How to Evaluate The Traffic Potential of The Website

Evaluation of website traffic potential is a necessary step for setting realistic goals and avoiding inflated expectations from website optimization.

It's especially vital for customers who expect immediate and sometimes far-fetched results when contacting SEO specialists.

We will use the Google Keyword Planner and Google Trends to determine the popularity of topics for the promoted website and to analyze the market.

These tools will allow you to get a general traffic forecast:

After analyzing the data, we will find out the maximum potential traffic for the topic leader.

To get information on the number of impressions for a topic of interest, we'll use the Keyword Planner.

According to the analysis, the search query "mink coats" will be shown 103,000 times. In an advertising campaign, it's going to receive 15,000 clicks per month if the website takes the first position in paid search results.

To estimate the popularity of a search request over a certain period of time, you can use Google Trends.

The data is presented on a graph that illustrates the popularity dynamics of the analyzed keyword in percentage terms, where 100% is the peak of interest.

When we analyze the same query — "mink coats" over the period of five years, we can clearly see that it has constant seasonal fluctuations in the popularity:

On the other hand, the such search query as "buy a laptop" doesn't really have such drastic seasonal fluctuations:

Analysis of search seasonality allows us to objectively evaluate the current situation and predict future results of website promotion, adjusted for general market trends that do not depend on the quality of SEO specialists' work.

After collecting the data from the web analytics tools described above, let's analyze the forecasted traffic of a specific website.

Traffic in Serpstat is the approximate traffic to the page by keywords depending on its volume and position.

As the result of the analysis, you will get a forecast of the number of clicks from the search results for the query of interest, taking into account the domain age, optimization problems, and current traffic.

To estimate the potential traffic, go to the Serpstat Keyword Research tool → SEO Research → Top Pages.

Then, type in the search query of interest, and select the database.

Here you'll get a list of websites that take leading positions in Google search results:

The following information is available in the report:

For all queries containing selected keywords, we've received a list with 10+ thousand websites. Here we should find our own website and compare its position with competitors':

Insert any keyword to start analyzing:

With the Serpstat Domain Analysis, you can assess the website pages of your own project on their attractiveness for search engines, and therefore, their potential traffic.

Go to Serpstat Domain Analysis → SEO Research → Top Pages, then type the domain name into the search bar and select the database.

You will get the list of the domain's top pages, optimizing which will yield the most traffic increase. Here you can see the current approximate traffic per month for each page:

If we click on any number in the "Organic keywords" section of the "Top Pages" report we just spoke about, we will receive the detailed data about each keyword the selected page ranks for:

The report includes the following indicators:

Analyzing and forecasting website traffic potential allows you to find out the prospects for the improvement of your own website, and keep up with your competitors.

Based on the results you have obtained, you can draw up a realistic website promotion and improvement plan, taking into account the competitive landscape of the market and potential opportunities for website optimization.

In order to correctly forecast website traffic, it is important to pay attention to the following: