Before we start any SEO campaign, we first have to set a goal.

A lot of websites tell you that but most of them don’t tell you why you need to have one.

After we set a goal, we create an SEO strategy and action plan to achieve that goal. For example, our goal is to get 100 leads by next month. Next, we can create an action plan to achieve our goal like:

• Find out who our audience is / our buyer personas.
• Find topics and keywords for our buyer personas.
• Create content targeting those keywords.
• Optimize existing content already targeting those keywords.
• Fix any website health issues like crawlability, broken links, etc.
• Create an optin that we can give to our user in exchange for their email, name, etc.
• Create a lead nurturing campaign with email marketing automation.

Putting numbers behind our goals

Let’s say, your optin / lead form converts at 2%. That means, we have to send 5,000 unique visitors to hit our 100 lead target or you can bump up your conversion rate from 2% to 3% then you only need 3,333 visitors instead of 5,000.

After that, we need to target keywords that can bring us at  least 3,333 or 5,000 visitors depending on your conversion rate. We know what numbers we need to hit. Now, we can start creating content targeting our target keywords, and optimizing any existing content already targeting those keywords.

Primary goals

When it comes to setting goals, different businesses have different measures of goals. For example, a B2B software site won’t have the same goals as an entertainment news site.

Primary goals are goals that directly impact the bottom line.

• For eCommerce sites, it is the sales generated from organic traffic.
• For New sites, it is the number of page views from organic traffic.
• For B2B software or services, it is the number of leads generated from organic traffic.
• For a Saas startup, it is the number of free trials generated from organic traffic.

Let’s say if I was managing SEO for a B2B software, the number of page views doesn’t really matter because the more page views we can get doesn’t mean we’ll get more leads for the business. I can share a viral article or video on Reddit and that will generate 5000 unique visitors and no leads. (Based on my experience Reddit is terrible for B2B leads)

On the other hand, if I was managing a news site, the number of page views count. The more I can get my hands on, the better and Reddit works perfectly here. My goal here is to get more eyeballs on my advertisers’ ads.

Secondary goals

Secondary goals are goals like organic traffic, rankings, bounce rate, social shares, etc. These are metrics that also impact the bottom line but indirectly.

For example:

• If I get 500 social shares, does that mean we’ll get 50 new leads? Not directly.
• If I drop our bounce rate from 70% to 20%, does that mean we will get more leads to the business? Not directly.

Read more: Choosing the right goal for your business

Executing the plan

We now know our goals (what we need to achieve), and our action plan (what we need to do) to achieve our goal. The hard part is actually executing the plan.