Pitching clients as an SEO firm inevitably generates a lot of questions, mostly because the industry is still so young. The most common question is always the one question that there is no real answer to: “How much will this work increase my website’s traffic?”

Gauging traffic increases is a noble ambition but efforts generally lead into the proverbial “wild goose chase”. Clients are usually a bit on edge when it comes to SEO proposals because there is no educated guess or traffic prediction equation that can give them an idea of what the end product will be.

The reasons behind these failed attempts at finding a solution to this question can be narrowed down to four roadblocks: click measurements by ranking, social media, and implementation by clients.

Clicking Through by Ranking

Engines don’t publish the click-through percentages of top search results. Your brand may rank at position 13 for a given keyword and through SEO efforts, that position may become number 5. However, there is no way to measure how much that increase in ranking will affect your traffic.

Adding Social Media to the Mix

Lastly, it’s impossible to determine how social traffic will factor into the metric. Del.icio.us users may tag an article, but traffic after the initial spike would be impossible to determine. How much of an impact will it have on SERPs and how long will that impact last?

Client Execution of Proposed Changes

SEO firms can provide clients with a full list of actions that need to happen to optimize their webpage, but implementation of these line items is in the client’s hands. If a forum section is set up, but the client doesn’t moderate or respond to posts, the forum’s potential won’t be reached. If not all recommendations were implemented, a prediction of traffic increases would be meaningless.

Catching the Wild Goose

As you can see, an accurate estimation by SEO firms at this time is impossible. However, if search engines continue to release more and more information and statistics and SEO firms continue to strive for new ways to add legitimacy to their proposals, the dream of answering this question may still live and one day be realized.