Most SEO forecasts use first-party data sources like Google Analytics or Google Search Console. If you want an accurate estimate for your website or page, this is absolutely the best data to use. If you need more granularity in your data or to predict seasonality, use one of these sources.
The problem is that SEO isn’t a single-player game. What you need to know is how your site or page is likely to perform relative to the competition. If your competitors are likely to outpace your SEO performance, that will influence your strategy and where you devote resources. And the only way to get data on your competitors is to use third-party sources like Ahrefs.
You may wonder if you can reliably use third-party data for forecasting. At Ahrefs, the way we calculate our data does not see daily granularity or seasonality, but it is useful for finding patterns and forecasting trends. We also re-calculate previous data and update our graphs to remove irregularities that would otherwise be caused by updates to our data or calculations.
Forecasting with SEO data: use cases
It probably comes as no surprise that creating graphs like the one I showed above usually requires some knowledge of coding and modeling libraries. That’s why many companies and agencies don’t do forecasting. They don’t have a data analyst or data scientist on their payroll at their disposal.
The workload like this whatsapp number list allows both the vendor and the affiliate to focus on. Clicks are the number of clicks coming to your website’s URL from organic search results.
With this in mind, I spent some time creating a bunch of plug-and-play scripts that you can run for free in Google Colab. Just choose what you want to forecast below. I’ve included a link to the script and instructions on how to use it under each section.
Predicting future traffic
Predicting future traffic value
Predicting future competitor traffic
Predicting future competitor traffic value
Predicting future competitor page traffic
Making performance predictions during a core update
Predicting future traffic
2 ahrefs traffic forecast 2
This script will forecast your future traffic one year from now. When I run this one for ahrefs.com, the trend (dark blue line) shows that one year from now, we will likely be up to 1.3 million monthly organic visits from our current level of 880,000.