SEO Goals, KPI’s & Managing Client Expectations – Part 1

This is going to be a 3 part blog series looking at metrics that SEO Agencies and their clients alike set for an online marketing campaign – looking at Goal Setting, Key Performance Indicators as well as some tips for helping manage the expectations of a campaign.

For those of you who came along to the last BrightonSEO event, these blogs are based on my presentation that day.

SEO Goal Setting

Goals can be easy to set, or difficult – it all depends on the client. These goals can involve increasing rankings for specific keyword phrases (which can lead to trouble) or could be having specific traffic levels that a client wants to achieve, but normally with these kind of metric’s there is a more specific underlying “goal” to be set – and its ultimately the one that all marketers will be measured on – the return on investment.

This can be getting a certain number of people to perform a specific action on the website – purchasing a product or signing up to use a new service, which generates revenue back to that client.

I’ve often had clients come to me with specific goals involving rankings that they want to achieve, or specific numbers of traffic. Despite conversations to explain that these specific goals being set aren’t necessarily the ultimate goal, these are often the metrics that you are measured on.

However, sometimes, “blindly” following a client goal like this can be dangerous. In my experience, and I am sure that others in the industry have experienced similarly – goals based on rankings are usually because a client expects a “big fat” keyword to deliver lots of business to that website.

This can be the case, but I often find that this type of phrase doesn’t convert fantastically well. A lot of the time, rather than going after that marquee keyword, more business may well be generated from gaining a large amount of traffic from attracted “long tail” keywords based around that phrase, more specific queries that have their “queries” answered by that page are likely to convert at a higher rate.

That being said, there are exceptions to rules like that – for example, some keywords that I would consider as being a “marquee” or “vanity” phrase that convert fantastically well.

The same goes with traffic goals – purely sending a lot of traffic to a website doesn’t mean that it will ultimately convert into a sale/enquiry for that website. You could have a client that  increases sales by x4-5 in 1 year, but from only double the amount of the website traffic – it’s important to ensure that relevant traffic is being delivered to a website, and not just traffic, for traffics sake.

The real goal for nearly all websites  is ultimately to increase the revenues that a website generates for them, despite a clients assertion that the goal is to double a websites traffic or increase specific keyword rankings

Understanding the “real” intent of a goal is becoming an important part of the search engine marketers toolset. Sometimes the specific KPIs that lead up to the goal are what you are measured on, but in nearly all the campaigns that I have worked on, no matter what KPIs and Goals were set, they ultimately meant nothing if that website was taking the revenue it required at levels required to make suitable returns on those investments.

Look out for part 2 of this series next week looking at Key Performance Indicators for SEO campaigns