PDF documents will be indexed.

If you edit the "properties" they can have a title tag that works as well as <title>. </p> <p>They can rank in the SERPs like any other document. </p> <p>You can put links in them pointing back at your site and these links will pass pagerank. </p> <p>They accumulate pagerank and show greenbar. </p> <p>You can put "add to cart" and "view cart" buttons in them. </p> <p>You can give them rel=canonical or redirect them with htaccess if needed.</p> <p>You can give them the same template as your site if you want to put that work into them.</p> <p>There is no reason to avoid PDFs if they are the best choice for presenting your information.  You just need to get a mindset about using them creatively.</p></title>

I believe that mentions are valuable.  if you are a manufacturer who has products listed and described on lots of sites these mentions will pile up to huge numbers.

Seeing weak manufacturers outranking heavyweight sites makes  be believe that mentions are driving rankings.

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.

For all of the past ten years, every person that  I have hired to work on any of my websites has been a person that I have grown to know from their forum participation.

If you read a person's forum posts for a while you  can get some idea of their competence for different types of jobs, their style, their communications ability and their generosity.

I have never been disappointed by any of them and have never met any of them face-to-face.

So, if you are looking for a certain type of work, search a forum for questions about the type of jobs you need to have done.   Read those questions and see who consistently gives the clearest, most competent and thoughtful advice.   That might be your person.

Lots of people who post on forums are available to work for hire.  Some are not.  If you read their profile page you can usually tell who is available for work and who isn't.  Most who do work for hire have a link to their business website on their profile page.