What SEO Goals Should Your Business Be Measuring?

Choosing the right goals for your SEO strategy is crucial, providing you with the key metrics to guide your strategy. However, often SEO goals are decided without taking the overarching company goals into account. In this blog, we will be outlining the importance of selecting the right SEO goals for your business, how to decide the relevant key metrics and a breakdown of how to measure these metrics.

Table of Contents:

1. The Importance of Selecting The Right Goals For Your Business
2. How to Choose The Right Goals For Your Business
3. Creating Measurable SEO Metrics

The Importance of Selecting The Right Goals For Your Business

As we briefly alluded to in the opening paragraph of this blog, choosing the right SEO goals for your business is a key step in creating your SEO strategy. Once your goals have been decided, it allows you as an SEO to understand the relevant metrics you need to track in order to work towards your SEO goal. In turn, informing your strategy of the tasks required to shift the dial on your key metrics.

How to Choose The Right Goals For Your Business

Now we know the importance of the right goals for your business, it’s about time we explain the best way to nail down the relevant goals you should be choosing. A common misconception when selecting SEO goals is to start by choosing your goals without taking the wider company goals into consideration.

Instead, you should start with your company goals, identifying the overarching goals for the next quarter or year. From here, you can then evaluate how marketing can best contribute to your company goal. This will mean that everyone in the organisation can clearly see how your marketing goals are tied to the company goal(s).

Then, we are ready to move on to our SEO goals, now we have a clear picture of the overall goals we are aiming to achieve. Allowing us to make a much more informed decision for our SEO goals. However, although we know the stepping stones to reach this point, there are still a few things to consider:

• • Set Realistic Goals – As I’m sure you’re aware, SEO isn’t our best friend when we look to tangible metrics that we can report on instantly. Instead, you have to think of your goals as a marathon rather than a sprint. For this reason, it’s crucial to ensure the metrics you’re using are relevant and consider a realistic time-frame. Which leads us onto our next consideration.

• Follow The SMART Framework – The SMART framework is an excellent acronym to follow when setting SEO goals. Allowing you to set goals that are:
  • Specific
  • Measurable
  • Achievable
  • Relevant
  • Time-based

Creating Measurable SEO Metrics

So, we have our SEO goals that support the marketing goals, which in turn support the company goals. But, how can we ensure that the SEO work we are doing is working towards these goals? Well, that is through creating relevant, measurable metrics.

As we have briefly mentioned, due to the nature of SEO,  there are only a handful of tangible metrics we can truly measure directly. Moz’s Smart SEO Goals blog does a great job of detailing the metrics relevant to Organic Search. However, when looking at metrics for specific tasks, there is not a one size fits all approach.

2 of the most recognised metrics for Organic Search are keyword ranking, and Organic Search users. When performing SEO tasks that focus on increasing top of funnel traffic, these are great metrics. However, if we’re looking to increase domain authority through backlinks or a PR article, these wouldn’t be relevant. Instead, you should be looking at your link profile.

This highlights the importance of selecting relevant metrics, outlining the usefulness of the SMART framework. Ensuring your metrics are in line with your SEO strategy allows you to demonstrate the impact of your work accordingly. Making it clear to all parties how SEO is contributing to your marketing, and company-wide goals.

Start Setting SEO Goals That Shift The Dial For Your Business

So, now we know the importance of selecting the right goals, the methodology behind it, and why we need to create relevant, measurable metrics, it’s time to put it into practice. Ensuring to follow the SMART framework throughout, keeping the marketing and company-wide goals at the forefront of your strategy.

At Peaky Digital, we help you determine your SEO goals from your wider company goals, allowing us to curate a strategy that works for you. If you would like to find out more about our SEO services, get in touch today.