SEO is a powerful tool for businesses that want to boost their organic traffic. However, many marketing teams make the mistake of jumping into campaigns without setting SMART goals.
In this article, we’ll break down the process for setting SMART SEO goals. We’ll discuss what this goal-setting framework is and how it works. From there, we’ll dive into a practical tutorial on how to set SMART goals for your SEO strategies.
The importance of setting goals for SEO
When planning your search engine optimization (SEO) campaign, setting practical goals is essential. This gives you a target aim with your efforts. When you “do SEO” just for the sake of it with no real direction, your chances of achieving any meaningful success.
Setting goals allows you to direct your efforts more intentionally. It also allows you to be strategic about allotting time and resources, as you can project your return on investment (ROI). Of course, you won’t know your exact ROI until the campaign is complete, but using your goals to create a rough idea will help you better direct your investments.
That’s where the SMART framework comes into play.
What are SMART goals?
The SMART goal model is valuable in many business use cases, and SEO is no exception. This framework involves setting goals that are specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound.
These criteria are meant to help you set achievable and valuable goals for your business. With that in mind, let’s take a closer look at the different parts of this SEO goal-setting process.
Specific
Vague goals are hard to reach. Think about if you were playing darts with no dartboard. You won’t hit the bullseye if there isn’t one to hit. That’s why it’s crucial to set specific goals.
Numbers are significant here. You should set goals that are concrete and quantifiable. For example, “improve SEO” is not very specific. However, “increase organic traffic to 10,000 clicks per month on mysite.com” is much more concrete.
By getting specific, you know exactly what you’re setting out to achieve. Plus, when you’re specific with your goals, there is less room for miscommunication about the expectations across your team. It helps to ensure everybody is aligned on what you want to achieve.
Measurable
A second layer to setting a specific goal is ensuring that it’s measurable. This is crucial for tracking progress toward the goal.
You can track number-based metrics by analytics or a tracking tool for creating measurable SEO goals. For example, “increase brand awareness” is hard to measure, but “gain 1000 email subscribers” is very concrete.
Ensure your tech stack includes the tools you need to measure your progress. Later in this guide, we’ll discuss some tools for measuring SEO analytics.
Attainable
Another important aspect of setting actionable SEO goals is ensuring they are attainable. If your domain authority is fifteen and you currently get under 100 clicks per month, a goal of 1,000,000 clicks per month after a three-month campaign probably isn’t realistic.
Assess your current search rankings and traffic to find a sweet spot that challenges you to grow but still falls within the realistic range. You should also look at your site’s historical data and the results of past campaigns to inform your goal-setting.
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Relevant
When setting strong goals of SEO, they must be relevant to your business. They should align with other marketing campaigns and push the needle toward your overall business objectives.
Relevant moves in your SEO content strategy are particularly important since Google uses all of the data on your website to determine the context of your content and rank you for relevant keywords. Adding irrelevant content to your website or content that doesn’t provide value to your audience can hurt your search engine rankings.
Time-bound
Another critical aspect to consider when setting SEO objectives is to create time constraints. Of course, you’ll likely have long-term SEO goals from ongoing initiatives, but for specific projects and campaigns, creating short-term SEO goals with particular timelines is key.
Time constraints are vital to keeping your team accountable for a campaign, which helps maximize your success. It helps prevent initiatives from being deprioritized or pushed off until your team has spare cycles.
Plus, by setting time constraints, you can compare apples to apples when studying the results of campaigns. You can assess the impact on the initiative’s results against the length of the initiative to help set your timeframes for setting future goals.
How to set a SMART goal for SEO
Now that you understand what a SMART goal is and its relevance to SEO, it’s time to implement this framework. Here are five steps you can follow when setting achievable SEO goals.
1. Identify your goal
The first step to setting your SMART SEO goal is to think about what you want to achieve. The most common goals of SEO are to drive traffic to a website, generate brand awareness, and collect more leads.
These are good starting points for setting your goals, but you must get more specific. Map out what exactly you want to accomplish. It might take some time to narrow down your goals and make them specific,
As we mentioned, it’s very important to ensure that your team aligns withwhat you want to achieve. Your marketing team is likely the driving force behind your SEO goal setting, but aligning with your leadership and product teams can also help you hone in on your goal.
2. Determine how to measure your results
Next, you should decide how you’re going to measure your results. Narrow down which metrics you’ll watch and how to identify and track them.
Many common SEO goals focus on metrics like clicks, views, click-through rate (CTR), and rankings. You could take this further to measure conversions, such as sales, inquiries, email newsletter signups, lead magnet downloads, and so forth.
Google Search Console is an excellent tool for measuring basic SEO metrics like clicks and CTRs. You can filter your results based on URLs, keywords, and more to generate the needed reports. The best part about this tool is that it’s free to use.
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Google Analytics is handy for more advanced metrics, like site conversion rates. It’s a little more complex than Google Search Console but also free to use.
3. Ensure your goal is attainable
From there, you’ll want to make sure your goal is attainable. When you set realistic goals, you’ll set yourself up for success from the start. If your goals are out of reach, you’ll be frustrated when you don’t hit the mark.
As you set achievable goals, looking at them in terms of a percent change from previous results can also be helpful. For example, you might aim to increase your monthly traffic by 10%. Of course, you’ll still be aiming for a specific number of clicks, but framing it as such can make it easier to determine if it’s practical.
You also need to have the budget and bandwidth to achieve the goal. For example, if you plan to publish 20 articles over two months, you need to ensure you have the budget for content creation and editing. You may also need additional SEO support, such as link building, and website optimization.
4. Make sure your goal is relevant
Ensuring your SEO goals are relevant to your broader business goals is also imperative. For example, there might be the potential to rank for random keywords with low search competition. However, it’s crucial to ensure that you aim to increase traffic from relevant search queries.
It’s also worth noting that although a keyword may seem worth targeting, the intent might not fully align with your brand or offer. Leaning into long-tail keywords with obvious intent is a great way to ensure relevance to your target audience.
5. Set the time constraints
The final step in setting practical SEO goals is to set time constraints for the initiative. Give yourself a timeframe to reach your goal. Start by determining a target date for achieving your goal.
At this stage, it’s also helpful to map out the timeline for your campaign. Take the target date for your goal and work backward to determine a timeframe for brainstorming, strategizing, execution, and implementation.
Make sure your team stays accountable for the timeline. Only extend deadlines when necessary so you don’t fall into the trap of deprioritizing the project.
Common SEO goals
Before we discuss a practical example of using the SMART framework to set SEO goals, let’s examine some popular objectives in the SEO space.
We’ve used the example of improving traffic several times in this guide since it is one of the most common SEO goals. However, you might consider several other SEO goals when creating your strategy. Some other common SEO goals include:
- Increasing how much time users spend on the page
- Secure more backlinks from high-quality domains
- Increase your conversion rates (make more sales, book more calls, etc.)
- Improve click-through rates
- Reduce bounce rates
- Improve domain authority (DA) / domain rating (DR)
- Improve website performance (increase load speeds, ensure pages are indexed, etc.)
Your long-term goal likely involves several or all of the accomplishments from this list, but remember to keep it very specific for each campaign you plan.
The SMART goal framework in action
Every goal for SEO looks a little bit different. However, if you’re having trouble visualizing what the SMART goal-setting process framework would look like for your brand, reviewing an example goal will help.
With that said, your SMART goal for an SEO campaign could look something like this:
- Specific: We aim to drive 10,000 visitors to our website through an SEO campaign that includes 50 new articles and 25 new landing pages.
- Measurable: We will measure this goal by tracking clicks on the website with Google Search Console.
- Attainable: Past campaigns have generated 75% of this traffic, so we can hit our ultimate goal by making calculated improvements to our efforts.
- Relevant: The traffic we generate from this campaign will be on articles and pages that target keywords with user search intent related to our brand.
- Time-bound: We aim to achieve these goals within six months of launching the campaign.
If you need help setting performance goals for your SEO initiatives, investing in consulting with an SEO strategist can help.
Bonus: 3 tips for reaching your SEO goals
Before we wrap things up, let’s look at a few tips for reaching your SMART SEO goals.
1. Write them down
When you establish your goals, write them down and share them with your team. Everybody who is involved in the project should be able to refer back to the goal at any time.
According to Forbes, having written goals helps you plan better and increases your chance of achieving them.
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It’s wise to include this goal at the top of any briefs for work related to the campaign. It helps everybody stay focused and keep their eyes on the prize.
2. Create stepping stones
We talked about the importance of creating timelines for your time-bound goals, but you can take this further. Break each phase of the project into measurable milestones. Use these stepping stones to create a system that will ensure your success.
Each step becomes more manageable by breaking the project into smaller phases with dedicated due dates. Plus, when you lay out smaller milestones throughout your project, tracking your progress and ensuring you’re moving toward your larger goal is easier.
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3. Prioritize accountability
SEO campaigns have a lot of moving parts. Naturally, this means there are usually quite a few people involved in bringing these moving parts together. Since it requires a team effort, each person involved must be held accountable for doing their part.
Regular check-ins are great for keeping everybody on task and ensuring team members meet all on the planned timeline. If you have project managers on your team, this is a great time to tap into their support.
Final thoughts
Setting SMART goals for SEO helps you stay focused on your initiatives. This framework is an excellent way to set you up for success.
As you develop your SEO strategy, remember all the moving parts required to reach your goals. For example, link building strategies are a crucial part of preparing your domain to boost your ranking potential. Ensuring your site speed is optimized is vital, as well.
If you need support with link building, look no further. uSERP is here to help you secure links from high-quality domains to help you achieve realistic SEO goals. Book a call to learn how to get started!
