What Are Your SEO Goals?
SEO for many is like a foreign language, and often, just like a foreign language, leaders in an organization only understand un petit bit of SEO. It is only natural that a business leader starts talking about SEO rankings and SEO goals. Basically, the SEO team should sit down and map out their goals, strategies, and tactics.
In this and all cases, SEO strategies should align with the overall organization goals. In order to achieve overall SEO success, the company must identify what the company is trying to accomplish for the year, quarter, or month.
Get Sales and Marketing Involved
Next, determine how are the Sales and Marketing teams are going to meet those goals. Decide what strategies and tactics they will employ to achieve the company strategies. If the company’s goal is to increase sales, there must be a strategy already in place for how sales and marketing will succeed with the new sales goals.
To illustrate, that could mean a plan on how to get more traffic closer to the conversion point; improving the number and quality of customers that get to and ultimately into the conversion funnel.
Your goal may be getting web visitors to come back to the site and into a conversion funnel. Whatever the goals are, the marketing strategy should align and support the company goals.
Why Should I Use SEO?
With this in mind, how does SEO contribute to those goals? As an illustration, the SEO team will want to employ tactics to get traffic to the top of the conversion tunnel, then SEO can be broad in targeting. The specificity comes in bringing people back to the website. In this instance SEO will need to be much more narrow in keyword targeting.
Once there are specific SEO goals, those outcomes can be measured and improved to keep meeting marketing goals. Remember, at the end of the day, someone is going to want to know the ROI of SEO. The more clearly the SEO strategies and tactics can be seen as mapping to marketing, the better.
How Do I Know it is Working?
In essence, measuring SEO directly isn’t all that simple or easy. There are not many things that can be measured directly. Here are seven goal metrics that can be tracked:
- Rankings. Which can be measured in three ways: globally, nationally, or locally.
- Organic search visits. This is just the raw traffic that is sent from organic search.
- Branded search versus non-branded search. This metric is a bit trickier than with paid because it lacks keyword data. Some inference on the analytic side is necessary when looking at the page visits. It is more likely that the pages are receiving branded search traffic, versus non-branded search traffic. On one hand, the home page is likely to be a branded search page. On the other hand, many internal site pages are more keyword driven pages.
- Search volume. If improving brand affinity, reputation and ultimately quantity of branded search is part of the SEO strategy then monitoring search volume is key. What’s more, there are different tools out there to help with search volume, like Google Trends, Google AdWords or Moz Keyword Explorer.
- SERP ownership. What are the page of search results that come up for a given query? There may be mixed results. They can be measured and tactics to increase successful SERP can be implemented.
- Links and link metrics. What is the growth or shrinkage of links over a period of time? These can be measured by looking at the number of linking root domains and the total number of links. Checking out the authority or spam metrics and how those are distributed is also a good measurement tool. Learn more about link building and management here.
- Referral traffic. In your situation, is the referral traffic coming from pages where links were built with SEO intent? Is the traffic intentional?
SEO goals should match up with marketing and company goals that are ultimately going to help the company grow. Setting up specific SEO tactics and strategies and keeping track of measurable goals is important as well.
If you are looking for strategies and tactics that align with your company goals but need a little help, SEOPtiks can work with you to establish, implement, and measure your SEO goals. Contact us for more information about a real SEO strategy that works, info@seoptiks.com, or call 603-821-0129.
