Traditionally, in search engine optimization, you’d find keywords that already have a large search volume and optimize your website pages to rank for that keyword.
The problem with that is you’re trying to compete with hundreds, if not thousands, of websites, some of which have been ranking for that keyword for years.
Predictive SEO provides a way to overcome this, to create content that will rank for search terms that are likely to be popular.
Google processes 5 trillion searches each year, and a significant proportion of those are never-before-seen search requests. With data analytics and creative, educated guessing, you can stay one step ahead of the general public’s interests and create SEO-optimized content for the future.
This article will inspect what predictive SEO is and provide advice on how to research and implement it.
What is Predictive SEO?
Traditional SEO is the process of optimizing your site to be in line with Google’s guidelines, which typically includes:
- Creating a crawlable website hierarchy.
- Ensuring the website doesn’t break spam policies.
- Optimizing Core Web Vitals.
- Doing keyword research and optimizing pages for keywords.
- Creating informational content for related keywords.
- Building website authority through backlinks.
- Optimizing for Google search features like local search results.
The key distinction between the traditional SEO approach and predictive SEO is that the former focuses on implementing widely recognised practices and trends that are currently working. It is a solid approach to gaining organic traffic and is necessary for all businesses that want to succeed in search.
Its weakness is that with optimization efforts taking months to produce results and both user behavior and Google algorithm changing, it might be lagging behind.
Predictive SEO is an addition to your basic search optimization strategy that aims to avoid this issue.
Together with optimizing for what already works, you optimize for what you believe will work in the future.
Any type of prediction is only guesswork, but predictive SEO strategies strive to make that guesswork educated. To that end, you’ll use historical data from your website and from SERP to find trends and make more predictions about what search might look like in six to twelve months. AI-based data analytics and machine learning tools are great assets in these efforts.
SEO forecasting mostly deals with content, not with technical SEO, and tries to predict what topics or content formats in your industry may be popular in the near future. It can also help you figure out which keywords may gain or lose search volume, which sites might grow in authority, and what the most likely updates in the next search algorithm are.
All of this data will inform your SEO strategy overall.
Why Predictive SEO Matters
The main reason why adding predictive SEO to your larger SEO strategy matters is that search optimization realities are not set in stone. Google’s algorithm is changing constantly. While it typically doesn’t change that much with every update, over the course of years, the changes can be drastic. Five years ago, few people would have imagined AI summaries on the front page of Google, yet here we are.
User behavior and interests are also subject to change. As new trends arise, some keywords and topics will decline in search volume, and others will increase.
A good example of a major change in both Google’s operations and user behavior is the introduction of featured snippets, and later, AI Overviews, which leads to an increase in zero-click searches.
When a user is looking for a short answer and has it answered on the search result page, there’s no incentive to click on an article that explains the topic in more depth. With AI Overviews, users can receive a more detailed AI-generated explanation of their question without leaving the SERP.
Predictive SEO aims at finding trends like these, projecting what the search might look like, and adapting your strategy to the possible changes. This lets you be ahead of the competition in capturing new trends and improving your traffic volume, conversion rate, and ROI.
5 Key Components of Predictive SEO
Predictive SEO can use multiple techniques creatively. Here are the five most commonly used ones.
1. Trend Forecasting
A large part of predictive SEO is understanding search trends. The easiest way to do this is by using Google Trends to compare multiple search terms. Set it up for at least five years to see the trends fully.
This can give you a hint to what search terms and topics are gaining or losing popularity. You can base your larger SEO content strategy on the findings.
If you can get access to historical cost-per-click data on search terms, you can also use it as an indicator that a keyword is becoming more competitive.
2. Audience Behavior Analysis
Another factor in organic search forecasting is user behavior on your website. Use tools like Google Analytics and your CRM to record which content pages get more attention from users.
Especially look for browsing behavior on the site. Pages that receive organic traffic from Google might just be better optimized and rank higher. Pages that receive clicks on the site are naturally interesting to users. Invest in creating SEO content for those topics or content types.
3. Keyword Footprint Audit
Before you can effectively implement a future-oriented keyword optimization strategy, you need to have a full picture of what keywords you’re already ranking for and where your keyword gaps are.
This SE Ranking guide on keyword audit will help you figure out what your website ranks for and what areas you can improve on. Gaining this understanding lets you approach predictive SEO strategy with a firm grasp of your current position.
4. Search Intent Research
Behind every search on Google, there’s an intent. It might be to find out a piece of information without reading an article or to read about specific details on the topic in question. Research the articles that do well on SERP to find out what details users are currently interested in, and research industry trends to understand what details will be important in the future.
5. Content Gap Analysis
The final piece of the puzzle is looking at the content gap with your competitors. SEO tools can show you content topics that your competitors have but you don’t. Use this information to analyze competitor performance in those topics and figure out whether you need to follow them or not.
How to Implement a Predictive SEO Strategy
To optimize for possible future changes in the algorithms, you have to keep in touch with search engine news, updates, and commentary from high-ranking Google employees. Creating and implementing a predictive SEO strategy for content may be harder.
Here’s a step-by-step guide on how to do that.
Identify Future-Focused Content Topics
The first, and the most important step in creating an SEO strategy aimed at the future is doing research to identify topics that might be interesting to users. There are multiple ways to do that.
- Monitor industry news for upcoming changes. Look for upcoming technology and growing trends.
- Discover search trends with Google Trends. Look for upward trends.
- Listen in on social media conversations about the industry with BuzzSumo or Sprout Social.
- Read consumer behavior research reports. Look for changes in user behavior.
- Draw conclusions on proprietary user behavior data from Google Analytics and your CRM. Look for areas of high interest.
- Brainstorm with the team.
Based on this analysis, find topics that are likely to rise in popularity in the near or distant future. This might mean finding a content cluster, a topic for a single article, or updates for existing content.
Leverage AI for Content Planning
Once you have a list of topics and keywords that might rise in popularity in the future, do content planning for them. You can do it alone or with your team, but it’s possible to use AI tools to make the process faster.
To make this AI brainstorming more precise, direct the LLM you’re using to provide suggestions with your business and your specific audience in mind. Add details about your ideal customer profiles and be precise about what the audience’s knowledge level is.
Start with content ideation, formulating the headlines for potential pieces of content. Combining AI help with team brainstorming, you can come up with 10-20 content pieces for a single topic by approaching it from different angles or tailoring to different audiences.
Then, cluster the content into closely connected groups of articles. You’ll interlink them more closely than other content pieces when they’re live. This helps with topical authority and user navigation across your content library.
Use keyword research tools to find a mix of keywords to optimize each content piece.
When you’re done with that, put each piece on a content calendar. Prioritise content pieces either by how much traffic you can attract with them, by which keywords they are currently able to rank for, or by which topics you expect to peak sooner.
It’s best to keep content from a cluster together. Keep a couple of free spaces in the calendar saved for developing content pieces urgently in response to a rising topic.
Create High-Quality Content
Start developing content from your calendar. Keep it in the tone and style of your brand and tailor it to your audience’s liking and level of understanding of the topic. The less you believe they know about the context of the topic, the more details you need to explain.
The outline of your articles should be in line with your expectations of the search intent evolution. Add talking points on subtopics that you predict will be relevant in the future.
Also, explore the multimedia trends. Add visuals, AR experiences, or interactive elements if you think users will expect those to appear in the topic you cover.
Optimize for Voice Search and AI-Generated Snippets
Adding the right keywords to your content is only one aspect of optimization. The number of people in the US who prefer voice search has remained around 20% since 2022. Another search trend to look out for is AI Overviews that now appear on many informational searches.
To optimize for them, make sure there’s one concise paragraph in your text that sums up the answer to a question users might have. Formulating it shortly helps with getting it displayed for voice searches and in AIO.
Monitor and Iterate
As no one can predict the future perfectly, one of the most important parts of predictive SEO is monitoring. Predictive SEO best practices include monitoring how your future-oriented SEO content performs now and looking for confirmation of your hypothesis.
If you see that the topic is gaining more popularity, your articles are ranking high for it, and you’re seeing more traffic on the site, it’s a success. Look for ways to increase ranking and conversions on the page.
If you don’t, reevaluate your understanding of the trend.
8 Tools to Help You Succeed at Predictive SEO
No digital marketing endeavour is possible without the right set of tools. There is no limit to what tools you can use for a predictive SEO strategy, but here are some highlights.
- Google Analytics: This tool is essential for measuring organic traffic and conversion rate trends on your website.
- Google Trends: This is great for measuring and comparing overall historical search trends.
- A suite of keyword research tools: Tools like the free Google Keyword Planner and paid specialized ones are indispensable for analyzing keyword search volume and CPC changes over time.
- Glimpse: This specialized predictive analytics tools can help you spot emerging trends before they blow over. It works for search traffic and social media.
- BuzzSumo: This tool is handy for discovering trending content, monitoring news and updates from industry journalists on social media, and social listening.
- Jasper: A generative AI tool tailored for marketing purposes and designed to remember your business’s context.
- MarketMuse: This AI-based tool is great for all stages of content planning, from ideating and clustering to generating and improving drafts.
- Clearscope: This is an alternative AI-based optimization tool that can help with both researching content trends and creating content.
If you want to delve deeper into analytics yourself, you’re also going to need a data storage and analytics solution and a data visualization tool in your toolset. BigQuery and Looker Studio can be great for this.
Common Pitfalls and How to Avoid Them
Digital marketing as a whole is prone to error in human judgment. The probability of a mistake is even higher when it involves predictive analytics.
One of the most common mistakes you’ll run into in predictive SEO is misreading trends. Either not catching a good trend early, or pursuing a trend that turns out to be nothing. The only way to avoid this is to be diligent with the quality of the data that you gather and with the way you analyze it.
Even then, you won’t be able to predict everything perfectly. You can mitigate that by investing in each trend only as much as you’re confident it’s going to take off.
Another common mistake is focusing on short-term planning only. Optimizing for zero-volume keywords that you think are going to become more popular in six months is a part of predictive SEO, but it’s not all of it. Always look at the bigger picture and try to find larger industry trends, not just keywords that are on the rise.
A common mistake of a smaller proportion is ignoring search intent evolution. Too often, specialists create content for a search intent that is relevant today or was relevant six months ago. Instead, study the industry trends, and try to fit the search intent as it may appear in the future.
Final Thoughts
Predictive SEO can be a way to get your pages ranking for searches that become relevant in the future and outcompete others before they even show up. It can also be a road to nowhere with your site ranking for searches that never take off.
The key to mastering it is the quality of information you use. Make sure you gather data from all possible sources and analyze it diligently without letting your biases dictate the decision. This will make your predictive SEO and overall SEO strategy future-proof.
If this information has excited you and you want to take the next steps in priming your business for greater search visibility, then schedule a no-obligation SEO discover call with our team.
