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How to Set Realistic SEO Benchmarking Goals

How to Set Realistic SEO Benchmarking Goals
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Business growth remains the foremost concern of every business owner. However, setting the SEO benchmarking rightly paves the way to an effective growth strategy. Here are a few ways to implement SEO tools and strategies in the most effective way to manage business growth tactically.

1. Be Specific and Number Driven

Before you start making any SEO efforts, be sure you know the exact goals without any ambiguity. Most entrepreneurs think attracting more organic traffic and creating more leads are some of the SEO goals they should be after. However, when it comes to precise vision, you should rely on numbers. The word more does not specify how much. 

For realistic goals, you need the support of a number that will set a limit to your SEO metrics and achievements. Suppose you made 2000 leads the previous year. While setting SEO goals for the next year, the idea of more might refer to a number of 3000 or even 30000.

Therefore, business owners should always make it specific that how much more they want their leads or traffic to grow. This is a more realistic approach than simply looking for higher numbers not knowing the boundaries.

When you have this clear insight, it becomes easier to lay down appropriate SEO strategies to enhance your business and check the real-time progress using Google Analytics.

Expert Tip: Never plan for too long into the future as the market dynamism often takes turns surprisingly. Try to envisage your business and its operational expansion over a period of 2 years or three years at most. This way, measuring progress becomes easier as well. Always remember that the market is good at deluding even the best strategists. So set your SEO benchmarks carefully and judicially. 

2. Use Milestones For Precise Measurements

Use Milestones For Precise Measurements

Suppose you have set the SEO goals for traffic volume to go from 2000 to 3000 within one year. If you have milestones to measure the gradual progress of the metric, it would be easier to trace whether whatever strategy you have taken is working to the intended end.

For example, if the traffic volume reaches a number of 2300 after three months, you can conclude that your strategies are working fine and if progress continues the same trajectory, you can achieve the goal you have set for the year.

On the contrary, if the volume comes down to 1900, you would get alarmed earlier and make the necessary changes to achieve your goals. This is why setting SEO benchmarking is immensely important.

When a specific SEO campaign or tools work in a way contrary to your expectations, checking the progress report after a few months of setting them at work helps you detect its inefficiencies in advance.

Here is a brief idea of how you can go about measuring your progress precisely.

  • Check the benchmark for competitive ranking. You can use the gap analysis tool of SEMrush for this purpose. This analysis based on target keywords helps you find the real position of your business compared to the competitors. 
  • Track down traffic volume, opportunities, and leads from the marketing analytics platform to understand how much scope you have for business up-scaling in the coming year. Check the report you have from SEMrush search to learn about your keyword ranking compared to your rivals and adjust the keywords to optimize your outcomes. 
  • Another step you should not skip ever is to check the report of conversation and bounce rate. This report will offer you insight into how much traffic is getting transformed into leads. 
  • Everything related to your SEO strategy does not always help the process. Sometimes, technical issues impede progress and take the volumes down. Use the most effective tools to check the SEO health of your business page regularly to learn if anything is keeping it from working optimally. 

Expert Tip: Check the key performance indicators from time to time and compare the new numbers with the figures with which you started. This will help you understand the exact progress or regression of your business. Additionally, you will have enough time at your disposal to retract the ineffective strategy to replace it with a more efficient one. Try to check the progress at least once a month. 

3. Develop a Well Devised Action Plan

Once you know the benchmarks to check and the numbers to chase, it is time for some ground-level action. 

  • Enhance traffic volume
  • Optimize traffic quality
  • Inflate lead volume
  • Make the lead quality better
  • Enhance customer volume
  • Improve customer quality and the size of the average order

These are certainly your goals and to achieve them, you need to put a strategic SEO plan in motion. Your SEO benchmarking plan should be based on the following factors.

  • The benchmarks
  • Market competition
  • Search demand
  • Budget/resources available.
  • Seasonality of the products and services you deal in

Now that you know what you want and the things you should keep in mind while setting SEO plans, it is time to break down the process a little further.

Based on the indirect competitors aiming for the rankings you do not enjoy a domain authority of, you can change the content of your website. Create engaging, optimized content for your website using non-ranking topics to penetrate the market deeper.

Check the click-through rate of the SERP page. Even reputed brands sometimes lose a considerable share of their traffic due to low CTR. If the CTR is lower than what it should be, the responsibility could be ascribed to either poor ratings and reviews or under-optimized meta tags.

To ensure that none of your customers leaves the website without making a purchase, use any variety of heat mapping software to watch them navigate. This will offer you a precise idea of where most are getting stuck. Accordingly, you can make the changes and overcome the low conversion issue.

If your website has a technical issue or the SEO plan has some technical errors, warning pop-ups will appear during CMS migration or website redesigning.  Get these corrected without any delay or your SEO goals might suffer in the long run.

4. Never Exceed Your Budget

What you wish for and what you are capable of are oftentimes two very different things. For effective SEO strategies as well, you need to set your goals in compliance with your resources. No matter your aspirations and ambitions, you will always have to spend money to engage efficient SEO experts and deploy the best strategies. Therefore, check your budget first, and then set the growth aspirations accordingly. This process, if reversed, can become a source of substantial financial losses along with growth reversal. 

5. Make Your Plans Business Relevant

Make Your Plans Business Relevant

Whatever growth figures you choose, let them be in Sympatico with your overall expansion plans. If an annual increment of organic traffic of 60% helps you achieve your long-run goal of capturing 40% more of the market, it is a good choice at any time. On the other hand, if your current goals do not aid in the process of achieving the long-run goals, they are comparatively less effective.

Final Words

In short, using SEO tools and integrating a team of experts will not suffice your business goal requirements until you make your SEO benchmarking strategies more measurable and grounded. Set goals based on resources and check the benchmarks regularly to track your progress to avoid a sudden catastrophe.