SEO is getting more and more difficult. It's time to get smarter. Learn how setting SMART goals can improve your SEO strategy.
As with anything, SEO works best when its goals are clearly defined and articulated.
If you set vague goals like “get more leads” or “increase traffic,” you will lack focus and direction. Such vague goals do not provide a clear plan of action and lead to wasted time on general SEO work that will do little to help your mission.
Why goals are important
An objective gives you a target to hit, guiding your SEO strategy. It is also a way to check whether your strategic approaches and actions are working towards achieving your goals.
Goals help measure progress, which is critical in SEO. Perhaps you are not moving forward, which means you need to change tactics or update your goals.
Likewise, progress toward a goal provides a sense of satisfaction and motivation that will help you keep moving forward when SEO seems overwhelming.
What are SEO goals?
SEO goals are aimed at developing your search engine performance and supporting your broader marketing and business objectives. As a rule, you will be focused on increasing recognition and engagement of potential customers in search engines (primarily Yandex and Google).
When working to improve SEO, you'll be looking at rankings, impressions, CTR, clicks, and how that traffic subsequently interacts with the site. Aspects such as opportunity size (search volume and impressions) are also worth considering.
Creating actionable goals is the first step in developing an SEO strategy. The following five steps should be considered:
Specific: The goal must be clearly defined so that it can be measured. Measurable: Goals should be quantifiable to track progress. Achievable: Goals should be realistic within the limits of your resources. Relevance: Goals should be consistent with higher business and marketing goals. Time bound: Goals must take into account the time frame for measurement.
Luckily, marketing has a handy mnemonic to help you remember these critical factors in practical SEO goal setting: SMART goals.
SMART goals for SEO
Let's look at how the steps are broken down and examples of how you can create your own SMART SEO goals.
S: Specific
Being specific is the first step to creating actionable SEO goals.
For example, “improve positions” is not a specific goal. But “enter the top 3 for request X in Moscow” is a specific goal.
A broader but still specific goal might be to increase organic traffic by 25%, but the less specific the goal, the more critical thinking you need to apply to how you will achieve it and include this in your goal statement.
Questions to ask yourself or your team:
What are we trying to achieve? How does this help achieve our marketing goals? What do we need to do to achieve this?
Then make the goal more specific:
"Increase organic traffic by 25% by improving rankings for all our commercial queries on category pages."
M: Measurable
Luckily, in SEO we have many touchpoints we can use to track success.
SEO metrics:
Positions for main conversion queries (regional/general). Positions on secondary benchmark queries. Organic clicks (Yandex.Webmaster/Google Search Console). Organic impressions. Organic CTR. Middle position. Website quality indicators (ICS, Core Web Vitals).
Link building metrics:
Total number of links built. Number of links from authoritative sites. Number of links from relevant sites. Domain and page metrics from SEO tools.
Real metrics:
Increase organic traffic. Increasing the number of pages that generate traffic. Increase in non-branded search traffic. Percentage increase in organic conversions.
A: Achievable
When it comes to SEO, assessing whether your goal is realistic and achievable requires some introspection and hard truths.
We don't want to aim too low; goals must be aggressive. However, we must ensure that our goals are realistic within the constraints of your resources (money, human resources, etc.) and sometimes harsh search reality.
A useful work here is to search your keywords and take a close look at the search results. What do you see? Who's at the top? What types of results are present? Where are the opportunities? What could you do better?
R: Relevant
It's very easy to start chasing the wrong goals.
There are two ways to ensure that your SEO goal is truly relevant:
Explain how this SEO goal helps achieve overall marketing goals. Double-check this with conversion data from PPC advertising.
You want a statement like:
"We want to rank for [x] to improve our visibility and get traffic from customers searching for [x]. This will help us generate more local awareness and attract more leads and sales. Data from Yandex.Direct shows that this the request has a 10% conversion rate, so we know this traffic is very valuable and will generate leads and sales."
T: Time-bound
All goals must have a target date for achievement. If you don't have that deadline, then you don't know when to give up or evaluate your progress.
SEO is different from most marketing tactics in that it can take longer to complete. Therefore, we may not see any actual hard results (sales or leads) right away.
Using SMART Goals in SEO
At my SEO agency, many queries simply say they want to rank #1 for a given keyword (or set of words). This is not a SMART goal.
SMART goals should state why the goal will help achieve business and marketing goals.
You should end up with a simple statement that represents your overall approach to SMART goals. Often you will also have statements for individual goals that the meta goal represents.
Something like:
"We want to increase our organic search leads by 50% in 12 months. We will do this by moving our target queries from positions 6-10 to positions 1-5."
Here's the breakdown:
Specifically: We want to increase organic search leads by 50%. Measurable: Easily measured through rankings, organic traffic and results. Achievable: We can create content better than what is currently in first place. Relevant: This will help us attract more sales for verified queries. Deadline: 12 months gives us a deadline.
This approach also allows you to conduct a simple situational analysis and determine whether all the elements of your digital marketing toolkit are up to the task.
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