Blogging 101: SEO Goals

For the past few months I’ve been working on updating old posts to be optimised for SEO and it got me thinking about the purpose of SEO. Why was I actually putting effort into this, and what was I actually getting out of it? Then I realised that whilst I was working on improving my SEO, I hadn’t set myself goals to aim for with it. This meant I wouldn’t be able to properly measure whether my efforts were succesful or not. So I decided to sit down and think about why I was doing this, and set myself some SEO goals.

First up I thought about my blog’s overall aims and goals, and whether SEO was adding to them. I then thought about what metrics could be included in an SEO KPI that I could actually measure, and thought about how long I wanted to measure them for. This helped me form some broad possible goals which I’ve outlined below with the thought process in how to make them SMART goals.

Increase Organic Traffic by X%

The quickest way to check whether your SEO efforts are succesful is by checking Google Anaytics or Search Console. Knowing how many views you get from search normally can help you see when you’re getting more than usual – but these tools also let you see which pages and keywords work for you. So if you know you updated a certain post to optimise it, you can see direct results if that post gets views from search.

In order to make this goal measureable and time-specifc you do need to add a metric and time frame to it. This could be a number such as gain 1000 views a month from search, or it could be a percentage such as gain 30% more views from search.

But whichever number you choose is dependent on what you’re already achieving. A blog with 10 views a month would be able to hit 30% more easier than a blog with 10,000 views for example. Picking the right number to be attainable is going to be up to you.

Improve Your Search Rankings

The next SEO goal you could set is about getting into search rankings or improving your search rankings. Search ranking is what number your post appears in the search engine for a particular keyword. There’s a couple of different ways you can go about this.

The first approach is to set a goal of X amount of posts to appear in the top Y search rankings within the next Z months. Similar to the above, the numbers included will be subjective to your blog in order to be attainable. This would be my recommended SMART goal for improving search rankings as it will help your blog in the long-term as you’ll need to work on SEO across both new posts and older posts. Plus with the right keyword research, and effort in optimising posts it’s going to be attainable to get your posts into the search rankings.

Or you could take a more specific approach and set a goal of getting a particular post in the search rankings for specific keywords. This is usually more difficult and isn’t advisable for some blogs unless your keywords are naturally more niche. For example, if many of your posts are product related it will be harder to rank first because the brands website and shopping websites will naturally rank higher than a blog. It’s not impossible, but it is harder. On the other hand though, if you do have a niche topic that you know a lot about and it fits a less competitive keyword, this could feasibly be a goal for you.

Increase Links and Referral Traffic

Alternatively, you can have a goal to try and build up backlinks to your blog and blog posts. This works well if you’re already someone who likes to guest post for others or your have content which is highly shareable. In order to understand which backlinks you currently have, ahrefs is a good free tool to find out the number.

A SMART goal could be you want to gain 1 guest post a month which links into your site, or it could be you want each post in a series to be linked X amount of times. These goals won’t work for all bloggers, but creating one that fits how you currently blog will make the goal easier to achieve.

Decrease Bounce Rate and Increase Time on Site

You may be thinking you want loads of views on your website… but actually you want these people to stay on your website. Have you ever clicked on a search result, immediately seen that it’s not answering what you’re looking for and clicked back? Yeah, we want to avoid that situation happening on your blog.

First things first is making sure your content is unique and useful so there’s something of quality to read, and a reason to read it. Next is deciding what a good bounce rate is for your blog which is difficult. Bounce rate and time on page is completely dependent on the audience you reach and isn’t even accurate most of the time. This is why I wouldn’t have it as a main objective… however, saying you want to reduce your bounce rate by 1% in a month could be an attainable goal.

This goal as a whole would be more catered to motivate yourself to create content which keeps your audience on site for longer. It means you won’t write titles that are clickbait or don’t fit the content for more views. It means you’ll work on your internal linking to get your readers jumping around the site. It doesn’t need to be a hard goal that you have to meet – and you shouldn’t put too much emphasis of your success on this metric.

Strengthen Your DA Score

So many people ask how is SEO measured by the actual search engines. But as the factors taken into account aren’t completely public, different companies have created scores where DA by Moz is the most prevalent. Again, this is a hard metric to change but a “score” for SEO is super easy to look at and measure if you’re doing it right.

Your actual DA is only updated about once a month, although the stats that Moz use are updated in real-time if you’re wanting to get in depth with it. So any time measurement will be long-term for this goal. I would recommend your measurement be one point per time period you’re going for to ensure it’s more attainable. To help with DA you’ll have to put a lot of grind into learning about SEO and how to improve.

Unfortunately, DA can also be updated similar to search engine algorithms so if your score changes drastically between months it could be from an update too. Keep an eye out for news from Moz to check if this is the case – for example, there was a month where all my blogger friends’ DA’s decreased because of an update and not because they’d done something wrong.

Take Action to Optimise Your Blog for Search Engines

This goal is a little different, this goal is how to develop an SEO strategy. Whilst I’ve been talking about all the different SMART goals you could have, I haven’t said much about all the work that goes behind them. So I think your goals should also include taking steps to actually improve your posts optimisation.

Whether it’s page speed and more technical parts of your website, optimising old posts for keywords or ensuring internal linking is perfect – you can create weekly or monthly goals to make this happen. It could be update one old post per month which is pretty easy, or you could be more ambitious. But sometimes finding the time to do the little things gets lost when only looking at the bigger picture.

I hope some of the above SEO SMART goals examples were helpful for you, comment below and let me know what your SEO goals are going to be!