Short Term vs Long Term SEO Goals

If you are not setting SEO goals, your campaign cannot succeed. But more than that, if you’re not considering both short-term and long-term SEO goals, your strategy is going to have holes in it that are going to restrict your ROI.

For example, if you were implementing a new PR campaign, you wouldn’t expect to be achieving the same goals after 1 month as you would after 12 months. You’d expect things to be incremental and for things to improve and slowly for you to get more and more results and your ROI go up over time.

The same is true for SEO. It’s not good enough to have one goal and say we want to increase conversions or we want to increase revenue. You need to be more specific than that and think about them in a time centric scale. So after one month, what do you want to achieve? Well, think about the short term and quick wins that you can get with SEO. This is your on page optimisation, setting things in place on the technical side, making sure that site speed and all the sort of backend pieces are in place to set the foundations for your campaign moving forward.

But what about after six months? Imagine you’ve been running a campaign for six months and now your manager or your superiors want some justification of the spend. How are you going to give it to them if from the onset you didn’t have a strategy in place or goals set that were going to suggest what improvements have been made by then? This is the sort of time when you really need to justify the spend that you’ve already made and make sure that you’re on track for longer-term plans.

Now obviously, when you get to 12 months, you’re looking at year-on-year data, and that’s really, really invaluable. So you need to know for sure that what you’ve done up until this point is on track, and this will help you to make further goals that are feasible with the progress and the speed of your campaign so far. Being able to compare year-on-year is going to be hugely important for you – showing actual growth, because you can’t always show it month-on-month because of seasonality and other outside factors.

So right from the beginning of your campaign you must set these goals, and they must be tailored on a time scale rather than just generic. Think about smart goals. Think about making sure that they are time centred, that they are relevant to your business, and that they’re valuable to your business. You don’t want to be setting goals that sound really useful, but actually what are you doing with the data? Is that leading to increased revenue or improving your ROI? Make sure that your goals are specific, they are valuable, and there’s deadlines like this that you can work to.

So I want you to go away and have a look at your strategy and actually ask yourselves, “Have I got these goals in place? Have I got any SEO goals in place?” But most importantly, “Have I got specific goals that I can measure over time and then report to the powers that be that actually this campaign is successful?”

Then it gives you the ability to review that at a later date, and if it’s not successful, look at why. Maybe the goals weren’t always that feasible. Maybe there’s more you can be doing. Maybe there are outside factors that you now need to take into account and adjust goals moving forward. But if you haven’t got them in place to start with, you can’t possibly achieve that.

So go away, have a think. Make sure that you’ve got these in place, and if you need any more advice, get in touch. We can provide loads of information on setting these goals. Head over to our blog. We’ve got loads of posts on KPIs and goals that could be specific to your business. And get in touch with us if you need more information.