Most professionals realise the importance of effective goal setting, especially in the marketing department. If not formulated correctly, goals can be elusive, arbitrary and abstract making them all the more impossible to achieve. So, there’s no downplaying the value of great goal setting – an approach that should be extended to various areas of your business, including your SEO marketing.
Avoid the obvious pitfall of traversing the online marketing landscape blindly and goalless by formulating a focused strategy that contains goals that communicate what your business needs to achieve.
SMART Goals for Your SEO Marketing
The tried-and-trusted SMART goal-setting approach is just as effective today as it was in the early 80s when it was taken for its first test drive and is a useful method to define and achieve your SEO marketing goals.
S stands for Specific
To avoid stepping into a trap of being too general and unspecific, keep in mind that your goals should be focused on what your bespoke outcomes need to be. Although it may be an excellent SEO marketing benefit, a goal like, “increase organic search traffic” lacks clarity, as it disregards the process of reaching the goal – the how.
Ahrefs solves this problem with its SEO Goal Pyramid, which divides goals into outcomes, performance and process goals. Start by formulating the outcome goal – the overarching goal you’re aiming to achieve; then segment this into smaller sub-goals that each contributes in some way to the outcome goal – the performance goals, and finally divide the performance goals into manageable and executable process goals. These are stepping-stones to meeting your performance goals eventually leading to achieving the outcome goal.
M stands for Measurable
SEO marketing is simple enough to measure and track when you make use of adequate tools and platforms, but it’s important to set a benchmark when setting your goals. Add a particular percentage or number that is realistically attainable for your business. Such as, “increase organic engagement rate by 15%”.
A stands for Attainable/Achievable
It is crucial that your SEO marketing goals are realistic to achieve, but also that it poses a challenge to attain them. To know what is within your control and what you can improve to achieve your SEO goals is equally important, and there are various initiatives that you can action to get closer to meeting your objectives, such as keyword research, competitor analysis, site audits, optimising new and existing content, etc.
It may not be possible to control every variable in your SEO marketing endeavour, so it is worth aligning your SMART goals to the conversion funnel, which defines the various stages of your customer journey, including awareness, consideration and conversion. This should give you a bird’s eye view allowing you to spot trends which could inform your approach to optimising for SEO in advance. This makes your strategy agile enough to adapt where needed to better meet your short-term goals and, eventually, your outcome goals.
R stands for Relevant/Realistic
Though the scope of SEO is huge, it’s important to make sure that your SEO marketing goals are relevant to your unique business marketing needs and that these goals are relevant considering your business’s capabilities and limitations.
A good place to start is to consider your business’s SEO maturity level. Is your business brand-new and do you have little to no SEO? In this case, your goals can be steeper at the onset as you work towards establishing a solid foundation to start with. For an existing company that has a higher level of SEO maturity and that actively maintains aspects that feed into its SEO, growth can be expected to be steadier, and goals should reflect this tendency.
T stands for Timeframe
Your goals should be completed by a predetermined and agreed-upon deadline. Allocating time to a goal ensures that the goal is prioritised and does not get put on the back burner. It also sets a manageable pace to the workflow, clearly delineating to all parties involved when this goal will be met thereby effectively managing expectations. For example, returning to the previous goal, we can add, “increase organic engagement rate by 15% in 6 months”.
iLEAD et al can Achieve Your SEO Marketing Goals
Using the SMART approach to goal setting will help you align your SEO goals effectively to your overall business marketing objectives. Still, though it is a great starting point, SEO success requires much more than top-notch goal setting. Make sure you call on an established Google Premier Partner agency with the expertise to turn your SEO goals into proven results. Contact iLEAD et al today.
