Defining SEO Goals for Your Company

SEO - Goals

Search Engine Optimization (or SEO for short) is on everyone's lips - not just now, but for many years. Quite rightly - SEO offers the opportunity to be found and seen on the Internet with its almost 1.9 billion websites. And preferably by the right people. This means above all, by people who correspond to your own target group.

In the last two years, SEO has taken another real upswing - thanks to Corona. Due to the pandemic, many consumers moved to the Internet, especially for trade, websites are sometimes the most important form of distribution. On the other hand, even the most traditional companies became aware that they need to accelerate the transition to digitization. SEO plays a key role here, because on the way to customers, it offers one of the most important and cost-effective options.

The point is to do the right thing at the right time. The basis for any SEO success is the implementation of a SEO campaign based on relevant SEO goals. What are these? Good question, answer: You determine that yourself.

Table of Contents:

• What are the SEO goals?
• Why should SEO goals be defined?
• What is important in the definition of SEO goals?
  • Supposedly with a business strategy
  • Stay realistic
  • Keyword-oriented goals
• What are suitable goals for SEO?
• Which SEO tools help to measure and achieve SEO goals?

What are the SEO goals?

SEO goals are specific and objectively measurable goals that you want to achieve over a certain period of time. Each goal should contribute to the success of SEO: reach more potential users through organic search and turn them into customers. In short: increase business.

Why should SEO goals be defined?

"A properly set goal is already half achieved." - as Zig Ziglar said. Properly defined goals are the foundation of subsequent success. They are reference points and guidelines for all points of a strong SEO strategy. Clear SEO goals serve as a decision-making aid and yardstick by which you can measure all activities and every content. Clearly defined SEO goals help to understand what all efforts are aimed at, where the invested money is flowing and what you can expect.
Conversely, no or incorrect SEO goals lead to unrealistic and false expectations. For example, after a few weeks or months of changes to the website, companies often assume that they no longer need SEO because "everything" is already optimized. However, SEO is a continuous process, so it's a marathon, not a sprint. Continuous testing and improvement against the backdrop of clear SEO goals is the secret of continuous success.

In other words: the lack of well-set SEO goals is like shooting in the dark. Choosing the right SEO goals for your corporate website is a crucial first step in your digital marketing campaign. It saves time, money, and stress if you know your marketing end goals and work towards them purposefully.

What is important in the definition of SEO goals? 

Supposedly with a business strategy

Good SEO should not take place in a vacuum. Important points of reference are your business objectives, the needs of the sales and customer support team, and detailed knowledge of your competitive landscape. Include your key stakeholders in every area of your business and work together to create a list of needs. You will be surprised how SEO can help each team achieve its goals. However, there is no one-size-fits-all blueprint. An organization that operates locally must pursue a different strategy than an organization with international reach. Your SEO efforts should align directly with the company's goals, so ask yourself:

Which SEO result contributes to the broader goals of your organization?

A look at the corporate mission statement, frequently asked questions in meetings, etc. can help with the answer.

Stay realistic

Align your SEO goals with reality. This includes a detailed knowledge of the competitors of the market, as well as your own strengths and weaknesses. So conduct market research and thorough competitor analyses. This is the basis for understanding which companies are at the forefront of search engines and what they offer.
If you only have a few competitors of similar size, it's much easier to compete for short and simple keywords. On the other hand, it can be laborious and expensive to compete with strong, well-established trade brands for a place on the first page of organic searches.

But here too there is no blanket solution. The better you know your competitors, the easier it is to define realistic SEO goals.

Also, your previous analyses can help to formulate future objectives with the existing data. Suppose the analyses of the last year show that the organic traffic on your website has already increased by 20% without major SEO efforts. In this case, you can assume that your SEO investment will double this percentage and you can set the goal of increasing organic traffic by 40%.

Avoidance of unspecific goals

Many make the mistake of setting generic SEO goals, such as "Increase traffic". The main problem with this is that the what and how is completely neglected. What do you need to do to achieve it? How do you get there?
"Generate more traffic" is too broad. Rather, align your SEO goals with SMART :

Specific

Specify exactly what you want to achieve with your SEO efforts. If you want to generate "more leads", ask yourself: "More leads than what? Last quarter? Or last year?"
What is the exact number you want "more" of and how much more do you want? If you generated 1,000 leads last year, a specific goal could be 50% more, or 1,500 leads in the coming year.

Measurable

Define which metrics you will use to measure your progress toward achieving your goals? If it is a long-term goal, create milestones that will lead you to your goal.
An example: You have decided to generate 1,500 leads in 12 months. If you develop quarterly goal
provisions to measure progress, you'll quickly notice if you don't reach 375 leads in the first quarter. In this case, you should adjust some SEO activities and thus increase the speed to reach your annual target (1,500 leads).

Achievable

Can you achieve your goals with the resources you currently have? If you want to generate 40 times more leads in the coming year, do you have the budget and the team to achieve this? So adjust your capacities and your SEO know-how accordingly – possibly also through external support. If you want to work with existing capacities, also align your goals with them and do not screw the numbers into unreachable heights.

Relevant

What is the benefit of your goal? Does it correspond to your general KPIs and company objectives? Ask yourself: "Will the goals benefit the company as a whole?" If yes, specify this in the goal itself: "Increasing leads by 40% in 12 months will help the company get closer to its annual goal of gaining a larger market share." Never formulate your goals as an end in itself or for personal profiling.

Time-bound

If you set an end date for your goal, the priorities of all parties involved remain aligned and the pace on the way to the finish line is set. Knowing that there is a defined point in time for achieving it, gives all stakeholders an important orientation for achieving the desired result within the given time.

SMART means: Instead of "Achieving more traffic", "Ranging among the top 3 for [high-quality keyword] in 6 months" would be the much better goal. It is specific and relevant, as ranking for [high-quality keyword] will increase sales. It is measurable because you can track your keyword rankings with every good rank tracking tool, e.g. the Rank Tracker from Ahrefs , can follow. It is achievable because you have already assessed the keyword difficulty. And it is time-based because you have specified the timeframe.

What I particularly like about SMART SEO goals is that they also make it clear when you can celebrate your successes!

Keyword-oriented goals

Of course, Keywords are important and make up a large part of the SEO strategy. However, you should know that focusing on very popular and obvious keywords also limits the possibilities of SEO actions. Those responsible often only see the common search words as a sign of success and set them as a goal. Ranking for popular and widespread keywords is often difficult and incredibly complex if you compete with big players in a developed market such as the textile trade.
Obvious keywords divert attention from long-tail keywords, which often have more potential in markets with strong competition. They may be less searched, but are often a key to success.

What are suitable goals for SEO?

Regardless of the goals you set for your company, it's also important to monitor KPIs for each SEO goal. One of the methods that helps to define the right metrics and regularly monitor how the broader, strategic SEO goals are being achieved is the OKR method.

OKR stands for: Objectives and Key Results. It is an easily understandable system for defining goals, which also contributes to good collaboration between individual teams. But first, it is important to understand the method itself.

Objectives are SEO goals that you want to achieve. Define these objectives as clearly as possible and make sure they are SMART.

Key Results are metrics to track the progress of the goal. It directly measures whether your goals were achieved or not.

It is also important to understand the difference between OKRs and KPIs. OKRs focus on a specific goal that you want to achieve in a specific timeframe (e.g., a quarter), while KPIs typically measure ongoing work or existing processes.

OKR is usually measured quarterly and serves the transparent collaboration of agile marketing teams. However, the frequency of results checking depends on the goal itself. So you can also significantly shorten the period. For example, if your website traffic is concerned, daily tracking is certainly sensible. In addition, you can involve all SEO stakeholders in OKR and work together to achieve the SEO goals.
With the help of OKR tools , you can easily set goals and monitor their achievement.

SEO OKRs Examples:

Objective 1: Increase organic traffic to the landing page by 15% in the next 6 months

Key Results:

• Increase of 1-10 keywords by 15% this quarter
• Increase of total do-follow backlinks by 30%
• Establishment of an executive keyword strategy in the next 3-6 months
• Update of 5 expiring Content
  Creation of 15 content articles, which have at least 10 internal links
• Increase Click-through Rate by 10%

Objective 2: Increase the average session duration on our blog pages by 33% by the end of the year.

• 15% more blog subscribers
• 25% more dwell time on the page
• 20% more social media shares of blog content
• Creation of 50 Content SEO - Articles , which have at least
  10 internal links
• Building 100 valuable backlinks to the blog articles
• Publication of 10 guest articles relating to the blog content

Which SEO tools help to measure and reach SEO goals?

SEO is one of the most measurable areas in digital marketing. Depending on your goals and KPIs, you should also rely on a metric to get an overview of most activities around your website, as well as capture the best and most detailed pictures of customer behavior and website performance. There are some useful tools on the market for this. On OMR Reviews you can find an Overview of all SEO tools and compare them with real user reviews.

Ahrefs is one of my favorite SEO tools. It's not only the second fastest web crawler (behind Google) but also has the best UI of all the tools. It is mainly used for backlink audits, competitive analyses, URL rankings, and keyword research. Ahrefs also provides organic search reports to analyze traffic on your competitors' websites. You can then use this extracted data for link building, keyword research, SEO strategies, rank tracking, and content marketing.

Another all-in-one package that covers most of your SEO requirements is Sistrix. This powerful SEO tool can help you to depict the visibility of your website within SERP based on ranking data. Whether monitoring keyword changes, comparing competitor websites, or finding potential backlinks - Sistrix certainly shines.