SEO goals are an important part of any business’s online marketing strategy. After all, what’s the point of investing time and resources into search engine optimization if you don’t have a clear idea of what you want to achieve?
Unfortunately, far too many businesses treat SEO as an afterthought, something that they’ll “get around to” eventually. As a result, their SEO goals are often vague and unfocused. In this article, we’ll show you how to set SEO goals.
Why Should You Set SEO Goals?
Before we dive into how to set SEO goals, let’s take a step back and look at why setting goals is so important.
- Goals give you direction. Without clear goals, it’s easy to get sidetracked and end up wasting time and resources on activities that don’t actually move the needle.
- Goals help you measure progress. You can’t improve what you don’t measure. By setting goals and tracking your progress, you can identify which SEO strategies are working and which ones need to be tweaked or abandoned altogether.
- Goals keep you motivated. Let’s face it, SEO can be a grind. There are always more keyword phrases to target, more backlinks to build, and more on-page optimizations to make. Having clearly defined goals will help you stay focused and motivated, even when the going gets tough.
How to Set SEO Goals?
The first step in setting SEO goals is to brainstorm a list of potential goals. To get the juices flowing, here are a few examples of SEO goals:
- Generate 100 new leads from organic traffic per month.
- Increase organic traffic from search engines by 25% over the next 6 months.
- Achieve a click-through rate (CTR) of 2% for our website’s main homepage.
As you can see, these goals are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. They also meet the criteria for being smart goals.
Once you have a list of potential goals, it’s time to start narrowing them down. Not all the goals on your list will be equally important or achievable.
To help you prioritize, here are a few questions to ask about each goal:
- Is this goal aligned with our business’s overall objectives?
- How important is this goal?
- How realistic is this goal given our current resources and level of expertise?
Answering these questions will help you prioritize your goals and focus on the ones that are most important to your business.
Finally, you need to set a timeframe for each goal. Giving yourself a deadline will help you stay focused and motivated. It will also force you to reevaluate your goals on a regular basis to see if they’re still relevant and achievable.
Tracking Your Progress
Once you have your goals in place, it’s time to start tracking your progress. There are a number of different ways to do this, but we recommend using Google Analytics.
Google Analytics is a tool that’s used by millions of website owners. It’s incredibly powerful and can be used to track just about anything you can think of, from the number of visitors to your site to the average time spent on each page.
Conclusion
Setting SEO goals is an important part of any successful SEO strategy. By taking the time to set smart goals and track your progress, you can ensure that your SEO efforts are always focused and effective.