SEO forecasting
Projecting future organic performance from current rankings, expected position changes, demand trends and seasonality, usually as a range…
AnalyticsSeasonal demand
Seasonality
Predictable variation in search demand across the year, week or day, which must be controlled for before attributing changes to SEO work.
In full
Comparing month over month without accounting for seasonality is the most common analytical error in SEO reporting; year-over-year comparison of the same period is the minimum defensible baseline. Seasonality also has operational implications: seasonal pages should be kept live and updated year-round at stable URLs rather than deleted and recreated, so they retain their history and links. Forecasts should decompose trend, seasonality and residual.
Example
A gift retailer's traffic falls 60% in January every year, which is expected and unrelated to any ranking change.
Related terms
Search volume
The estimated number of times a query is searched in a period, usually derived from Google Ads data and modelled by third-party tools.
Content decay
The gradual decline in a page's search traffic as it ages, competitors update, intent shifts or the underlying information goes out of date.
Causal impact analysis
A statistical method that estimates the effect of an intervention by forecasting what would have happened without it, using control series…
Rank tracking
Regularly querying search engines from defined locations and devices to record where specific URLs rank for a keyword set.
Where to read more
- Debug Google Search Traffic Drops · Documentation · developers.google.com