The SMART SEO Approach For 2018

SEO's are beginning to set goals for their 2018 campaigns. SMART goals stands for specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and timelined. These goals are both aggressive and realistic.

Specific are the objectives critical to the marketing campaign. These are the website or conversion goals necessary to achieve more visits, exposure, sales and leads. The goals must be clear, and applicable to the objectives of the business.

Measurable are the SEO goals that can be measured to show improvement. This will lead to an upswing in the business results. There are numerous examples of what can be measured including organic traffic, conversions, SEO metrics and citation flow.

Achievable is incredibly important regarding planning. The goals should be high, but not unattainable. The keywords must be able to be targeted, and the resources necessary to reach the goals must be available. SMART goals is the process used to achieve goals with the resources available.

Realistic is to ensure the goals set are completely understood. The goals must be achievable, and the resources available to help ensure success. The difference between realistic and achievable is the length of time required for the marketing tactic. Relevance is important as well because increased traffic and rankings are fairly irrelevant if the traffic is still low.

Timelined is important for SEO goals because this usually takes longer than most types of marketing online. Traffic and visibility can be delivered instantly by PPC. If there is no timeline for a goal, it is impossible for the goal to fail. Realism must be a factor in what is possible in a specific period of time.

It can be difficult to figure out how much time and money SEO will cost. This must be done or timelines cannot be estimated, and the goal will be unable to be tracked with KPI's.

Most of the inquiries into SEO simply want to be ranked in the number one position for specific keywords. This does not qualify as a SMART goal because it does not explain what it will take to help the business reach their objectives in marketing.

There is no reason SMART goals have to be complicated. The goal can be increasing organic search leads by fifty percent within twelve months, or taking the target keywords from one place and moving them to another. The specific would be increasing the number of organic search leads by fifty percent. The measurable is measuring these leads by using rankings, results and organic traffic. Achievable is a factor because this goal can be completed. Realistic comes into play with the improvement to the current lead source. The timeline is a deadline of twelve months.

This is the approach that enables a business to use a simple analysis to figure out if the digital marketing is doing the job it is supposed to. Sometime SEO campaigns do not have the content assets necessary, or the website has not been properly dialed in. Setting SMART goals can fix issues by clarifying the digital marketing, SEO, and identifying any problems. This can enable improvements in 2018 and farther into the future.

So many business are caught in the digital rush, and have forgotten the importance of the foundation. SMART goals, tools, and SEO strategies are necessary for good results. The idea is not to work even harder, but to work smarter.