Our clients often ask us to evaluate their business, website and set some goals for our SEO efforts and where we want to see ourselves in, say, 6 months. The problems we often face are that without historical data and, we can’t set any realistic goals. As experienced digital marketing experts, we don’t like the make assumptions. There are a lot of things in additional to data to take in consideration when setting goals:
Competition
Every industry is different. One of the many things you should do before marketing your website is to check out your competition. See what others are doing, who is ranking in top positions that you want to see your website in and what kind of efforts they are putting into their internet marketing. You can tell, by doing additional research who is doing SEO and who is running Google AdWords campaigns. Both SEO and PPC can help internet marketing efforts, so both should be considered if you want to dominate in your marketing (and especially if your competition is running both).
Local Reach
If you’re a local business, most likely there’s a certain radius that you’re willing to extend efforts to. It’s important to evaluate your custom database to find out where your clients are coming from. This will help identify the areas you should target. Aside from that, if there is a certain area you would like to pull clients from, you can target that as well. Put together a geographical “top target” list to help identify which areas you want to focus on. This will help your business keep focused on who you’re targeting.
Data/Statistics
If your website is new, your historical data isn’t available. If your website had been live with analytics software or coding installed, using your history can be very beneficial. Compare your old data to new data to learn where you need improvements.
One thing about internet marketing and SEO is that, it takes time. It’s hard to set goals without having a good, solid 6-12 months of data to work from. You don’t fully know what you’re up against until you’re “in the game.” Give it time. After a year, start evaluating your efforts and campaign. Find the weak spots, re-evaluate your competition, pull together your new client list and find out where they are coming from, have you establish ranking positions for the keywords you want? All of these pieces will eventually put your puzzle together, but it doesn’t stop there. Internet marketing is always evolving.