S.M.A.R.T SEO

Specific 

Vague goals will often produce vague results. To truly gain the most benefits, it's important to become more precise when setting your SEO goals. Rather than "Increasing Online Sales", you may want to narrow it down to something less generalized, like ranking for a specific keyword or increasing your website traffic to a certain number. This will help provide you and your team with clarity and focus, and will make it easy to recognize when you've hit the target and it's time to create new goals. 

Measurable

There's no sense in creating a goal if there's no way to know when you've succeeded. Again, if your goal is "Increasing Online Sales", then is your goal complete as soon as you book your next appointment? How much of an increase do you need in order to grow your company at the desired rate? It's important to take a large, overarching goal and break it down into more specific accomplishments that can be easily evaluated and analyzed. Use numbers and percentages so that you know precisely if you've reached your goal or missed the mark. 

Attainable

Consistent failure at reaching a lofty goal can be detrimental long term. For this reason, you need to ensure that your goals are achievable. Reaching a goal should be stimulating and challenging, but being unrealistic is counterproductive. If your website is currently ranking on the 8th page of google for a popular keyword, then it may not be helpful to set your goal to be "Get to First Place in Two Weeks". Remember that lasting results require lasting effort, and quality organic SEO results don't appear overnight. Instead of looking at your most successful competitor, look at your prior performance and raise the bar to an attainable level. Once this goal is reached, continue to lift the expectations higher and higher until that first page victory is more realistic. 

Recorded

Many people are great at writing their goals down, but never look at them again. Recording your efforts every step of the way will push you and your team to reach those goals. Even if you don't succeed, you'll be able to look back at the steps you took, analyze the data and know how to pinpoint the exact cause of your setback. If you aren't measuring progress or failures along the road, it can be difficult to diagnose when and where your company got off track. Repeating mistakes wastes a lot of time, energy and money. If you're recording the details of implementing your goal can help you and your business achieve long term success. 

Timely

Establishing a goal is great, but if there's no timeline applied to it, then there's no incentive to achieve it. Placing an expiration date on your SEO goals can help your company stay accountable and on schedule. If goals are met within the time frame allotted, then the victory can be celebrated and new specific goals can replace them. If the target wasn't reached, having a date set will force you and your staff to take a look at why, so you can implement a strategy to progress forward as effectively as possible until the goal is eventually achieved. 

Want Better SEO Results for Your Company? Get Help from the Experts at iBoost

Do you want to improve your online sales? Call the SEO and digital marketing professionals at iBoost. Our specialists will work with you one on one to help develop the perfect strategy for success. Contact our office today and find out how we can help you reach your goals.