SMART Plan
Every company is unique so naturally, their challenge is unique. Even a second SEO initiative within the same company will not be the same as the first initiative. Your initial SEO efforts will have changed things, creating new benchmarks, new expectations, and different objectives. Thus each SEO project is a new endeavor. One way to start a new project is to set SMART objectives. Let’s look at how to go about doing that in the world of SEO.
1. Specific
The specific objective is important. It is easy to get caught up in the details of the plan and lose sight of the broader site objectives. You want to rank #1 or this phrase or that but in reality, what you want is more customers from organic search, but you want higher sales volume, so having the same number of orders but with a higher average order value would meet your objectives better.
2. Measurable
A measurable objective is essential if one is to manage the performance in meeting them but you can’t manage what you can’t measure. SEO practitioners have to help their clients or organizations come to a grip with analytics and not just the analytics software but the actual processes of how to gather the data, how to sort it, and most importantly how to use it to make informed decisions.
3. Achievable
Achievable objectives can be accomplished with the available resources. You could decide to put a man or mars next year. For example but it is just too big an undertaking to be feasible. You can be ambitious but it is important to pick goals that can be met. You cannot possibly sell to more people than exists in your market. There are limits to markets and at a certain point, the only growth can come from opening new markets or developing new products for the existing markets.
4. Realistics
Realistics objectives are about context and resources. It may be perfectly achievable to meet a certain objective, but only with greater resources than may be present available even a top ranking on the most competitive terms around is achievable for the relevant product, but it is a realistic goal only in the resources required for such an effort.
5. Time-bound
Time-bound is the final part of the SMART objective. If there is no timeline, no project can ever fail, since it can’t run out of time. SEO generally tends to take longer to implement and gather momentum than a paid advertising campaign. Milestones and deadlines must be set so that expectations can be managed course corrections made.
We want to rank at #1, which is not a smart objective. It doesn’t identify the specific reason why the company thinks a #1 ranking will help it. It doesn’t have a timeline, so there is no way to fail. It doesn’t state an engine on which to be #1 so there’s a guaranteed argument if the intention is to rank well on both Google and Bing, but the result is only high rankings on bing.
We want to increase approved loan applications generated by natural search by 30% over six months is a better objective. There is a deadline and the company can certainly gauge progress towards the specific objective.
The company can look at its current market share and the resources committed to see whether this an achievable and realistic goal.
