Types of SEO Objectives

Digital Marketing - Study Notes:

Importance of SEO objectives

We'll first review the importance of setting SEO objectives.

They encourage buy-in from key stakeholders

The first one's really important. So let's imagine you've got a marketing manager as your boss or maybe the marketing director, or possibly, you even report to the CEO, maybe even you run an agency and your stakeholders might be your clients.

But from my experience, for SEO to really work, it needs to be embraced in the company. And I think, historically, for some reason, SEO has built up this reputation of being a bit of a dark arts. And for those that don't really understand SEO truly, people do think of it that way. It's this black box where magic happens and sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't work.

And really your goal is to inform the stakeholders who are responsible for SEO in some way, how SEO works. And what I would advise maybe doing is after you've done this course, is just to summarize how SEO works and maybe even present it to someone. It could be a friend, or it could actually be one of the stakeholders in the business.

They help to formulate your SEO strategy

The second reason why SEO objective is important is they really help formulate to your SEO strategy. So, if you don't know where you're heading, it's very difficult to actually get to that place. And if you think about it, when you go into a car and you want to go on a long journey, you might use some sat nav to tell you how to get to that destination.

But if you can't put in the destination that you want to get to, you're going to find it very difficult to get there. And it's similar with SEO. We need to set objectives so we can be clear where we want to get to, and we can actually move in that direction.

They ensure objectives are met

The third one is, they ensure objectives are met. There's an old saying, "What gets measured gets managed," and I find that really is true.

What should you measure?

So, while it can feel like a laborious task to set objectives, it really helps you with your SEO progress. So what types of things should you measure?

• Keywords: Well, keywords are important, so we can set objectives for keywords. And we're going to look at how you do keyword research, and we'll talk about how you can measure keyword rankings as well. But essentially, what you might find is that you've got a target list of keywords, maybe it's 50 keywords, it could be a lot more. But let's say it's 50 keywords and you want to set objectives around how well you're doing for those keywords.
• Traffic: It might be traffic-related. So, when you get website traffic to your website, you want to see how well you're doing for organic search or SEO.
• Market share: Maybe it's market share-related. So, when you do your keyword research, you'll actually get an idea of what search volumes are actually happening for keywords. And when you do that, you can start to work out what the market share is for a list of keywords that you want to target. And perhaps, you're getting a certain percentage of the market share and you want to increase that.
• Brand or product awareness: For brand and product awareness, the more people are talking about your brand and searching for your brand, that's going to have a positive impact on your business.

So we'll talk about some ways of measuring the brand.

• Lead generation: Not all businesses can accept money on their website, some just sell services, for example, and we need a way of measuring how well that website is operating in terms of leads for the services.
• Backlinks: So if you want to build up your website's reputation, the best way to do this is by encouraging other websites to link to your site so we can set SEO objectives such as, "Hey, let's try and build 5 backlinks in the next 30 days."
• Ecommerce: We can also set objectives around ecommerce. So if you're familiar with Google Analytics, with a little bit of tweaking in the code on your website, you can actually set up tracking of e-commerce. And we can set objectives around that as well.
• Ads revenue: Maybe you're a large publisher or a blogger and it might be that actually the way that your business succeeds is by selling ads revenue, so that might be a way that you'll want to look and setting objectives.