The right targets in SEO promotion

Are you sure that your current SEO goals are the best for your business? It is essential that your SEO goals link both your company’s business goals and your marketing goals.

It is also important that the goals provide specific measurable values that you can improve.

Let’s consider the topic of choosing the right SEO goals for your business or project.

Targets in SEO

We are considering the topic of setting goals, how to set goals, how to measure your progress in achieving goals, how to strengthen SEO so that optimization brings a high return on investment.

The choice of goals is a huge challenge. Many professionals from the field of SEO do not know for sure how to set the right goals, goals that are effective for business.

In particular, the task has been complicated by Google’s search engine, making it difficult to access existing and already inaccurate data and hiding the latest accurate data on the frequency of search queries.

A typical task of search engine optimization is to capture high positions in organic output. The main task of the business is profit. The right approach is to solve business problems through search engine optimization.

Focus on how to set goals that are actually measurable, traceable and reasonably related to the goals of the business or project being promoted.

Where to start.

Let’s go! In the beginning, the main problem is this: many people start with goals that seem reasonable, but in fact the goals are terrible. Do not start with the objectives of search engine optimization site. Do not start with technical goals SEO.

When your team gathers together to consider promoting the company’s website, or when you are at a meeting with your SEO consultants, or at a meeting with an agency, do not start with setting goals to optimize the site for search engines.

  • The company’s goals. Start with the goals of the company. This is what your company plans to achieve this quarter or this year or this month.
  • Marketing goals. It’s about understanding how marketing will contribute to your company’s goals. So, if a company has a goal to increase sales, then what is the work of marketing? The job of marketing is to optimize the sales funnel. Does this increase traffic at the top of the funnel? Does it return more traffic that was already on the site, but can be redirected to the site? These marketing goals must be tied directly to the company’s goals so that everyone in the company can clearly see the ultimate goal of activity.
  • SEO goals. Further, it is necessary to move on to the question of how SEO contributes to the achievement of marketing goals.
  • Specific measurable indicators available for improvement. From these selected SEO goals, you can get the maximum result with a subsequent return on investment.

Measurable target metrics

The full list is given below. This is not a very large list. SEO does not have many goals that we can measure with real accuracy. And so, measurable target values can be as follows:

  • Positions. We can measure the metric in three ways. We can measure them around the world, at the country or regional level. You can set up position monitoring in MegaIndex;
  • Transitions from search engines. Just raw traffic from search engines;
  • You can also separate traffic by brand from other traffic. The home page of most brands is likely to receive mainly branded search traffic, while blog pages will receive mostly branded traffic unevenly;
  • Capturing the issue. Essentially, the metric describes a search results page that displays the results for a list of requests. So, the meaning of the metric is in your reputation in search results. There may be things you don’t like and don’t want to see in the search about your brand, as well as what you really want to see. In this case, benefits and harms can be measured directly from the results of the search results ranking in the search results;
  • Volume of queries. Metrics for companies whose goal is to increase brand recognition. You can look at the numbers through tools like Google Trends or something like MegaIndex SERM;
  • Links and link metrics. Link data is a metric that is analyzed for growth or decline in reference mass over a period. You can measure the matrix by the following parameters: the number of referring domains, the total number of links or the number of referring subnets. You can analyze the link profile through tools such as SEMrush or MegaIndex. When analyzing links, it is recommended that you mark up toxic and natural links;
  • Referral traffic. And the last metric is in the plane of referral traffic analysis, especially important for SEO campaigns, which focus on links, link profile improvement and traffic collection from sites. Using referral traffic metrics, it is possible to see the traffic by link and assess the sources of the traffic and whether new users have come from the pages where the links are placed for promotion purposes.

Example

Suppose the goal of the company is to increase sales through the Internet…

For example, the research department of the analytics department is conducting a study, which reveals the following: there are many ways to increase sales via the Internet.

According to the study, the best way to achieve the goal is to increase the top of the funnel, because the conversion rate at the landings is high and the optimization of the top of the funnel will lead to increased sales.