In our eagerness to generate content and attract visitors to your website, we sometimes let ourselves be guided by intuition when it comes to SEO; however, it's important that you clearly define your strategy's objectives, which will allow you to propel your brand to the big leagues.
That's why we're giving you some tips so your objectives are clear and you can establish a great SEO strategy for your company.
In recent years, search engine optimization (SEO) has become a fundamental strategy for any online marketing campaign. The reason is clear: it improves a website's ranking in the results provided by internet search engines.
However, for Inbound Marketing actions to be truly effective, they must be tied to realistic objectives. Thanks to them, the people involved in the campaign will have basic guidelines: they'll know which direction to work in or whether they need to redouble their efforts in certain areas.
The characteristics these objectives must meet are summed up by the letters of the word SMART:
- Specific
- Measurable
- Achievable
- Relevant
- Timely
Each of these five traits is described below:
- Specific: This variable has to do with traffic, prospects (leads), or the customers obtained. In this sense, you need to define whether you want to increase the volume of visitors, interested people, or buyers. The more specific a goal is, the easier it will be to measure the campaign's success.
- Measurable: Objectives must include a figure tied to the concept you want to quantify: for example, the number of visitors to your website or of new customers. To monitor the campaign, it's advisable to use web analytics tools such as HubSpot.
- Achievable: Along the same lines, objectives must be defined taking the context into account. That's why it's important to consider the results and metrics achieved to date (for example, the number of monthly visitors) and use them as a benchmark. Likewise, if there are no other precedents of online campaigns, you need to set realistic objectives. Let's look at an example: aiming for 2 out of every 100 visitors to convert into leads is an achievable objective. On the other hand, expecting 50% to do so would not be, even if a titanic marketing effort were made.
- Relevant: It's important that the campaign's objectives contribute to achieving your company's main objective, which would be to obtain more profits. With this in mind, increasing the number of leads would be a relevant objective, since these prospects can help generate more sales and, therefore, more revenue.
- Timely: Those responsible for the campaign must set a deadline to achieve the established objectives. If this isn't done, it's impossible to know when these goals will be reached and whether the marketing actions taken are effective or not. In this sense, a very useful practice is to set monthly objectives: if the timeframe is longer, it's harder to make forecasts, and if it's shorter, it may not be very representative.
Considering these five factors, an example of a SMART objective would be to increase monthly visits by 30% (that is, going from 1,000 monthly visits to 1,300) before September 30. This goal would be specific, because it refers to visitors; measurable, because it's based on numbers; achievable, because it uses realistic figures from a historical standpoint; relevant, because it contributes to the annual objective of the company in question (generating more profits); and finally, it's framed within a time period.
Once all these factors have been analyzed, you can define the objectives that must necessarily accompany any SEO strategy. As a general rule, these objectives tend to be tied to the number of visits a website receives (that is, to attracting organic traffic, which is the leitmotif of SEO), since obtaining a greater volume of leads or customers depends on other aspects of the marketing strategy.
In short, correctly defining the marketing campaign's objectives is the key to evaluating whether SEO strategies are being applied correctly. It also lets you know whether the effort made is truly profitable, considering the relationship between the time and money invested and the increase in visits to a given website.
We hope you found this post useful. Leave us your comments on this topic.
