Search engine optimization (SEO) is one of the most important aspects of online marketing, as it can generate long-term organic traffic. Organic traffic is a free website traffic source that can help your business succeed even with a small marketing budget. However, setting or knowing what SEO goals to set can be difficult. By setting SMART SEO goals and objectives, you can ensure that you will be able to outrank your competition into the future.
The objectives of SEO depend on what your business model looks like and what is your company’s outcome or ultimate goal. Your ultimate goals should be specific to your brand and constructed with maximum input from team members. Having multiple viewpoints and perspectives will allow your team to conduct SEO marketing correctly to reach your desired SEO benchmarks.
To establish realistic goals and have SEO success as a company, you will first need to know why it is important to set SMART SEO goals. Therefore, this article first defines why SEO goals and objectives are important, then discusses how to set and track them, and finally, how to achieve them for your business.
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What are SEO goals?
SEO goals refer to the specific objectives that a website owner or digital marketer wants to achieve through search engine optimization (SEO). The primary goal of SEO is to improve a website’s visibility and ranking on search engine results pages (SERPs) for relevant keywords and phrases.
Why are SEO goals important?
SEO goals are important because they help you focus your efforts on specific tasks to achieve the best results possible for your company in a desired timeframe. Without a clear understanding of what you want to achieve, it’s too easy to waste time and effort on activities that don’t add up or bring you closer to your goal.
And quite frankly, SEO is essential to all digital marketing strategies; a lack of attention toward your SEO goals can hurt your long-term marketing efforts. Therefore, having SMART SEO goals can help position your online business in a spot to succeed for the years to come.
Additionally, if you are starting a local SEO campaign as a small business, it is essential to set SEO goals for your marketing and business goals. Setting website performance goals will allow you to plan and develop actionable steps with the right components. For example, will you require technical SEO, social media, paid ads, keyword research, or just content for your SEO efforts?
By establishing the right SEO goals, you can determine a potential metric for each of them and set your website up for long-term success.
The first step is understanding how to set SMART SEO goals. As with any goal in life, the best formula is to ensure it is SMART. A SMART plan represents a simple formula that helps increase the success of goals and objectives. It stands for:
S – Specific
M – Measurable
A – Achievable
R – Relevant
T – Time Bound
Each component is essential to complete and meet your SEO goals. Each part of the formula is very specific in the goal-setting process. They are as follows:
Goals need to be specific if you want them to be effective. Specific goals will answer questions like:
- What needs to be accomplished?
- Who’s responsible for it?
- What steps need to be taken to achieve it?
Considering these questions and coming up with the answer to each will ensure your team members are all on the same page regarding the objective.
Here’s an example of a specific SEO goal you can set:
Increase the monthly organic traffic to Clear Door SEO’s website by utilizing content marketing and the best search engine optimization techniques.
How To Set SEO Goals
To set SEO goals, you must define your business objectives and understand your target audience. Here are the steps to set SEO goals:
1. Define your business objectives: Start by understanding your overall business objectives and how SEO fits them. Identify what you want to achieve with your website and how SEO can help you reach those goals.
2. Conduct keyword research: Use keyword research tools to identify your business’s most relevant and valuable keywords. Look for keywords that have high search volume and low competition.
3. Analyze your website’s current performance: Use website analytics tools like Google Analytics to understand your website’s current performance. Look at metrics like traffic, bounce rate, and conversion rates to identify areas for improvement.
4. Identify your target audience: Understand your target audience and what they’re looking for when they search for your products or services. Use this information to create content that addresses their needs and interests.
5. Set specific, measurable goals: Define clear goals for your SEO campaign. For example, you might set a goal to increase organic traffic by 25% in the next six months or improve your website’s search engine ranking for a specific keyword.
6. Develop a plan of action: Once you have your goals in place, develop a plan of action to achieve them. This might include optimizing your website’s content, improving its technical performance, or building high-quality backlinks.
7. Monitor your progress: Monitor your progress regularly and adjust your strategy as needed. Use website analytics tools to track your performance against your goals and identify areas for improvement.
Remember that SEO goals are not set in stone, and you may need to adjust them as you go. Be flexible and willing to adapt your strategy as you learn more about what works best for your business.
So why are SEO goals so important for your business and its ability to succeed on search engines? Let’s jump into that now.
What are the Three SEO Goals?
The three SEO goals to focus on in every campaign are: visibility, traffic and return on investment. Every search engine optimization goal will be grounded in one of these three categories as they are the best and easiest indicators to track success.
When boiled down to the basics, SEO campaigns should work to increase visibility (impressions), traffic (users on your website), and return on investment (money being made from the campaign. Additionally, these are typically the three things that decision makers in companies care about the most. In other words they are the three key performance indicators (KPIs) of any SEO campaign.
When working with an SEO agency, or while doing in house SEO, make sure that all your on-site, off-site and technical SEO strategies contribute to one of these three SEO goals or the SEO KPI that builds up to accomplishing the search engine optimization goal. Of course, your minor objectives and goals can be much different.
Let us look at some SEO benchmarks to target for your SEO campaign 2022.
SEO Goals To Target in 2022:
A few search engine optimization goals to target for your online business in 2022, include:
- SEO Goal #1: Optimize websites internal linking structure
- SEO Goal #2: Increase website conversions
- SEO Goal #3: Increase visitor time on page
- SEO Goal #4: Decrease the websites bounce rate
- SEO Goal #5: Maximize and optimize page speed
- SEO Goal #6: Strengthen the website’s domain authority
- SEO Goal #7: Improve backlink strategy
- SEO Goal #8: Increase organic traffic to the website
Just make sure you remember to make all of these goals into SMART ones!
These are just a few examples of achievable SEO goals. The important thing is to set search ranking goals that are realistic and achievable that can collectively work together as a team to achieve results. The best way to do this is to ensure that you have a solid SEO strategy in place to conduct an initial SEO audit.
With an SEO audit, you can evaluate where your website currently stands, and allow you to plan for your website’s objectives of SEO. As shown above, SEO objectives can be a variety of targeted goals and outcomes, however, if you don’t have data regarding the current performance of your website, it will be hard to measure progress and evaluate success. Thus in the next section we are going to look at how to measure your SEO objectives, and progress using SEO audit tools as well as Google webmaster tools as well.
What Are The Objectives Of SEO?
There are many different objectives of SEO that can be targeted during a digital marketing campaign. It is important to determine which search engine optimization objectives you want to target before you start your optimization efforts. This will allow you to plan ahead effectively and set your business up for success. Four of the most common objectives of SEO are:
1. Increasing website traffic:
This is an important SEO objective as organic search traffic is what SEO is all about. If a webmaster is unable to harness the power of search engines and drive traffic to their website, the website will have a difficult time converting on any of their other objectives.
To increase website traffic, make sure you are creating keyword-targeted content, you can properly optimize your website. Moreover, in order to ensure that these keywords help increase website traffic, it is important to first produce high-quality content.
2. Branding:
Having a strong brand, and having your target audience recognize your brand is another important SEO objective. Whereas, when online companies are able to continuously rank well for keywords in their niche, they are able to build trust and authority with their brand. Ultimately, companies use their SEO efforts to bolster the brand recognition and authority of their brand.
3. Reputation Management:
A common objective of search engine optimization is to manage a company’s reputation online. Whereas, with various off-page SEO efforts, a website can extend its reach to other large authoritative websites that consumers trust. By releasing PR and other updates on websites (such as: Economist, Forbes, Entrepreneur, Harvard Business Review, or other niche specific publications) they can build a strong reputation as being a brand that people can trust and rely on.
4. Lead Generation:
Finally, the most important objective of SEO is to generate leads. None of the other SEO objectives matter if the company is not able to convert website visitors into leads, and eventually paying customers. The return on investment, and the money made from SEO campaigns, are typically the number one objective for companies investing in search engine optimization.
How To Measure Your SEO Progress and Results
When it comes to SEO, it can be difficult to measure your progress and results. After all, search engine optimization is all about improving your website’s ranking in search engine results pages (SERPs), and there are a variety of factors that impact your ranking. Moreover, with constant search engine updates, and constant fluctuation in competition and performance, it can be almost impossible to know where to start when it comes to tracking progress.
However, by using the right SEO tools and techniques, you can measure your website’s SEO performance and progress results fairly accurately.
Google Analytic Tools
One of the best ways to measure your SEO progress is to use tools like Google Analytics and Google Search Console. These tools provide webmasters with a wealth of data about how people are finding and interacting with your website. You can use this data to track the following data:
- Website’s organic search traffic,
- The indexing, crawling and ranking of webpages
- Keywords that are driving website traffic
- Conversion rate
- Bounce rate and time spent on page
SEO Tools
In addition to using Google’s services, you can also use other third party tools to measure website’s SEO progress and results. For example, there are a number of rank tracking tools that can help you track your website’s SERP position for specific keywords. There are also tools that can help you track the number and quality of backlinks pointing to your website.
By using these tools, you can get a fairly accurate picture of your SEO progress and results. However, it’s important to remember that SEO is a long-term game, so don’t expect overnight success. Instead, focus on gradually improving your website’s ranking over time, and you’ll eventually see the results you’re looking for.
A few of these third party SEO tools that we use are:
Common SEO mistakes to avoid while setting goals
One of the most common SEO mistakes is not setting goals or setting website optimization goals that are unrealistic or unachievable.
Businesses go about their SEO tasks with no future goal to strive for. Additionally, this can result in effort being spent doing a lot of different things, which all go in different directions.
What we mean by this is that without a common end goal, or measurable SEO outcome, your team is trying to hit a target with a blindfold on. Without knowing exactly what to aim for, your team can spend significant time on things that may not pay off.
Another common mistake while planning and goal setting for SEO is when companies don’t set SMART objectives and goals for their website. As discussed above it is essential to create goals that are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time bound. When goals are formulated with ‘SMART’ in mind, they will be more effective and results driven.
Moreover, SMART goals will ensure that your whole SEO team is on the same page and working to one overarching outcome.
If you avoid these common mistakes, you will be well on your way to being able to set realistic SEO goals and objectives. Goals and outcomes that are realistic, specific and time bound will allow you and your team to have the most success when working to meet your process goals.
If you are looking for more insight on setting SEO goals for your online business, check out Ahrefs SEO goals resource!
FAQs: SEO Goals
Below are some of the most frequently asked questions when it comes to the goals and objectives of SEO.
1. What are SEO goals and objectives?
The main objectives or goals of SEO are to improve the ranking of a website on search engines and attract more visitors from the search engines. The secondary objective from these two SEO objectives is to increase the return on investment from the campaign.
There are multiple ways in which SEO can help achieve these objectives. Some of the most common methods include improving site content, adding optimized keywords and meta data, creating well-designed websites, and optimizing website design elements like titles, headers, and images.
When you’re designing your SEO strategy, you need to first decide what you want your website to achieve. There are five commonly used objectives of SEO:
– Drive Traffic To Your Website
– Increase Rankings In Search Results Pages
– Generate Leads And Downloads From Your Website
– Increase Revenue From Your Website
– Improve User Engagement With Your Website
2. What is SEO KPI?
Marketing teams use Search Engine Optimization (SEO) KPIs to evaluate the performance of their website for organic search rankings. Measuring SEO metrics and tracking changes month over month is critical for teams to effectively understand their search marketing performance. This data may be used to see which pages are performing well, which keywords are converting best, and where on the internet you may want to improve your SEO.
To track a website’s KPIs, a webmaster can use SEO tools like Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and other third party SEO auditing tools.
3. How do you define and track your SEO goals?
o be successful with SEO, you need to have clear objectives and goals. There are a number of factors that go into determining your SEO goals, including the type of website you’re working on, the target audience you’re trying to reach, and the keywords you’re targeting.
There are a number of different SEO objectives that you may want to pursue, including:
– Ranking higher in the organic search results page (SERP)
– Getting more people to click through from your website to the landing page
– Increasing clicks and visits from unique visitors
– Improving overall site performance metrics like load time, error rates, and bounce rates
To track your progress and ensure that you’re hitting your goals, you’ll need to use a variety of different tools. These include:
– A Content Analysis Tool to measure the quality of your content against industry best practices
– A Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Tool to analyze your website’s keyword density, titles, meta descriptions, backlinks, anchor text links and other factors
To track these components, consider using Google Analytics, Google Search Console, SEMrush, Ubersuggest, or Ahrefs. Finally, it is important to remember that SEO is an ongoing process that requires constant adjustment in order to stay ahead of the competition. By following these guidelines for setting and tracking your SEO goals, you’ll be able to stay on track and achieve your desired outcomes.
Key takeaways: SMART SEO goals and objectives
Now that you understand the basics of an SEO marketing strategy, it’s time to set some goals for your company or website. You want to make sure that your objectives are realistic and achievable. That way you don’t get discouraged and give up before you even start.
It’s also important to set a timeline for each goal, so you can track your progress and results. And lastly, be sure to use measurable metrics to track your success. By following these tips, you’ll be able to set smart SEO goals that will help your business grow online.
If you need help getting started, or if you’re not sure how to measure your progress, contact us and we can assist you. We can help you set achievable goals and track your progress, so you can see the results of your efforts. And by working with a professional SEO agency like us, you can be sure your website is optimized for the best possible results.
