The Importance Of Goal Setting For SEO
Setting SEO goals and calculating Return On Investment (ROI) is an area in which SEO generally lags far behind the Paid Ads industry. It’s painful to observe how readily companies will spend £100s or £1000s on Google and Facebook paid ads, simply because Google and Facebook give you statistics to justify your spending; while at the same time avoiding spend on SEO because they can’t see such a clear connection with results or ROI.
However much the marketing team believes in the value and return that SEO can bring, they still need to justify the spend on SEO to avoid being told by senior management that this is an ‘expense’ that they can no longer afford, even though it’s bringing in business that is keeping the company alive!
The solution lies in setting SEO goals that relate to bottom-line results and making the connection between the end sale and the initial SEO activity that helped to generate it in the first place.
How To Set SEO Goals
There are 3 main types of goals you can set for an SEO campaign. A blend of these 3 goal types can provide the right mix of focus – focus on what will drive the results, but also keeping an eye on the results themselves.
Ranking Goals
- Rank for 5 specific search terms (identified using Keyword Research), on page 1 of Google, within 6 months
- Rank for 10 specific search terms, in positions 1-3 on page 1 of Google, within 3 months
- Rank for 50 search terms, on page 1 within 12 months
Traffic Goals
- Double organic traffic to the website within 3 months
- Increase visits to this key product page from 300 unique visitors per month to 1000 unique visitors per month
- Decrease the bounce rate from 73% to below 50% (by attracting the right kind of visitors who are interested enough to stay on the website and browse around)
Conversion Goals
- Get 7 new customers per month, from organic visits (natural search visits, not paid ad visits) to the website
- Get 15 new enquiries each week, from organic visits to the website
- Get 1000 new email subscribers per week from organic search traffic
Normally it is best to have SEO goals from all 3 categories:
- It is the ranking positions that drive the traffic, so some focus on this is helpful
- It is possible to have high rankings and yet unexpectedly low traffic, and/or low-quality traffic, so monitoring traffic levels and quality is an important step
- Conversion goals are the most crucial as they’re the ones that bring you the sales to keep the business afloat, but due to the extra effort required to track conversions, they are the SEO goals most often ignored. And without the ranking and traffic goals, conversions from SEO are unlikely to be achieved, as the focus will be on the end result only, without having the needed focus on the earlier stages needed before you can arrive at the desired end result.
SEO Goal Deadlines
All the above goals need to have a deadline – SEO companies have a tendency to avoid setting deadlines for their achievements because there are so many variables involved that affect progress, but in reality, with enough focus and effort, pretty much any result can be achieved within quite a short timescale like the examples above.
Business owners and managers are interested in getting to a pre-agreed sales target by a pre-agreed date, and the unwillingness to commit to deadlines by SEO companies is a prime reason why business leaders so often dismiss SEO, saying it is a “soft marketing ploy that doesn’t produce tangible results”.
It only needs regular monitoring and focus throughout the campaign period, and extra effort putting in where results are lagging behind target, and it’s amazing what can be achieved, so don’t be afraid to put a timeframe to your SEO goals.
How to track SEO Goals
Ranking Positions are easy to track.
Your SEO company should provide you with some kind of dashboard where you can log in and view these, or at least they should report monthly on the ranking positions of the search terms that you’re targeting.
You may notice that if you do your own search in a standard web browser to validate the ranking positions on your SEO report, the search engine ranking position (SERP) that you achieve rarely ties up with the ranking position on the SEO report.
This is because Google likes to add a deliberate ‘bias’ to the search results in your browser, based on your past search history, your location, and other factors – if you’re logged in to Google when you search the effect is even more pronounced,
To some extent, you can nullify some of this Google Bias by using an incognito browser window and logging out of Google, but some bias will remain, so it is safer to go by the report from your SEO agency which is normally produced using software that checks average rankings over a specific region or country.
For the DIY SEO-ers out there, there is a great free keyword rank-checking tool that utilises Google Sheets, produced by RankTank. This doesn’t give you graphs or trends over time but is a great free tool if you don’t want the expense of paid tracking software.
Traffic Goals are easy to track once you learn your way around Google Analytics. You can read in our blog about Google Analytics and Tag Manager, and if you need any advice or help to set this up, please contact us and we’ll be glad to assist.
Conversion Goals can be more difficult to track, although some kinds of conversions are quite easy to measure.
If you run an eCommerce/webshop style website, and your goal is based on orders received through the online checkout, then this is relatively easy to measure, as all the data is on your website – all you have to do is connect the website’s webshop data to your reporting dashboard. You may want to consider advanced tracking to trace the IP addresses of visitors so you can see when someone doesn’t buy on their first visit, but then comes back later and purchases on the 2nd or 3rd visit – this kind of multi-visit activity can give misleading statistics if you don’t track which visitors are new and which are returning.
Enquiry-generating websites (where the website just generates an enquiry and then the sale is closed offline in the sales office rather than on the website) make it harder to track enquiries right through to sale conversions. You can either take the simple route and only measure the enquiries generated, along with a calculation of closing rate percentage from past data, or you can instruct your office team to manually track and record the original source of the enquiry against each end sale. Good CRM software is a great help here, Hubspot is a market leader when it comes to automatically tag every new contact on your database with an enquiry source, and Ruler Analytics is a highly customisable software package to ‘close the loop between the enquiry and the sale’, and the team at Ruler are very hands-on in helping you set up and implement this correctly. Ruler even allows you to vary the phone number displayed on your website, and then when people phone in to enquire, it tells you how that phone enquirer first found you, e.g. from a Paid Ad, Google Search, Direct Visit, etc. If going with Hubspot, you will also need a separate Callrail subscription in order to display a tracking phone number on your website and ensure that phone leads are tracked along with emails and form submissions.
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