The SEO Goals should be tied in with the overall marketing and business goals. For example to drive more sales and revenue. The marketing goal is to make that happen and the SEO goal is one of the ways to achieve that by ensuring there is an optimised and fast website.
The SEO goals need to be associated with your business and overall marketing plan. For an eCommerce site, you will want to see more revenue. In order to achieve this, you need to drive more traffic and ensure you are ranking for key terms and topics. The key landing pages need to be optimised, and that they load quickly on desktop and mobile so that users can purchase what they need.
SEO goals should be smart – Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic and Time bound. For example with the above goal regarding rankings, it is important to work on the long tail keywords not just the brand and generic. With the long tail, you are more likely to understand the user intent and with that build up the content of the page aimed at “transactional” queries vs “informational” queries.
Therefore your SEO goals could be:
- Increase in traffic by x% (in x months)
- Increase in the number of conversions by x% (over the next x months)
- Increase the visibility of key landing pages ensuring video, image and featured snippets are ranking (over a 6 month period)
- Improve Page Speed – getting a 80/100 in Google Page Speed Insights
Improving page speed is paramount in SEO, especially with Google Web Vitals becoming a ranking factor next year. Make early 2021 a time to really focus on reducing the load time of your page and ensuring it loads quickly on mobile and then desktop.