from this tool. This is possibly because the monthly statistics always seemed to be marred by inaccuracy. The possible reason for this is because it judges how much a keyword will be used in a week, or a day, and multiplies it over 30 days to generate a monthly estimate. This means that statistically the monthly data will probably be wrong more times than it will be right. Still if you would like to see which keywords are long-tailed and rarely searched then this is a very good tool.

Google Trends

This is a frighteningly good tool that gives away some very detailed information. It is puzzling why Google do not charge for the use of such a powerful tool. The only possible criticism of this tool is that it always seems to err on the side of caution, and gives very conservative data. There are times when you can draw more traffic with your keywords than this tool is willing to admit.

The folly of forecasting

You must consider various factors in the relevant keyword selection, such as search volume, the strength of the site, the importance of a keyword for the company, individually weighted and chained together. There is another angle however, which makes the process of forecasting so difficult that your forecasts may as well be random predictions.

This exterior force is your competition. You have no idea what your competition are going to optimize their websites for. You also have no idea where they are going to get their forecasting information from. If your competitors are using the same forecasting tools and resources as you then does that not suggest that they will come to the same conclusions as you? Every time you use a forecast to create your keyword group, are you not pitting yourself against your competitors in an even more precarious way?

Applying your forecasted keywords to your website is going to have varied outcomes

The success of your keyword research and application will depend upon a few site-specific conditions and a few keyword specific conditions. A site-specific condition may be something such as it having JavaScript links that the search engines cannot read. The website may appear to be poorly internally linked, and will therefore struggle to rise in the search engine results pages–even with your new keywords.

A keyword specific condition may be something as simple as a keyword falling out of fashion and suddenly not being as popular anymore. A sudden increase in interest for a certain keyword is often followed by a just as sudden lack of interest. A slow but free way of forecasting the success of keywords is to run small tests yourself on your own website and record the results