What are SEO goals? SEO goals are measurable objectives that a business can set and tryto reach in a specific amount of time. The thing is that SEO is a vast field and it is easyfor a business to lose its way and start expending its resources on the wrong things.
It is quite possible that a business sets vague goals that do not help them to grow and
expand. In fact, vague goals can even make it feel like there is no growth happening at
all. So, to prevent your business from falling into this pit of doom, we are going to teach
you five measurable SEO goals that you can set for your business. We will also provide
some tips on how to reach those goals.
So, let’s get started on the 5 SEO goals:
#1 Organic Traffic
This is obviously one of the most important SEO goals that all businesses strive to reach.
But again, it is very easy to set unrealistic or unspecified targets when it comes to
organic traffic.
Organic traffic is the number of visits to your website through organic means. By
organic means, it is implied that the website is found on the SERPs and then visited.
For a small business, their goal with respect to organic traffic should be something like
“increase organic traffic by 10% in six months”. That is a clear number and an
achievable goal. It is not too low, and neither is it so difficult that achieving it seems
impossible.
How can You Improve Organic Traffic?
Improving organic traffic is basically the result of the culmination of a variety of SEO efforts. Some common things that you can try are:
- Writing and publishing valuable content on your website. Content is very likely to get indexed and ranked on the SERPs, especially when it is plagiarism-free, and provides value to your reader.
- Optimizing the on-page SEO of your web pages so that they get indexed and ranked on the SERPs.
- Make your website accessible so that people who arrive on it interact with it and read your content.
Out of all of these tips, the one about content is probably the most important one. That’s because even if your content is valuable, if it’s plagiarized, then the search engine will demote it in ranking or outright remove the webpage. This really hurts your organic traffic, so always use a plagiarism checker free to ensure that any content you are about to publish is 100% unique.
#2 Backlink Profile
Backlinks are one of the most important components of SEO. Nowadays search engines
like Google, Bing, and Yahoo! do not just rank all kinds of websites. Instead, they only
rank pages that seem authoritative to them.
One of the most important aspects of determining whether a website is legitimate or not
is by checking its backlink profile. A backlink is a hyperlink that is pointing to a website
from another website.
The higher the quality of the website providing the link, the more legitimate the website
receiving the link looks. A large number of backlinks from reputable websites show the
search engine that your website is an authority on its subject and that others in the
industry accept that they are legitimate.
An achievable goal for a business can be getting backlinks from 10 reputable websites in
your niche in six months. That may seem like a really easy goal, but be warned that the
more reputable a website, the more stringent its requirements for providing a backlink.
How Can you Improve your Backlink Profile?
Improving your backlink profile requires diligence and research. You may be tempted to
simply accept backlinks from all kinds of websites but that will hurt you more than it
will help you. Here are some tips for improving your backlink profile.
- Research what kinds of reputable websites exist in your niche. A great way to find out if a website is reputable or not is to check its domain authority. You can do that with a domain authority checker tool. The higher the authority, the more reputable the website.
- Check the websites with high domain authority and see how much traffic they get. You want to get backlinks from websites with a large traffic flow so that your website can gain more traffic as well.
- Reach out to the selected websites and ask them for backlinks (politely). They may allow you to guest post and place a link in it.
- Write and publish high-quality works that others in your niche are tempted to link to. In this way, you may get some backlinks from really good websites.
Creating and holding backlinks is a very tricky affair, and the only thing you can do is be
diligent and steadfast. Ultimately, your efforts will pay off and you will get a strong
backlink profile.
#3 Dwell Time
Dwell time is an SEO ranking factor. It is basically part of Google’s initiative to put user
experience above all else. So, Google does not just rank websites based on their content
quality and value. It also checks whether this information is easily accessible to the end
user or not. One metric they use to determine this is dwell time.
Dwell time refers to the amount of time a visitor spends on your website interacting
with it in some way. The larger the dwell time the more accessible and valuable the page
is considered in Google’s perspective. So, a high dwell time improves your site’s SERP
ranking. A good goal for improving dwell time can be boosting the dwell time of your
poor-performing pages in three months. You can check out the dwell time for a page
using tools like Google analytics.
How Can you Improve Dwell Time?
You can improve the dwell time by doing the following things:
- Make the design of your website very easy to understand and navigate.
- Write content that is easily understood by a vast majority of the audience.
- Provide unique content and services that make visitors want to stay at your site (no unique things will only serve to repel visitors)
Doing these things will improve the dwell time of your websites.
#4 Bounce Rate
This is another metric that is used to determine how satisfied users are with a website.
Bounce rate refers to the number of visitors who leave your website from the very page
they landed on without interacting with the website at all.
A high bounce rate signifies that the webpage may be ranking for the wrong keywords
as it does not provide the user the value they are looking for. The rank of such a
webpage will decrease considerably, thus directly hampering all SEO efforts.
A good goal can be to reduce the bounce rate of your web pages by 20% within six
months.
How Can You Reduce the Bounce Rate?
The short answer is “the same way you increase the dwell time”. Dwell time and bounce
rate are opposites of each other, a high bounce rate will naturally decrease the dwell
time and vice versa.
So, do the same thing again:
- Target the keywords that you are actually addressing.
- Make your content easy to understand.
- Design your website so that visitors can easily navigate it and find the things they need.
In doing so, you will ensure that only the right people find your site and they spend a lot
of time on your site instead of bouncing.
#5 Conversions
One of the derivative goals of SEO is to drive conversions. If you think about it, the
entire reason a business turns to SEO is so that it can market its products and services
to a larger audience.
And marketing aims to convert all of these new leads into paying customers. So that is
another measurable SEO goal that your business can strive to reach. A good place to
begin is to try and improve your conversion rate by 10% in six to eight months.
How Can You Improve Your Conversion Rate?
The conversion rate can be improved by doing the following:
- Adding CTAs (calls to action) in your content.
- Making your content compelling
- Subtly hint at your services and products and pitch them as solutions to the reader’s problems.
These are some ways in which you can improve the conversion rate of your website and
get more paying customers from it.
Conclusion on SEO Goals
Well, these were five measurable SEO goals that your business can set and work
towards. Measurable goals are required to track the progress of a business and how
much profit it is bringing in. However, measurable goals are supposed to be set by
keeping in mind how they reflect on your business. In this article, we only discussed
goals related to SEO. These are goals that are relevant for any online business. If you
want to learn more about SEO, and how effective it is, you can head to our blog and read
more.