Set goals

This article is a part of the SEO cycle series of articles.

Once you have established your exact position, you need to set goals. This involves determining what your most significant problems are and also where your SEO opportunities lie. During this phase, you will also discover and set your priorities as well as the amount that you'll want to spend on SEO (if you choose to outsource any of the activity). We find that it helps if you work to these guidelines for each and every goal that you set during this phase:

• Your SEO goals need to be specific. "More traffic" is NOT specific! Exactly how much traffic? Where do you want that traffic to come from? The more specific your goals, the more likely that you will achieve them.
• Your goals should be measurable. If you don't have a way to measure performance, how will you know whether you're achieving your goals?
• We'd all like to make a million sales a day and although search engine optimisation is an excellent and vital step to increasing enquiries and sales via the World Wide Web, it can't produce miracles. That's why your goals should be realistic.
• Your SEO goals should be focused on and relevant to those areas of the your business that you can affect such as how many people visit your website (the traffic) and the number of those people that become buyers or interested prospects (conversion). You cannot achieve goals for things that you cannot control such as the "number 1" slot in Google for a certain keyword phrase.
• In order for your SEO goals to be effective, you also need to have specific start and end dates - they need to be timed.