The first critical step in your digital marketing campaign should be to select the best SEO goals.
SEO goals will set your campaign on the right path for the long-term. This will help save money, stress, and time.
How To Set Seo Goals?
You should set your seo goals factoring in your
• business and strategic goals;
• objectives and requirements of each department and unit of your business; &
• sound understanding of the landscape in your business domain area.
The next move should be to engage all stakeholders from each area of your business; and combine to generate a list of what needs to be done. This will set the process for seo goals before the implementation of seo strategy.
What Constitutes Good Seo Goals?
The main goal of seo is to boost website conversion rates from original traffic. For this to happen, your website should have a prominent ranking on serps. This will garner the attention of searchers facilitating the path for more leads, sales, and eventually revenues.
Aside from this, three important seo goals include:
Brand Visibility
Brand visibility is critical to catch searcher’s attention. The better the visibility is, the better impression the searchers will have of the brand.
Searchers who are customers’ usually consider high ranking on the SERPs as an acknowledgement of brand’s value in the top category bracket. Towards this end, it is vital to have a plan of action focused on increasing organic search exposure for branded keywords.
Branded keywords refer to search phrases or words containing the brand name or brand name’s variation. They not only drive traffic from people already aware of the brand but also drive traffic from people unaware of the brand. They speak about the power of the brand’s visibility with the target-audience.
To track the appropriate branded keywords, you need to
- Prepare a list of specific branded and even non-branded terms.
- Leverage tools to track keyword ranking. Tools are either free or paid. Most free tools are good enough. But there are some that come with certain restrictions. Among free tools, SERP’s Rank Checker is popular. With it, you can track by device, geolocation, and search engine; and later get a report of position history which is better saved in a spreadsheet for future reference. PAID tools are much better option. They let you know ranking history and also offer more flexibility. But you have to pay to use them.
Tracking keyword terms offers precise insights. You will get all the required data in one location; and understand where your business stands and which direction it is moving. In short, it will let you know whether your SEO efforts are proceeding as planned or not.
Site Traffic
You need to make your website count. It needs to offer value for your money by attracting searchers
This is where SEO plays a key role.
Higher search ranking on the SERPs means several hundreds of new site visitors. The more the searcher traffic to your website, the more it will enhance your business profile.
Hence, your 2nd SEO goal must revolve around site traffic; targeted traffic of relevance to your website. This will complement your SEO strategy that intends to attract new prospects to your website.
To attract more traffic, generally high-volume keywords get first preference. But these keywords do not exactly garner higher ranking for start-ups and small site owners. That’s because, most of them tend to have low brand recognition and low domain authority (DA) score. Aside from this, SERPs for them don’t have a clear focus.
Hence, to make the goal of Site Traffic count, search volume must be balanced with other factors like search intent and organic competition. And keywords must be ones that are associated with your business domain area or expertise segment.
To track site traffic, Google Analytics and Data Studio tools can be leveraged. They help in monitoring and obtaining reports of the results of SEO campaigns, whether they are successful or not. When it comes to reporting on traffic, restraint must be exercised. A maximum of seven KPIs (Average Session Duration; Bounce Rate; Pages per session; Page Views; Sessions; & Users) must be reported else anything more than that tends to get overlooked.
ROI
When customers’ invest their money in SEO services, they expect quality return on investment (ROI). In case, they do not get or are not able to validate the return on their investment, then they will stop investing in SEO.
ROI can be interpreted in many ways. They generally are interpreted in line with business goals. Each business will have own set of goals based on which all SEO activities must align. Most business goals include leads and sales.
To learn how SEO goals play a role in facilitating leads and sales, they must be tracked. This can be done with Google Analytics tool. Using the ‘Goals’ function in Google Analytics, you can measure the impact of SEO efforts. Then using Data Studio, the findings can be reported.
SEO can provide many benefits. To extract the best out of SEO and obtain maximum benefits, it’s important to have clear SEO goals.
Conclusion
Having clear SEO goals matters a lot.
They not only ensure proper implementation of SEO strategy but also mention appropriate SEO KPIs that needs to be tracked. This will eventually ensure your customer gets value for his/her money.
