In order to ensure you obtain the best out of your SEO campaign, it is imperative that you tailor the work in line with your business goals. Should you not do this, you are technically conducting your campaign blind with no real sense of direction.
As a way to remedy this and to make sure your SEO matches the objective of your business – we suggest that you implement ‘SMART’ goals into your strategy both for internal and external purposes. If you are unsure as to what SMART goals are or how to set SMART SEO goals up, this post will help you obtain an understanding.
Set Realistic Measurable Goals For Your SEO Strategy:
The first thing that we suggest that you do before implementing your SMART goals is to ask questions. Regardless of this being for a client or your own website, you should have a clear grasp of the company’s trajectory and what will be needed to ensure that growth happens. Questions that can shape your SEO goals should be:
- What are the objectives for the coming year?
- What KPM (Key Performance Metrics) do you have?
- What marketing objectives can support these KPMs?
- What SEO goal maps directly to your marketing objectives?
Once you have these questions answered you can then shape your marketing goals to meet your business goals through an effective SEO effort – which will ensure a flow of prospects being taken to a conversion funnel. The difference is, that you have been able to set up the goal posts to meet the demands of that particular campaign, resulting in the likelihood of these prospects turning into leads and potential customers being substantially higher.
One thing that all SEO agencies & SEOers will agree on is that SEO is not used to obtain instant results. Unlike PPC, an effective SEO strategy will take time to drip-feed with the results not showing for an initial 6-12 months – especially through organic search.
However, this doesn’t necessarily mean that the initial actions that you deem to be critical cannot have a beneficial impact on the website and its ranking. For example, you might find that several pages are riddled with grammatical errors with poor Meta Data. Following the work being completed, you might experience a jump in rankings – perhaps not to page one, but from five to page three. This is always a great win to obtain, especially initially.
With this in mind, it is also important to have some stretch goals in place whilst also being realistic. For example, should you set your business objectives too low, you are likely to reach your targets fairly quickly without having room to push the boat out – Even if just a little.
What SMART Goals Stand For In Relation To Search Engine Optimisation?
An easy way to remember SMART SEO Goals is to remember the acronym that all SEOers are fond of – this is:
- Specific
- Measurable
- Achievable
- Relevant
- Time-based
In order to break this down, let us elaborate on what each word represents:
Specific:
Regarding being specific, this is in reference to laying out exactly what you hope to accomplish with your SEO efforts – whether this is on-page or technical SEO work or a combination of both.
Measurable:
In order for your SEO campaign to be measurable, you will need to identify what metrics you will need to have in order to monitor the success of your campaign. For example, this could include obtaining a set number of website traffic in order to see a percentage of visitors turn into clients/customers. Utilising tools such as Google Analytics or Google Search Console to grasp an understanding of your goal trajectory.
Achievable:
Regarding your goals being achievable. This essentially means exactly what the heading suggests. To elaborate, this means that you have an understanding of having the necessary requirements in order to achieve the goals that have been set.
In order to understand this, you will need to review the budget set, the allotted time to achieve the goal(s) and the personnel who are conducting the necessary work. The consistent analysis will need to be carried out throughout the progression of the campaign – reviewing the necessary SEO metrics to ensure your achievable goals are being met.
Relevant:
Similar to your campaign being achievable, this too means exactly how the heading suggests. In order for your SEO campaign to be relevant – you will need to have a clear and precise understanding of the overall objective of your goal(s). For instance, does it link back to your company/clients’ objectives that have been set? This is crucial as you want to ensure that the tasks you set out to achieve will see an increase towards your company/clients’ objectives.
Perhaps it’s to see an increase in a specific set of keywords – with the goal being to make the website being seen for those particular sets of keywords. Which will result in a slew of new traffic entering the website.
Time-Based:
The last point is to ultimately determine an end date for your objective(s) – for example, should you determine that ‘X’ number of additional traffic/clients/customers will appear across the next 6-12 months. This will allow you to prioritise the mandatory actions first, selecting tasks on a metric from critical to lower-end tasks.
Examples Of SEO Objectives:
In order to determine which objectives are in line with your company goals, you can often expect these objectives to fall into the below categories:
- Brand Awareness
- Lead Generation
- Website Traffic
- User/Customer Engagement
- And most of all – Revenue
Conclusion:
In order to get the best out of your SEO campaign, you need to get a clear understanding of the SEO goals that will benefit your website or the websites of your clients. In order to have a clear understanding of your objectives will assist you in tracking the progress of the campaign more effectively whilst allowing you to refine your processes along the way – should this be necessary.
At Quirky Digital, we have quickly become one of the fastest-growing digital marketing agencies in Liverpool and surrounding areas. This is due to the fact that we have a clear understanding of what our clients desire and plan accordingly. So let’s talk about getting your online presence up and running in the best way possible.
