4 SEO goals for your business
Has your SEO strategy delivered higher rankings and more traffic, but your business has not really benefited from this? Or have you invested money and time, but you have reaped little or no business benefits? This is often due to choosing the wrong SEO goals.
In this post, we are going to tell you which common pitfalls to avoid and which actionable goals will deliver profit for your business.
How to avoid setting wrong SEO goals
In general, vanity metrics are the wrong thing to set as goals; page views, followers, free downloads make you feel good but they do not tell you anything about the numbers that really matter (engagement metrics, cost of getting new customers….). Getting more traffic is also not a good goal: traffic volume is very deceptive because it can be totally unqualified and from the wrong sources.
Ranking is a good goal only if your Click-Through Rate is high and your content engages your visitors; without these two conditions, ranking does not deliver good business results.
SEO goals which will bring benefit to your business
1 – Valuable traffic.
You want to be found by people who need your products or services. You need good website traffic from the right buyer groups, demographics, location. Build your buyer personas well and concentrate your SEO efforts on receiving traffic from them: produce and post useful material targeted at these buying groups. Remember that most searches originate from people trying to solve problems. Don’t aim for high volumes of visitors; aim to solve the problems of the visitors that matter to you.
2 – Engagement and returning traffic.
Comments, downloads, sign-ups are good only if you can convince your subscribers to give you their e-mail address so you will be able to build a nice mailing list, but remember to give your subscribers useful content or they will soon abandon you. Get visitors’ attention, motivate them to engage with your website, offer information that is valuable, make website interactions as fast and easy as possible, provide clear paths to conversion and gain business information which you can nurture.
3 – Acquiring leads.
If you do well all we mentioned at point 2, you will acquire good business leads and build revenue. SEO is now an extremely competitive scenario, where the top Search Engine Result Page is nearly completely taken by Ads, Wikipedia, Google books, video and many other sources of information, which makes it so hard to appear organically. However, SEO can still be a lead acquisition channel; an effective use of structured data, keyword optimisation, a good site structure and navigability, content strategy and link building are only a few SEO practices which can really put your website pages in front of the right buyers in an organic way.
4 – Raising brand awareness.
SEO is great to create brand awareness in many ways. For example, some of your products have lots of good reviews but they do not rank very high and you want to push the good reviews up, above your competition’s products. A sound SEO strategy can deliver this for you.
