“You can’t improve what you don’t measure” is a popular quote by Peter Drucker, the father of modern management, that holds true to this day. As you begin your SEO journey, be it independently or with the help of an SEO agency, an important first step is to set SEO SMART goal that align with your desired business outcomes. Much like any journey, if you’re unaware of your destination, you’ll be unable to recognise when you’ve arrived or if you’ve strayed off course.
That being said, how do you set SEO SMART goals that can help you pick the right strategies, identify the most relevant metrics to measure, and determine the return on your SEO investment?
How To Get Started with SEO Goals
There’s a big difference between knowing what SEO SMART goals and knowing where to begin. As someone who naturally tends to be detail-oriented about my aspirations, I often have to remind myself to consider the broader picture first. Simply put, when setting SEO targets and goals, take a step back and begin with some high-level thinking.
What Is the Goal of SEO?
The primary goal of SEO is to increase your visibility score in relevant online searches, which in turn leads to increased leads, sales, and revenue. The ultimate objective of SEO is to expand your business online. This involves enhancing your website so that search engines rank it higher and display it on SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) for pertinent search queries.
Great SEO Goals Start with Great Business Objectives
To determine your SEO goals, start with your company’s vision for the future. Your digital marketing plan is likely already structured to support these broader business goals – just as your SEO goals should.
Inform Your SEO Goals with These Questions:
- What are the company overall business objectives for the coming year?
- Which key performance metric (KPM) do you oversee?
- Which marketing goals support that KPM?
- What SEO goal directly aligns with your marketing objectives?
For example, suppose your company’s annual objective is to capture a larger share of your industry’s market. To support this company objective, your KPM might be the number of qualified leads. Your marketing plan probably includes several initiatives aimed at attracting prospects to your marketing funnel and nurturing them into qualified leads.
In this context, you would likely seek an SEO strategy that directly impacts lead generation and conversion. Thus, your SEO goal should be tied to conversion metrics.
Set Realistic SEO Objectives
SEO is a slow-cooker approach to build website authority. SMART, sustainable SEO strategies need time to start yielding results. Think of it as a marathon rather than a sprint. Don’t get me wrong, this doesn’t mean you won’t see incremental improvements early in your campaign, but significant progress will occur over time.
By setting realistic expectations for your SEO objectives, you’ll help your team and stakeholders be patient while achieving cumulative gains towards your goal.
Base Your SEO Goals on Historical Data
To develop realistic goals, start by examining: 1) where you were and 2) where you are.
Review past Google Analytics data and draw predictive conclusions from your findings. For example, if last year’s analytics show that organic traffic to your site increased by 20% without a focused SEO effort, you could reasonably expect that your investment in SEO could double that percentage. Hence, you might set a goal to boost organic traffic by 40% year over year (YOY).
Be Realistic and Aim High
While some realism is vital when setting your SEO goals, it’s probably just as vital to have some stretch goals. Setting the bar too low means you’ll hit your easily attainable goals and see some results from your efforts. However, by setting challenging objectives, you push yourself to step out of your comfort zone, get creative, and maximise your SEO campaign’s potential. It’s better to aim high and fall a little short than to bear the opportunity cost of remaining too comfortable.
How To Set SMART SEO Goals
I might be a wordsmith, but a good acronym gives me the tickles! So that your goals are clear and attainable, each should be:
- Specific
- Measurable
- Achievable
- Relevant
- Time-bound
Let’s explore this in the context of SEO.
Specific
Be explicit about what you intend to achieve with your SEO efforts. Vague goals like “more traffic” or “more leads” aren’t good enough.
Quantify your objectives.
If your aim is to generate “more leads,” consider, “more leads than what?” Last quarter? Last year? What specific number you want to beat, and by how much? If you garnered 1,000 leads the previous year, a specific goal could be to increase that by 50%, resulting in 1,500 leads in the upcoming year.
💡Defining a concrete number sets a clear expectation for stakeholders about what a successful SEO campaign looks like.
Measurable
What metrics will you use to track progress towards your goal? For long-term goals, establish milestones to guide you towards completion.
Suppose you aim to generate 1,500 leads in 12 months. By setting quarterly milestones, you’ll know if you’re on track to achieve 375 leads by the end of Q1. If not, you can adjust your tactics to accelerate progress towards your annual goal.
The best part about a measurable goal is knowing exactly when to celebrate your achievements!
Achievable
Can you achieve your goal with the resources available?
If you’re aiming to produce 400 times more leads in the coming year, do you have the budget and team to support this? As mentioned earlier about setting ambitious goals — if you have a realistic understanding of what’s required and the resources are available, then your goal is achievable. If you’re unsure how to realise your plan, it’s time to reassess.
Relevant
What purpose does your goal serve? Does it align with your overall KPIs and company objectives? Your results must contribute meaningfully to your company-wide objectives.
Ask yourself, “Will this achieve something significant for the company?” If so, articulate this within the goal: “Increasing leads by 50% YOY will help the company get closer to its annual objective of capturing a larger market share.”
Time-Bound
When you set a deadline for your SEO goal, everyone’s priorities are aligned and sets expectations for the pace needed to reach the finish line. A fixed end date provides the impetus to drive tasks towards achieving the desired result within the given timeframe. It also makes it easier to set incremental milestones on a consistent timeline.
SEO Objectives Examples
Your SMART SEO goals can be categorised into 5 main areas:
- Site Traffic
- Brand Awareness
- User/Customer Engagement
- Lead Generation
- Revenue
Site Traffic
A SMART SEO goal for site traffic could be: Increase total unique web traffic year-on-year (YOY) by 50%.
Brand Awareness
If your aim is to enhance brand awareness, you might establish a keyword rankings SMART goal to: Achieve first-page ranking for this [specific] keyword set within 12 months.
User/Customer Engagement
To push people through your marketing funnel, you might focus on boosting customer engagement on your website. In this case, a SMART SEO goal could be: Increase the average session duration on our blog pages by 33% by the end of the year.
Lead Generation
Drawing from the lead generation example mentioned earlier, if your aim is to attract more leads into your marketing funnel, your SMART SEO goal could be: Generate 1,500 leads in the next 12 months.
Revenue
To enhance the value of your organic traffic, you might set a goal focused on increasing revenue-producing conversions on your website: Increase online sales from organic traffic by £3M YOY.
Measuring Success: Choosing SEO Targets
As I’ve mentioned before, choosing the right metrics to track progress is crucial. These metrics should directly correspond to the specific SEO goals you defined.
Seo Metrics Defined
There are several general SEO metrics to consider when determining how you’ll measure progress towards your goal.
VISIBILITY METRICS
In SEO, visibility is about getting your website in front of as many potential customers as possible.
Visibility metrics include:
- Impressions in search results.
- Organic ranking positions for keywords.
Learn more about visibility metrics here.
TRAFFIC METRICS
while visibility is concerned with how many people see you in search results, traffic metrics measure how many people click through from search results to your website.
Traffic metrics include:
- Traffic sources.
- Organic search traffic.
- Referral traffic.
- Direct traffic.
- Click-through rate.
Learn more about how to measure website traffic here.
ENGAGEMENT METRICS
Once prospects have landed on your site, engagement metrics measure how they interact with your content.
Engagement metrics include:
- Pageviews.
- Time on page.
- Session duration.
- Bounce rate.
- Pages per session.
- Page/scroll depth.
CONVERSION & REVENUE METRICS
Conversions, often associated with purchases or contact, broadly refer to actions taken on your website that convert a visitor into a potential customer. Conversions could include:
- Sales.
- Leads.
- Email signups.
- Form completions.
- Registrations.
- Subscriptions.
- Visits to a key page.
- Phone calls.
TECHNICAL METRICS
While not directly pertaining to user behaviour, technical SEO sees to it that your website functions properly for search engines and users.
Technical metrics include:
- Page load speed.
- Pages indexed.
- Crawl errors.
- Core web vitals performance.
Put Your SMART SEO Goal in Writing
Documenting your goals helps you clarify them and provides the opportunity to work through the SMART process.
Your SMART SEO goals serve as a reference point throughout your campaign, enabling you to evaluate your current progress against your intended destination. Sharing this document with internal teams or an SEO agency means everyone is on the same page.
FAQs About Setting SEO Goals
HOW OFTEN SHOULD I REVIEW MY SEO GOALS?
The frequency with which you review your SEO goals can depend on several factors. Consider the following questions:
- Have I achieved a goal and need to set a new one?
- Have my overall business objectives changed?
- Are there economic or social factors that require a significant pivot to maintain viability? (Think COVID-19.)
- Was there something I didn’t know when I set my goal that now needs addressing?
- Is the SEO goal I set misaligned with the KPIs for which I’m responsible?
HOW OFTEN SHOULD I REVISIT MY SEO STRATEGY?
It’s best to review your SEO strategy at least once a year. Given the never-ending variables — both within and beyond your control — that influence your SEO success, regular reviews of key metrics are essential to refine your efforts and strategy.
At Hawk SEO, we constantly monitor our clients’ SEO health to provide real-time recommendations in response to fluctuations in search trends, changes in the competitive landscape, or social concerns that could impact visibility. If you’re not seeing improvements in your SEO performance, you may need to conduct new keyword research, ensure your content aligns with search intent, create new content, fix technical SEO issues, run an SEO audit, and so on.
HOW OFTEN SHOULD I REVIEW MY SEO METRICS?
That’s a pertinent question without a straightforward answer. Generally, how often you should review your SEO metrics depends on which metrics you’re examining, the average length of your sales cycle (if your goal is revenue-based), and any seasonal fluctuations in your business.
Here’s a basic framework:
- Weekly: Before developing a habit of weekly metric reviews, consider if the metrics you’re examining are critical enough to warrant immediate action. It can be counterproductive to track metrics weekly that have no significant impact on your broader goals and that you wouldn’t act upon.
- For a weekly metric, choose the one that you know will be a key indicator for your long-term goals. A specific metric to check weekly is organic traffic. Monitor organic traffic every week to identify any unexpected or inexplicable declines, which could signal significant issues needing immediate attention. While a one-week dip might be insignificant, watching weekly trends in organic traffic provides context for better understanding monthly trends, especially when observing prolonged but subtle traffic decreases that might indicate complex issues like keyword cannibalisation.
- Monthly: Monthly metric reviews usually offer a sufficient timeframe to see results from improvements, such as new SEO content being indexed. Comparing metrics month-over-month reveals trends related to the smaller fluctuations tracked weekly.
Monthly trends are also relevant to the milestones set for longer-term goals. At Hawk SEO, we review metrics with our clients every month to assess incremental progress on their campaigns, provide context for fluctuations, and offer recommendations for improvement. - Quarterly: Quarterly reviews help build a picture of the performance of long-term SEO activities. Comparing metrics quarter-over-quarter clarifies the impact of your keyword strategy. Like monthly reviews, quarterly assessments indicate whether you’re on track to meet your milestones.
- Annually: Year-over-year data views provide valuable insights, especially for seasonal businesses. If you’ve set a year-long goal, this is your chance to take a comprehensive view of your progress. At this point, there should be no surprises since you’ve been tracking incremental milestones from the beginning.
HOW DO I SET SMART SEO GOALS WITHOUT HISTORICAL DATA?
I understand that setting SMART SEO goals without historical data can be daunting. If you lack historical data, ask yourself:
- What previous experiences can inform your SEO goal-setting?
- Are there industry benchmarks that can provide a framework for your expectations?
- Are there internal or external subject matter experts who can provide a reality check on your goals?
If you’re working without historical data, you’re likely building something new and establishing systems and processes as you go. Set growth milestones that account for the momentum you’ll build over time.
For instance, if your goal is to attract 1,000 qualified leads in a year, don’t just set milestones to bring in 250 leads per quarter. Instead, plan for smaller gains early on that increase over time.
WHAT IF I NEED TO MOVE THE NEEDLE ON MULTIPLE OBJECTIVES?
If you were at the bottom of a mountain with five boulders to push to the top, what would you do? You’d push them up one at a time, right?
Attempting to divide your energy to move them all simultaneously won’t be effective. Pushing boulder #1 halfway up and then running back to start pushing boulder #2 is a sure way to lose all the progress made with boulder #1 as it rolls back down the hill.
The moral of the tory is: prioritise the activity that will help you build momentum. What matters right now? Narrow your focus and apply pressure to the goal that you can build upon once it’s achieved.
Tie Your Business Goals & SMART SEO Goals Together
The first step to reach your destination is to clearly define where that is.
Setting clear SEO goals enables you to chart your course, monitor your progress, and adjust your strategies as you work towards your ultimate objective.
At Hawk SEO, we’ve witnessed the transformative power of setting clear goals with our clients, goals that are aligned with their broader business objectives. (As demonstrated in these SEO case studies.) Regardless of the SEO service we provide, the first step is understanding our clients’ SEO goals. Then, we work very hard to help them get there.
Looking for an SEO partner to guide you towards SEO success? Let’s discuss how we can secure the attention your website deserves.
