how to set the goals of your SEO campaign?

Call it search engine optimisation or search engine optimization, the goal is still to improve a website's visibility and achieve top rankings on Google and other search engines. SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) involves more than just an online presence.

Many businesses and SEO professionals struggle with defining SEO goals. Consider the following steps to create SEO goals that meet the company's expectations and generate the desired results.

why is SEO important?

When we talk about SEO we refer to web positioning. Why do we want to improve it, how does it help us to increase our visibility? These seem like obvious questions, don't they? Companies have become increasingly aware of the advantages of making themselves known and increasing their visibility on internet search engines, as it opens up a world of opportunities for their brands.

So much so that nowadays there are very few companies that do not have a website to show who they are, what they do, what they offer, etc. In short, it is a kind of showcase and a powerful tool to attract customers. Achieving this is not an easy task, as it requires more than just being located on the web. We will tell you what it is all about.

SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is defined as "the process of improving the visibility of a website in the organic results of the different search engines". Since its appearance, it has evolved so much that its basic factors have come to reside in relevance and authority, that is, the correspondence with a specific search and the popularity of the website itself.

Some of the best practices that you can carry out to improve the SEO of your page may be the following:

• Know your users: Are you clear about who you are targeting?
• Establish a plan. Do you know what you are going to do?
• Use a blog. What medium are you going to use?
• Use social networks. How are you going to disseminate your content?

SMART objectives

If you want to know how to set good metrics for your goals, here areSMART goals . As the acronym says, SMART goals are smart, as they direct a company's strategic efforts to be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and on time.

The SMART criteria refer to the 5 basic characteristics that every goal must have to be considered SMART:

• Specific: A truly specific objective includes what you want to achieve, how you want to achieve it and who will be responsible.
• Measurable: Since it is a process, you need to have indicators that will help you analyse the achievement of these goals.
• Attainable: Think about how your company interacts with the environment to define easily achievable goals that fit your resources.
• Relevant: Recognise what you see as opportunities and develop the relevant research to find out if these issues are relevant.
• Timely: When does this goal have to be achieved? Define general, partial and daily time objectives.

Steps to take to set your SEO campaign goals

• Know your company's goals

Here you define what your company wants to achieve over a certain period of time, using the above mentioned SMART objectives: specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound.

• Set marketing objectives

Once you know what your business objectives are, you need to focus on how marketing can contribute to achieving them. It may be that the company wants to increase its sales, so they will resort to creating more effective advertising campaigns that will be done by those who work in this area.

• Take advantage of SEO

You should think about how SEO can help in the marketing campaigns to be developed, some options could be:

• • Improve the quality of the articles published on the corporate blog to get more visits.
    
    
  • Include keywords in all pages of the website to appear in new lists of results.
    
    
  • Optimise meta elements to create attractive content to improve ranking.
    
    
  • Adapt the images of native or organic ads to make them visible in search engines.

• Choose the right metrics

As well as your business objectives, define smart SEO goals in order to make your SEO progress measurable. It is worth noting that an SEO strategy can take weeks, months or even years, as it is a positioning process that will depend on different factors.

To measure how well you are achieving your SEO goals, you can take into account:

• • Searches by brand name: that is, those who search in Google for the name of your business. Once you recognise which pages are receiving this traffic, you should optimise them so that users can find them more easily. You can also measure the number of visits that come from search engines.
    
    
  • SERP evaluation: analyse how and in what position your pages appear in the list of results and, as time goes by, determine which aspects are favourable to increase your position in the SERP. In addition, constantly checking the position you are in will tell you how well you are developing the SEO positioning of your site.
    
    
  • Search volume: knowing the number of searches that people do for your brand is an important indicator of how your company is consolidating organically in search engines.
    
    
  • Links: this point measures different aspects, such as the number of internal links that strengthen your main pages, as well as the number of backlinks to see how the site's authority increases.
    
    
  • Traffic sources: links that are created elsewhere can be great sources of traffic, whether on social networks, local media, or other blogs. It is the task of the SEO to check which of these are the ones that attract the most traffic to your site, to maintain them and even increase them.

One thing is clear, and that is that it is not easy to establish and develop the objectives of an SEO campaign, which is why every company that does not specialise in digital marketing turns to professionals in the sector to carry out its SEO strategy.

Keep in mind that there is no common pattern for digital marketing, nor for marketing in general. Each company has its own customers, products, services and business objectives, so you must be very careful when applying these objectives to your website, because the slightest basic error will trigger problems with Google, which is reflected in penalties to your positioning.