visibly-seo-potential

SEO Potential Analysis

Turn a Status-Quo into a defensible business case: how many extra clicks, leads, and euros an SEO engagement realistically produces over 12 months.

Preconditions

A Status-Quo table must exist for the domain (run /visibly-seo-status-quo first). You need, per keyword: search volume (SV), current position, current clicks, impressions, and an intent label.

Step 1 — Classify intent (this drives everything)

Each keyword is transactional, commercial, informational, or navigational. CTR at the same position differs wildly by intent, so misclassifying inflates or deflates the whole forecast. When unsure, infer from the SERP and the query form ("buy", "price", "vs", "how to", brand name).

Step 2 — Apply the intent-aware CTR curve

Read CTR from the Keyword Study 2026 curve in docs/ctr-model.md (first-party GSC data, 1.3M keywords, 94 domains). Pick the column for the keyword's intent, the row for its position. Anchor values at position 1:

Intent	CTR @ Pos 1
Navigational	~8.9 %
Commercial	~4.1 %
Transactional	~3.7 %
Informational	~3.2 %
Overall (blended)	~5.6 %

Never use the old textbook curve (Pos 1 = 28 %). Below position 20: ~0.3 % (21-50), ~0.1 % (50+).

Step 3 — Set realistic 12-month target positions

Current position	Search volume	Target
> 100	> 10k	Pos 15
> 100	5-10k	Pos 12
> 100	1-5k	Pos 8
> 100	< 1k	Pos 5
Already ranking	any	improve 1-10 positions by current strength

Never promise Position 1 for a page sitting at 100+. Conservative targets keep the offer credible.

Step 4 — Compute the click delta

target_clicks  = SV × CTR(target_position, intent)
current_clicks = from GSC (or SV × CTR(current_position, intent) if missing)
delta_clicks   = max(0, target_clicks − current_clicks)

Aggregate delta_clicks by cluster / theme — per-keyword numbers are noisy; a decision-maker acts on cluster rollups.