How to find average organic traffic growth rate for ecommerce startup?

[G2W]

Happy Friday Everyone,

I have a quick question:

I am in the process of crunching some numbers to try and figure out an organic traffic forecast for a client.

One of the crucial metrics I can't seem to figure out is traffic rate of growth over the next year or so.

The reason this is complicated for me is that I have only ever done this sort of thing for an established business before, and had plenty of past organic traffic data to work with.

What I am looking for is a source that could give me a reasonable idea of what kind of growth rates I might expect for a startup with practically no data; I would be perfectly happy with a national average for online retail startups.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

[KenyonManu3-SEOSEM]

I had some great ideas for a response but the previous three were pretty much everything about the subject i could say. ( I thumbs upped them all)

I would mention that you are getting in murky water making organic growth prediction a year in advance for an unknown company with no data. I wouldn't do it.

With that said If I had to I would apply theory of business law and go with a case study and press a correlation.

ie so so and in a similiar industry spent this amount of money on content development and marketing. With GOOD SEO and the same budget you can see a similar growth.

Like bryan said use google insights as back up. I would even use data form google keyword tool data as well. You can argue that if you get high enough on ranking you will earn a percent of that organic traffic. Main point i would stress is correlation between $spend combined with your seo skill correlates to such and such growth.

Even still that's hard to concretely present but it's a starting point.

[EGOL]

A more important projection is....

... How much will the client need to spend each month to become competitive.

You must have the ability to answer that question before you can estimate organic traffic - because you must first be able to make the site rank before public traffic data - by keyword - can be used to make a reasonable traffic estimate.

This is the most difficult question for many SEOs.  They will ask the client his budget and have no idea if that is enough money to compete in his niche.  And sending 200 troops out to a fight where 20,000 is needed is a waste of 200 troops.

So, average traffic growth data is meaningless because it varies by niche, it varies depending upon spend and most importantly it varies by the skill of the SEO.

[Bryan_Loconto]

"Google trends" should give you an idea of what people are searching for and if the terms are moving up/down etc...

If you want to know volumes of terms searched within Google you can use "Google adwords keyword tool".

[Mike_Davis]

Trying to forecast organic growth will be extremely difficult to do.  It really depends on what they have been doing as compared to what you are planning to do for them.

Have they been conducting content marketing?

Have they been heavily involved in social?

Have they been creating local citations?

Have they... etc. etc. etc.

I'm not saying that you should pull a number out of your ass, but conservatively estimating that you will be able to drive a 20% increase to their organic traffic should be easy to hit, especially if they haven't been doing a lot of what they should have been (see above).  If you can't get their traffic up by 20% in a year, they should fire you anyways.  Anything about that will make you look like a rock star.