SEO potential is a measure of how much organic traffic you can generate through search engines like Google without spending a penny on advertising. This free traffic can translate into increased brand awareness, leads, sales, and revenue.
Calculating SEO potential can be complex and time-consuming. But that’s where my free SEO Potential Bot comes in.
This bot is based on a simple approach but is enough to allow you to:
- Save time and skip manual work.
- Set more realistic goals.
- Find out how much SEO can improve your website.
you can find robots here.
This bot works best with Ahrefs data as it relies on traffic potential and parent topics (more on these later). But if you’re not an Ahrefs user, the bot can use regular keywords instead of the parent topic, and regular search volume instead of traffic potential. It will also process copy and paste data from our free keyword generator.
It produces a spreadsheet with traffic estimates that you can download in CSV format. You also get a visualization of traffic potential (country selected in Keyword Browser) and global traffic in the form of stacked bar charts, which you can also download.
Remember that flow is expressed as access (not a guest) you may get every month.
Here is an example.
The higher the difficulty, the more time and effort it takes to rank. The “Simple” bucket shows how much traffic you are likely to get in the short term – a good target, especially for lower traffic sites domain rating.
The bot is free to use but requires a subscription to ChatGPT like all community bots. I’ve added a tip at the end of the article that you can use bots instead of bots (you still need a ChatGPT subscription to use the data analysis features) or in conjunction with other LLMs such as Gemini or Claude.
Here’s how to get the input data Keyword Browser for Ahrefs.
- Ask AI for a list of seed keywords. You can use a prompt like “Give me a list of seed keywords for a blog about personal finance.” Of course, you can add your own keywords or get keywords from competitors (The method is as follows).
- Go to the Compliance Term report and turn on the Clusters by Parent Topic tag.
- Export results in CSV, UTF-8 format.
- Upload the file to the robot and wait for the results. The bot might ask a simple follow-up question or ask for confirmation of additional data—this is artificial intelligence after all.
You can also ask the bot to explain the method and adjust settings.
hint
Use your competitors’ keywords to estimate the traffic you could get if you went after their market.
use Ahrefs website browser Export competitor keywords. You’ll need a maximum of 10k keywords, so adjust the filters to stay within limits, such as minimum number and maximum position to filter out less important keywords. Also skip brand keywords.
Plug them into Ahrefs’ keyword browser to get parent topic and traffic potential data.
Finally, export the data and feed it to the bot.
Traffic estimation divides search rankings into ranking buckets and applies a specific click-through rate benchmark to calculate potential traffic. Click-through rate reflects the fact that not everyone clicks on the first result. Keywords that rank higher usually get more clicks, and click-through rate helps bots solve this problem.
The bot simulates optimistic, realistic, and pessimistic ranking scenarios to show how different rankings affect traffic.
This robot is designed for proprietary Ahrefs indicator:
- transportation potential. Shows the total organic traffic that the page that ranks #1 for your target keyword receives from all the keywords it ranks for. Since a page can rank for hundreds of keywords and get traffic from all of them, traffic potential is often a better metric than search volume alone.
- Parent topic. Determine whether you can rank for your target keywords while targeting a more general topic. To identify parent topics, Ahrefs takes the page that ranks #1 for your keyword and looks for the query responsible for sending the most search traffic to that page.
- keyword difficulty. Estimates the difficulty of ranking in the top 10 Google organic search results for a given keyword. It is measured on a scale of 0 to 100, with the latter being the most difficult to rank.
It’s important to note that the bot does not take into account your website’s current ranking. Instead, it focuses on the overall potential of your target keywords. However, you can still use it to estimate potential traffic for the keywords you’ve targeted.
Export your target keywords from Rank Tracker by Ahrefs or other tool of your choice and paste them into Keyword Explorer. This tool will find relevant parent topics based on your target keywords. Export the results and pass them to the bot.
For example, the website can get the highest traffic boost by focusing on the simplest keywords.
hint
Another useful approach is to use ChatGPT to identify groups of terms that are most likely to improve. This is my colleague Patrick Stokes Interpretation method (And some other cool tips).
SEO is a long-term strategy. Expected:
- Incremental improvements rather than overnight miracles.
- Sustained effort is better than sporadic bursts. First page rankings often come from sustained strategy execution.
- Competition is trying to take your place in the SERPs.
The more high-quality content you produce and the more high-quality links you create, the farther you go from pessimism to optimism.
As with almost all marketing strategies, there are basically two approaches to SEO: DIY and outsourced.
Please do it yourself if you meet the following conditions:
- Budget is limited.
- Learn to be patient.
- Have time to invest.
Check out our free beginner-friendly SEO course Ahfs Academycovering everything from keyword research to link building.
Outsource to an agency or freelancer if you:
- Own a high-value business.
- Results are needed immediately.
- Create a budget that allows for expert intervention.
Find out what your expectations are Pay for SEO services.
I’d love to hear your thoughts on robots! let me know LinkedIn.
If you prefer to use it without the robot or with different LLMs (I tried it with Gemini and Claude), here are the tips.
Generate an SEO Potential Report
Create a file listing Parent Topics with columns for:
Difficulty: Categorized into four buckets: Easy (0-10), Medium (11-30), Hard (31-70), and Super Hard (71-100).
Traffic potential and Global traffic potential: Based on user-provided columns.
Estimated Traffic: Calculated for three ranking models:
Optimistic: 30% of keywords rank #1, 25% at #2, 20% at #3, 15% in positions 4-10, and 10% unranked.
Realistic: 20% at #1, 20% at #2, 30% at #3, 30% in positions 4-10, and 20% unranked.
Pessimistic: 10% at #1, 10% at #2, 20% at #3, 60% in positions 4-10, and 20% unranked.
CTR Assumptions:
Rank 1 = 30%, Rank 2 = 15%, Rank 3 = 10%, Ranks 4-10 = 5%, Unranked = 0%.
For each difficulty bucket, calculate:
Total keyword count.
Total traffic potential and Global traffic potential.
Estimated traffic for each ranking model.
Clean Data:
Remove any rows with an "Uncategorized" difficulty bucket.
Exclude rows where all values for traffic and potential traffic are zero.
Provide a summary row labeled “Sum”, aggregating totals for traffic potential, global traffic potential, and estimated traffic across all buckets.
Visualizations: Create two stacked bar charts:
1. Estimated Traffic Potential:
Each bar represents total Estimated Traffic Potential for a ranking model (Optimistic, Realistic, Pessimistic).
Stack the bar by difficulty bucket (Easy, Medium, Hard, Super Hard) to show the contribution of each bucket. The pessimistic scenario needs to be at the bottom.
2. Estimated Global Traffic Potential:
Each bar represents total Estimated Global Traffic Potential for a ranking model (Optimistic, Realistic, Pessimistic). The pessimistic scenario needs to be at the bottom.
Stack the bar by difficulty bucket (Easy, Medium, Hard, Super Hard) to show the contribution of each bucket.
Column Mapping:
If the exact column names cannot be found, ask the user to confirm which columns to use for Parent topic, Traffic potential, Global traffic potential, and Difficulty.
