How Smart are your Search Engine Optimization Goals? Introduction When you look up information on popular search engines such as Google, Yahoo, or Bing, you may have noticed that they return search results with content, image, or video listings in order of ranking based on what the search engine considers map closely to the search term. While this may sound ordinary, SEO has an important role to play in improving a website’s position among competitors including increasing traffic to the site and enhancing the market presence. So it is absolutely critical to ensure that the appropriate SEO strategy is implemented to maximize customer base, increase sales and revenue. There are SEO companies that offer professional services to help you realize your SEO goals.
Evaluating Your SEO Goals Any major investment or business strategy takes a keen look at the cost effectiveness of the investment. In order to have a returns on investment that is cost effective while giving maximum returns, considerable research must be carried out to understand market behavior, trends, market constraints and evaluate it against the existing resources and skills to determine reasonable goals that are relevant and can be achieved within reasonable time within a specific budget.
In order to measure progress, the SEO goals must be measurable or should be quantifiable. Giving vague non-quantifiable measure will make it inaccurate or impossible to evaluate whether the goals are achievable, and if so, what is considered an ideal target to aspire for. These sort of difficulties can be resolved by implementing the SMART approach to achieve reasonable, aggressive goals, that can be evaluated. SMART is mnemonic that means Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Timelined. In other words, the goals have to evaluated against the five Ws of What, Who, Which, Where, and Why. For example, you need to first question the goals you want to achieve against your business needs. This can include the need for higher conversion rates, if applicable, and whether the process or tool to achieve this desired goal is even the SEO tool.
Sometimes, you may be surprised to realize that a tool you strongly felt is the right choice, on closer evaluation may not even be the right one. Once you have
decided to go with the SEO approach, then you need to determine the team composition and consider if you will be able to extend your support to the team. While building the team, you will also have to decide between going for external contract agencies or building an in-house team. You can either do a mix of both in proportion to the allocated budget and feasibility or go with either choice.
Next, you must think through how to set SEO KPIs or key performance indicators to establish the link between positive SEO metrics and the increase in business. For this, you need to measure different aspects of the SEO component including number of links from authoritative and relevant sites, the percentage increase in organic search, pages that increase site traffic, to evaluate the SEO strategy.