Why Setting Specific Goals is Crucial for Successful SEO
In the vast landscape of online success, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) stands as a powerful pillar that can elevate your website’s visibility and prominence. However, like any journey, SEO requires a clear sense of direction to achieve meaningful results. Merely setting vague SEO goals such as “get more leads” or “get more traffic” will leave you wandering without purpose. To truly harness the potential of SEO, one must embrace the strength of specific, well-defined goals. In this article, we will delve into the significance of setting precise goals and how they act as the compass that guides your SEO endeavors.
The Importance of Goals in SEO
A goal provides you with a target to aim at, allowing you to sanity check your actions and ensure that the way you spend your SEO time is in service of the goal. Moreover, goals help you measure your progress, which is crucial in SEO. You may be making no progress, meaning you must change your tactics or update your goals. Likewise, progress towards a goal gives you a feeling of accomplishment and motivation that can help you keep pushing when SEO can sometimes feel overwhelming.
Understanding SEO Goals
SEO goals aim to progress your SEO and support your broader marketing and business objectives. Typically, you will target awareness and engagement with prospective customers on search engines. When looking to improve your SEO, you will look at rankings, impressions, click-through rates, clicks, and the subsequent engagement of that traffic. You may also consider aspects such as the size of an opportunity (keyword volume and impressions).
Creating practical goals is the first step in crafting an SEO strategy and should consider the following five steps:
- Specificity: The goal must be clearly defined so it can be measured.Measurable: Goals must be quantifiable so you can track progress.
- Achievable: Goals should be realistic within your resources.
- Relevant: Goals should map to higher-order business and marketing goals.
- Time-bound: Goals must consider time to aid the measurement.
- Fortunately, there is a handy mnemonic to help us remember these critical factors in practical SEO goal setting: SMART goals.
SMART Goals for SEO
The SMART goals framework is widely used in project management, personal development, and psychology. Utilizing time-proven marketing concepts within our SEO work can significantly enhance performance. Implementing SMART goals for SEO is a smart move as it offers a structured approach to goal setting and tracking progress.
S: Specific
Specificity is the first step toward creating actionable SEO goals. For instance, better rankings are not a specific goal. Ranking in the top 3 results for keyword X nationally is a specific goal. A broader yet specific goal could also be improving organic traffic by 25%, but as you become less specific, you must also apply critical thinking about how you will achieve this and state it in your goal.
Questions to ask yourself or your team include:
- What are we trying to achieve?
- How does this help us achieve our marketing goals?
- What do we need to do to achieve this?
Make your goal more specific:
“Improve organic traffic by 25% by enhancing the rankings for all our commercial keywords on our category pages.”
Ensure you build your specific goal on top of clearly defined business and marketing goals to create a hierarchical set of goals that align with your overall mission.
M: Measurable
To understand if you are making progress towards a goal and if that goal is truly helping you achieve the underlying goals, you must make the goal measurable. Fortunately, with SEO, there are plenty of touchpoints we can use to track success, such as organic clicks, impressions, CTR, average position, and link building metrics.
Identify metrics that will help you track progress and not just the end goal so you can identify if your tactics are working!
A: Achievable
Setting realistic and attainable goals in SEO requires critical thinking and soul-searching. Search results and competitor SEO metrics can help you determine what is achievable. Focus on what you can do better and ensure your SEO strategy is quality-driven rather than solely metric-driven. Consider the quality of your content, SEO feasibility, the competitive situation, and your available resources.
Understand that progress may not always happen as expected, and adjusting your strategy accordingly is crucial.
R: Relevant
Ensure that your SEO goals are truly relevant by explaining how they help achieve your overall marketing goals and cross-referencing them with conversion data from paid search. This will ensure a sensible use of your resources and strong alignment with your mission.
T: Time-bound
All goals need to have a target date to achieve. Introduce time-bound goals for SEO, along with milestones showing progress, to ensure you are moving in the right direction and not chasing rainbows. Although SEO results may take time, reviewing progress regularly and adjusting goals accordingly will keep you on track.
SMARTeR SEO Goals
To make SMART goals even more effective for SEO, add a regular “Review” step. By reviewing your progress, you can amend your goals based on real-time data and performance. This iterative approach ensures your SEO efforts remain effective and goal-oriented.
Using SMART Goals for SEO
Instead of simply aiming to rank #1 for a keyword, make SMART goals that state how the goal will help achieve your business and marketing objectives. Through thorough discussions and critical thinking, you can create a simple and clear statement representing your overall SMART goal approach.
For example:
“We want to achieve a 50% increase in leads from organic search over 12 months. We will do this by moving our target keywords from positions 6-10 to positions 1-5.”
With SMART goals, you can identify issues in your digital marketing toolbox and sharpen your SEO and digital marketing strategies to succeed in 2023 and beyond.