Free tool
SEO Forecast Template Your next 12 to 24 months of organic traffic, month by month.
Enter your baseline, its seasonality and the work you expect to ship. The template forecasts organic clicks and modeled revenue for a low, a base and a high case, and gives you the whole table as a CSV file.
- Runs in your browser
- Sends nothing
- Free, no sign-up
Build your SEO forecast
How it works
- Set your baselineOne monthly value with an optional seasonality index, or twelve months pasted from a spreadsheet.
- Add the work you expectEach item’s expected uplift and start month, one ramp, and how far the low and high cases reach.
- Read it and download itOrganic clicks and modeled revenue month by month, as a chart, a table and a CSV file.
Your inputs
The template opens with round example values so every output has something to show. They are not typical figures or benchmarks: replace them with your own.
Amounts are in US dollars; the arithmetic is the same in any currency.
Modeled forecast
ModeledOrganic clicks over 12 months
262,771 to 308,313
45,542 more clicks than the baseline in the base case
Modeled revenue over 12 months
$630,650 to $739,951
Low$630,650Base$685,301High$739,951
Baseline: 240,000 clicks, $576,000 modeled revenue
The month-by-month table below gives the same figures.
The file is made on your device; it carries your inputs and every month.
Modeled, not measured: a forecast from your inputs, not a QueryRev result. Its revenue is modeled revenue, never known or incremental revenue: revenue counts as incremental only once a change is verified against a baseline.
Month by month
ModeledScroll the table sideways for the high case and the modeled revenue.
| Organic clicks | Modeled revenue | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Month | Baseline | Low | Base | High | Low | Base | High |
| 1 Jan | 18,000 | 18,113 | 18,225 | 18,338 | $43,470 | $43,740 | $44,010 |
| 2 Feb | 18,400 | 18,630 | 18,860 | 19,090 | $44,712 | $45,264 | $45,816 |
| 3 Mar | 20,000 | 20,750 | 21,500 | 22,250 | $49,800 | $51,600 | $53,400 |
| 4 Apr | 20,800 | 22,100 | 23,400 | 24,700 | $53,040 | $56,160 | $59,280 |
| 5 May | 21,200 | 22,923 | 24,645 | 26,367 | $55,014 | $59,148 | $63,282 |
| 6 Jun | 20,000 | 22,200 | 24,400 | 26,600 | $53,280 | $58,560 | $63,840 |
| 7 Jul | 18,800 | 21,056 | 23,312 | 25,568 | $50,534 | $55,949 | $61,363 |
| 8 Aug | 19,200 | 21,696 | 24,192 | 26,688 | $52,070 | $58,061 | $64,051 |
| 9 Sep | 20,800 | 23,712 | 26,624 | 29,536 | $56,909 | $63,898 | $70,886 |
| 10 Oct | 22,000 | 25,080 | 28,160 | 31,240 | $60,192 | $67,584 | $74,976 |
| 11 Nov | 21,600 | 24,624 | 27,648 | 30,672 | $59,098 | $66,355 | $73,613 |
| 12 Dec | 19,200 | 21,888 | 24,576 | 27,264 | $52,531 | $58,982 | $65,434 |
| Total | 240,000 | 262,771 | 285,542 | 308,313 | $630,650 | $685,301 | $739,951 |
What an SEO forecast is
An SEO forecast is an estimate of the organic search traffic a site could get in the coming months, and of what that traffic could be worth. It starts from what the site gets today, the baseline, and adds what the work you expect to ship could change.
A forecast is a set of assumptions written down as numbers. Its value is that the assumptions become visible: which work is expected to move traffic, by how much, from when, and what a click is worth. When the months arrive, each assumption can be checked against what happened.
How the template works
The template runs the same steps for every month of the horizon, then adds the months up.
Baseline. Either one monthly value, shaped by your seasonality index, or twelve months typed oldest first, starting with the forecast’s first month a year earlier, each repeated in the same month of the forecast. The index is scaled so its twelve values average 1: a month at 110 gets a tenth more than the average month.
Work items. Each item adds its expected uplift, a percent of the baseline, from its start month. Over the ramp it grows in a straight line: with a ramp of four months an item reaches a quarter of its uplift in its first month and all of it in its fourth. The uplifts of several items are added together, not multiplied.
Low, base and high. The base case reaches all of the expected uplift; the low and high cases reach the shares you set. The baseline is the same in all three.
Modeled revenue. Forecast clicks times the conversion rate times the value per conversion, for each case and for the baseline alone.
What the template cannot see
It is arithmetic on your assumptions. These things decide whether a forecast holds, and none of them can be computed from the inputs here.
- Seasonality that moves
- The index repeats the same year shape every year. A launch, a sale moved to another month or a change in what people search for can shift the shape, and a single past year may hold one-off spikes that will not repeat.
- Search engine updates
- Search engines change how they rank pages and how much of a results page goes to organic links. An update can raise or lower the baseline itself, whatever work you ship. The template keeps the baseline as you typed it.
- Attribution
- The conversion rate you enter carries the rules of the analytics tool that produced it. A visitor who first finds you in search and buys later through another channel may be counted for either, so the same clicks can be worth more or less depending on those rules.
- What would have happened anyway
- The baseline is the template’s stand-in for the months without the work. Real traffic would also have moved without it, so the difference between the forecast and the baseline is an assumption, not a measured effect of the work.
How to use the CSV
Download as CSV saves the whole forecast as a file your browser makes on your device: a header that labels it a modeled forecast from your inputs, the inputs themselves, then one row a month with the baseline, the three cases and their modeled revenue, and a total row. Any spreadsheet opens it.
Keep the file beside the months as they arrive. Add a column for the clicks you actually got and compare it with the baseline and the base case each month. When actual clicks run below the low case or above the high case, an assumption was wrong: find which one before the next forecast.
Share it as what it is. The header says the figures are modeled from your inputs; keep that line when you paste the table into a report, so no one reads a forecast as a result.
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