To truly succeed online and reach your website goals, you need to have a solid SEO strategy that supports your offering. This strategy needs to combine your business goals and marketing goals into one cohesive web-based unit.
To start, make sure you have clearly-defined business goals. What is your company trying to accomplish, and when is the goal deadline? Then, ensure that your marketing goals are aligned with the business goals. What is the function of your marketing strategy in achieving your business goals?
Once you have defined your business and marketing goals, you can now work on SEO goals. How will your SEO strategy contribute to your marketing goals? To set the best SEO goals for your company, you can implement the SMART strategy. Like any business, setting goals with the SMART strategy makes them more defined and easier to measure.
SMART goals
In normal business terms, a SMART goal is one that is specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-constrained. These principles can apply to setting SEO goals – they must be specific and clearly-defined; they must be measurable (which is easy with Google Analytics); they must be achievable and realistic; they must be relevant to the business and they must have a deadline.
- Specific – Clearly state what your goals are and ensure that your SEO team is on-board and in agreement. The more concise you can be, the better. This leaves no doubt as to what you are all working towards, and that you have one clear focus.
- Measurable – There are various ways to measure your SEO goals – whether it is through organic search visits, local and international Google rankings, paid or non-paid searches, search volumes, backlinks or referrals.
- Achievable – Your SEO goals need to be realistic and possible to complete. It’s no good saying that you want to increase traffic by 1000% in one week; in perfect circumstances, this could happen, but it’s not exactly realistic or achievable for a small blogger or start-up company.
- Relevant – As mentioned before, your SEO goals need to be relevant to your marketing goals and, ultimately, your company goals. They need to drive the focus of the next biggest entity and align with the entire business plan.
- Time-constrained – The best goals are ones that can be ticked off the list. Time-constrained goals have a deadline, after which you can measure your performance and make any necessary changes before setting new ones. They push your team to work hard before the time is up, and they add urgency to your purpose.
Once you have your SMART goals defined, it’s up to your SEO team to devise the correct strategies that will let you achieve these goals. They will know the best ways to reach these goals and to take your marketing department and business to the next stage of the process.
If you develop the right SEO SMART goals for your team, and you can measure them properly, then you will be able to build and run a special website. If you can align your SEO, marketing and business goals, your company will run like a well-oiled machine.
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