SEO Smart Goals for Beginner's

Author: Manoj Maity

SMART is the acronym of five different words which are criteria for determining the marketing goals of any business.

Before setting any SEO goals you need to know about the company goals and what marketing goals are. Based on this information one should align the SEO goals.

Whether you are a digital marketing consultant in Kolkata or an SEO expert, you should always start finding out the SMART goals.

Suppose if the company’s goal is to gain 30% penetration in Indian citizen of different metro cities ageing 25-65, the marketing dept may decide to increase the traffic to the top of the funnel by 50%.

Then as an SEO, you can decide to increase the search visits by 70% because you don’t know the conversion ration flowing down the funnel.

You may decide to increase quantity, quality of blog posts targetting to the audience, create new resources, creating geo-location pages for gaining traffic from those cities, improving the lin profile etc.

So, based on the marketing goals which is aligned with the company’s goal you need to prepare actions to be taken and ways to measure them.

While setting up SEO goals, we need to follow these acronyms below,

Specific - Need to have a clear objective of your goals. What you want to achieve from SEO.

Measurable - the actions implemented should be measurable. We can use different KPI’s or Key Performing Indicators such as Traffic, Session duration, PA, DA, total backlinks, impression, number of unbranded traffic etc.

Achievable - goals should be achievable, not too high and impractical.

Realistic / Relevant - It should be realistic and relevant.

If we are targetting keywords which are highly difficult to rank and SERP has top brand website’s pages or different results, it becomes unrealistic SEO goals.

Timelined - time to achieve the SEO goals is also big factors.

Example -

We want to increase our leads from organic search by 50% within 12 months. We can achieve this by improving the bottom of the page keywords to the top half of the SERP.

Specific - Increase our leads from organic search by 50%.

Measurable - We can measure it using KPIs, organic traffic, keyword ranking, setting goals in analytics platforms, pages per session etc.

Achievable - It can be achieved, this is an ongoing process on an existing website.

Realistic/Relevant - it is realistic.

Timelined - Within 12 months.

KPI’s

After setting smart goals and implementing the strategies we need to track some metrics which are also known as KPIs or Key Performing Indicators.

These KPIs help us to measure the performance of SEO.

  • Increase in organic traffic
  • Increase in the number of pages on the site that generate traffic
  • Increase in non-branded search traffic
  • Percentage increase in organic conversions
  • Percentage increase in traffic from specific geographic regions
  • Organic Impressions (Search Console)
  • Organic Click-Through Rate (CTR) (Search Console)

Referral traffic

A solid SEO campaign can impact your business beyond simply driving more organic traffic. If links are a key part of your strategy, then this exposure can drive more high-quality referral traffic, so it is prudent to demonstrate the extra value here. This helps to illustrate how your SEO strategies have multiple marketing benefits, and often solid referral traffic can convert at a better rate than organic search traffic — so ignore this at your peril.