Are you sure you’re setting the correct SEO goals for your business? We want to make sure that your SEO goals are not too off-base from your marketing and company goals. We want to tell you that there’s also ways to improve the way you measure your goals to investigate if they all coincide.
Where to begin?
Begin with a mindset that focuses on how you’re going to set SMART SEO goals that are actually measurable, trackable, and pertain to the overall goals of the business.
Hierarchy Of Goals
Business Goals.
First thing’s first – each goal that you place on any team, no matter what department, should correspond with the business’ overall mission, the overall goal it plans to achieve. Start with the company goals; what is it you’re trying to accomplish, and specifically, what is it that you’re trying to accomplish this year, this quarter, this month.
Marketing Goals
When business goals have been given full thought, you’re ready to move down the link and focus on your marketing goals. Here’s how marketing is going to contribute to those company goals; if the company has a goal of increasing sales, marketing’s job is to find a way to help increase sales. No matter what route you choose to do it, the end result should focus on increasing sales. That way we ensure that everyone in the company can clearly see, “Ok, this is why marketing is doing what they’re doing?
SEO Goals
Now, we’ve arrived to what you’ve all been waiting for, the SEO goals. Well, we come to the conclusion that somehow, SEO goals will contribute to the marketing goals, which contributes to the overall goals. If the goal is what we previously mentioned, SEO could be very broad in growing traffic to the top of the sales funnel. If it’s retargeting, you’ve got to be very narrow in your keyword targeting. Align the SEO goals more closely to your marketing goals. It’s teams helping teams achieve the same goal; working as a unit to arrive at the same destination.
How To Measure Your Goals
1. Rankings – Three ways to measure rankings: globally, nationally, or locally. The company chooses which is best aligned with their goals.
2. Organic Search Visits – The raw traffic data from organic search.
3. Separate Organic Search Into Branded vs. Non-Branded – The homepage will most likely always show up for branded organic search versus your resource/service pages will get unbranded search. Tracking which pages show up for which searches can be crucially important for future goal strategies.
4. SERP Ownership – Basically, this is looking at the page of search results that come up for a given query and what results are in there. You may see results that you don’t want and some that you do want. Web pages being indexed for the wrong keyword. Keep in mind your company’s reputation when you’re deciding.
5. Search Volume – Research the amount of searches your branded and non-branded keywords are getting so that you can evaluate which ones to go after and spent time on.
6. Links – The company can measure the growth or loss of links over time. Also, you can look at the authority of these links and which links should be removed.
7. Referral Traffic – You’re going to want to watch the amount of referral traffic and what those refferers are and where they came from.
SEO Goals
Take all these measurable metrics and apply them to the SEO goals your team end up choosing. Make sure they match and coincide with your marketing team and your overall company’s goals. Teams working as one to reach the one ultimate goal.
