SEO Goals

[chetna]

What's a good goal to set for your SEO?

[eCommerceChamp]

How can you set and achieve aggressive yet realistic SEO goals in 2018? Columnist Marcus Miller explains what SMART goals are and how to apply them to your SEO campaigns.
SMART goals
SMART goals set out a series of criteria that can be used for setting marketing objectives. This is all wrapped up in the clever mnemonic acronym — Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Timelined — which makes SMART goals so easy to remember.

S — Specific
Specific objectives are crucial to success in any marketing campaign. We need to know what a goal or conversion is for your website and how this relates to the broader business objectives. It is easy to think, “We want to rank #1 for various search terms,” but that’s just a detail. What we really want is more exposure, more visits and more leads or sales.

It’s essential to ensure that our goals are crystal-clear and connected to our business objectives so that everyone from the boardroom to the marketing department understands what success looks like.

M — Measurable
The promise of digital marketing is that everything can be measured. But simply installing analytics is rarely enough. We have to be specific regarding our SEO goals so we can ensure we know how to measure these goals and then how to illustrate that improvements in SEO metrics are clearly correlating with improved business results. As an example: a 50 percent rise in organic traffic resulted in a 50 percent rise in conversions from organic traffic.

There are many business and SEO KPIs we can track here, but here are a few to consider:

SEO metrics

Rank for main converting keywords (local/organic).
Rank for secondary benchmark keywords (local/organic).
Citation Flow.
Trust Flow.
Trust & Citation Balance.
Link-building metrics

Total links built.
Number of links from authority sites.
Number of links from relevant sites.
Real-world metrics

Increase in organic traffic.
Increase in number of pages on the site that generate traffic.
Increase in non-branded search traffic.
Percentage increase in organic conversions.
Organic Impressions (Search Console).
A — Achievable
This is a big one with regard to planning. We want to set aggressive goals so we aim high (maybe our chance of hitting the goal is 50 percent), but we don’t want to set our goals too high such that they are simply unattainable.

Key areas to consider here are:

SEO feasibility: Can you target the keywords you are going after?
Situation: Are you in the same league as the big players on the first page?
Resources: Do you have the resources to hit these goals?
Developing SMART goals will often be an iterative process as we consider what we want and what is achievable in our campaign window with our available resources.

R — Realistic
Setting realistic SEO goals requires a solid understanding of the search results for the search terms you are targeting. If you are a national business and results for the keywords you are targeting show only local business results, then ranking in the top three may be an uphill battle. However, you may be able to generate first-page visibility with really well thought out location pages.

Realistic has to take the following into consideration:

Can this be done?
Do we have enough resources to do this?
So, you may decide that you can achieve your objective, but your goals for 2018 are to move you 80 percent of the way toward the finish line.

Realistic vs. achievable is an important distinction, as it plays into the short- and long-term nature of SEO as a marketing tactic. You may have to invest for 12 months to reach your goal, so ROI during this period may be low, and you have to factor this into your budgets when lining SEO up against more instant forms of marketing like PPC.

Note: “R” can also stand for “relevant” when considering SEO goals. It’s important to ensure that the keywords or traffic we are targeting are relevant to the products or services we provide. If we increase rankings and traffic without seeing an improvement in conversions, odds are the traffic is not relevant enough.

T — Timelined
Time is hugely important when setting SEO goals, as SEO will often take far longer than other forms of online marketing. PPC delivers visibility and traffic instantly. And no objective can ever fail if it is not timed. So we have to be realistic about what can be achieved in a given time period.

It is not always easy to determine how long SEO will take or cost, yet we must do all we can to estimate timelines and use our KPIs to track progress toward the goal.

[tradingstacks]

* Measuring Targets
* Establishing Benchmarks
* Developing Your Action Plan
* Expanding Your SEO Footprint
* Increasing CTR of Current SERPs

[AMFan102]

SEO, or search engine optimization, is the process by which people take to make sure that the websites are appealing to the search engines. Even though techniques can vary depending on your industry, the main idea is to make sure the basic white hat tactics are followed on a regular basis.

[imriakapoor]

Every website should have its own goal while some remaining in common like traffic & leads

[evejones]

If you need guidance on goals too, why do you even do SEO?

[ShriBalaJiUdyog]

Thanks for sharing such amazing information.

[yuva12]

The ultimate goal of SEO is to increase the site's usability so that you can bring the right people in from the search engines. The purpose of your site should be clearly defined so that you can make sure your site achieves that purpose.

[nancy07]

SEO Golas are:

- Increase Traffic
- Increase Ranking
- Increase Website Goals
- Increase Business Conversation
- Increase Website Authority.

[Gaurav06]

Ranking
Traffic
Conversion
Engagement
Profit.
SMART GOALS:-
It’s important that every goal that you determine is formed by the SMART-structure. This structure makes sure that you form goals that are valuable and don’t give false or incomplete information.
SMART is an abbreviation for Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic and Timely.

[Saurabh]

Lead Generation and Direct Marketing. Build customers and revenue, one form-pop at a time.
2: Increase Raw Traffic to Your Website.
3: Increase E-commerce Sales

[mihirthakur]

you should keep a realistic goals .

[rafiakhan]

The SEO goals are to be set are to increase the website traffic, more brand awareness and visibility, more sales and revenues, more improvement in website rank.

[Sara James]

The first goal of SEO is to get a top position on SERP. This is important in terms of getting traffic and increase sales and earn money. The Value - Producing Objective for SEO are: 1.