There is not one good goal, but there are several good goals that work collectively to help you optimise your website for SEO. An SEO agency can guide you into setting goals for your SEO, but awareness about what they are is also important.
The key is to choose the right SEO objectives. When you create an SEO strategy, you will have a guideline to go by to execute it one step at a time.
8 SEO Goals to Set for SEO
Here are a few goals you need to set for SEO:
Goal #1: Go for Long-tail Keywords
Optimise your content using long-tail keywords. Long-tail keywords can help you get your story out there, increase your chances of discovery, and drive visitors to your website.
Goal #2: Recognise the Importance of Voice Search
Understand the importance of voice search. More and more users are searching for products and services via voice search. It has become a convenient option to speak to a voice search assistant. Your SEO specialist can optimise your content for voice search.
Goal #3: Know How New Technology Affects SEO
Stay one step ahead of the latest technology that comes into the market and know how it affects SEO. Augmented reality, artificial intelligence, and virtual reality are new technology that are projected to have a significant impact on SEO in the coming future.
Goal #4: Optimise Your Featured Snippets
Featured snippets or quick answer boxes show on the first page of Google on the top. You need to optimise your featured snippets for SEO, so they display on the search engine. By optimising them for SEO, Google may feature them on the first page of the search results.
Once optimised, track, adapt, and pursue all present and future featured snippets, seeing them as opportunities to increase your rank. For this reason, it is so crucial for businesses to create the best practices for SEO, staying current with featured snippets on Google, seizing the opportunity to have your snippet featured on Google, and once you have obtained your place, maintain it.
Google values information that answers the user’s search query. You need to create useful informational content for both your target audience and Google. Google will collect the information and feature it as a snippet on the Search Engine Results Page (SERP).
The popularity of data collection technology has increased users’ demand for direct answers through featured snippets. Having a featured snippet on Google means optimising informational and value-adding content for SEO. If it is optimised for SEO, but does not add value to the user, Google is likely not to feature you at the top of the first page.
Goal #5: Stay Updated on the Changes Made to the Algorithm
Your focus is generating leads, increasing sales, and earning revenue. You are busy refining your business model and marketing your products and services to your target audience. Naturally, this gives you less time to focus on SEO and if you did that already, staying up to date with the latest trends and changes made to Google search algorithm requires time.
This is where an SEO agency comes in. You can visit them on a regular basis to audit your website for SEO to check if you are in line with all the latest trends in SEO and meet Google’s search algorithm. They will identify the upcoming trends and their effects on your industry and make changes accordingly. Optimising your images for SEO is just one way to get exposure.
Goal #6: Improve Your Website’s Loading Speed
We cannot stress this enough. If the pages of your website load slow, it will affect your ranking on Google. Ensure your pages load in less than four seconds. A page that loads slow loses potential customers as well.
Most users will not have the patience to wait for your website to load because the internet is all about convenience. If your page takes ages to load, prospective customers would rather exit your website and take their query elsewhere.
Goal #7: SEO + CRO
Search engine optimisation and conversion rate optimisation work together to produce results. SEO will attract users to your website and CRO will convert them. Combining both of them will yield the following results:
- The pages of your website, focusing on a single subject or product, will rank better on search engines and this, in return, will improve your conversion rate.
- Create clear and relevant headlines that will improve both your SEO and CRO.
- Replace complex animation and content to improve SEO and CRO.
- Use clear content hierarchy with proper heading tags to improve your SEO and CRO because it forces you to think on how you would like your message to progress.
Goal #8: Give Attention to Your Links
Your links need your attention, which is why you need to hire an SEO agency to conduct link audits periodically. They will fix outbound links and obtain backlinks from reputable websites that are relevant to your industry.
We also want to tell you about the different applications of SEO and how to choose the right SEO goals for your business.
The Different Applications of SEO
Here are the different applications of SEO:
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Raw Traffic
Optimise your website for Google, create keyword targeted content to encourage content sharing, and direct traffic to your website and refer links as more users discover and use your website. Using it can monetise traffic on your website. Create SEO optimised, high quality content.
For instance, your SEO specialist will perform on-page optimisation, such as titles, internal linking, headlines, and more. This will make your content easy to share for users and increase the chances of your content going viral.
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E-Commerce Sales
Use SEO to drive relevant traffic to an e-commerce store to increase your sales. Search traffic is among the best quality traffic on the internet because the user’s search intent is to find the answer to their question. If your business or product and/or service answers their question, your conversion rates will increase. Use this technique if your target audience can buy or sell products or services through your website.
Test the effectiveness and potential Return of Investment or ROI of your keywords using pay-per-click. Pursue keywords that receive reasonable traffic because they will be easier to convert.The more specific the search query, the more likely users will buy something online.
For this, your SEO specialist will perform some serious link building, combining it with internal optimisation to increase your rank for competitive keywords that drive traffic to your website, which you can convert. Additionally, manual link building can also help.
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Branding
Even though optimising branding for SEO is not popular among businesses, it is still very effective. Social media websites, bloggers, news outlets, content producers, and several other web publishing websites have used SEO for branding purposes and have found success.
This has allowed them to appear at the top of the search results, which, in return, has resulted in increased exposure to increase brand authority and recognition. If your page focused on a certain topic shows up consistently on the first page of Google,it will have a positive effect on traffic, perceived authority, and consideration.
Choose long-tail keywords to bring your target audience to your website because they will be interested in what you sell and will recall your brand’s name. Achieve this by creating a user-friendly website, a good link structure, and focus on links to increase your domain authority for specific keywords.
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Lead Acquisition and Direct Marketing
Lead acquisition and direct marketing help bring in customers and generate revenue. Several questions searched online have a commercial intent that you cannot fulfil directly online. Some of these search queries include alternative energy providers, commercial loan requests, contract construction, legal consulting, and more.
If you offer a non-ecommerce service, product, or goal that you want people to achieve on your website or you want to attract inquiries or direct people from the search engine to your website, use SEO for lead acquisition and direct marketing.
Select phrases that you can convert easily, have reasonable user traffic, and have performed in pay-per-click campaigns. Since doing this can be quite challenging to do by yourself, hire an SEO specialist to assist you with it. An SEO specialist will perform on-site SEO optimisation with external link building to direct pages, consisting of good anchor text, to perform competitively online in the search engines.
When you visit an SEO agency, they will create an SEO Plan, consisting of goals that can help you achieve a solid rank on the search engine. If you do not have time to focus on SEO, let someone else do all the work while you sit back and relax and watch your rank rise on Google and other search engines.
