When setting goals for SEO content, a lot of them can be generalised and sometimes outside our control, so we can’t always guarantee results.

However, it helps to set specific and measurable objectives that can be achieved over a specific period. Setting SEO goals is significant for your content plan, as they bring clarity to your strategy with a clear target and provide you with something to work towards.

What is SEO-focused content?

SEO-focused content is content created to attract search engine traffic. When it comes to this type of content, you need to consider the essential factors of SEO.

Keyword research –Conduct your keyword research before you begin writing content. This can give you keywords to focus on and provide leads on topics or words that people are already searching for.

Content organisation – This may seem obvious, but you should ensure the content on your website is clear and organised for the user to navigate and understand. The longer a user stays on your site, the better.

Content promotion – How are you going to increase your visibility? Consider social media and building links to your content. This type of promotion includes internal and external linking.

How to create SEO-focused content

Let’s take a look at some of the ways you can ensure your site content is SEO-focused.

Critique your site

When analysing your existing content, you must always check what is performing well and what isn’t. Review your site for improvements and ask yourself if could you optimise some pages. Reasonable measures of success in SEO include the following steps:

Review success – Review the pages that are performing well. Check for a pattern if you have a high ranking on a particular page or a set of pages. What does your regular audience enjoy the most? Once you recognise these patterns of success, you can focus on creating content that accommodates your audience.

Update and improve – When reviewing existing pages, you should always check how it’s performing with existing keywords and see if there is a way this can be changed to increase your site’s traffic.

While reviewing your site for keyword opportunities, you should also run a technical check and ensure it’s fully optimised for Google and other search engines.

Assess technical SEO issues

Measure the technical factors that could prevent your site from being indexed or ranking higher within the search.

Many tools exist to help with measuring your SEO health. These tools may also help you discover some technical SEO issues that are impacting your ranking and weighing your site down. Check for critical errors and see what quick changes could make for a noticeable impact.

Set goals

The starting point is choosing what the result is going to be. What exactly are you aiming to achieve? Is it more conversions or to increase the site traffic?

If the goal is to drive product sales, you should check the content you already have and look at a plan for any content you want to create. All product pages should be informative and have optimised pages for searches and conversions.

To help drive sales further, you could include a blog post that mentions how your product is useful and internally link where it’s most relevant. However, ensuring your blog is not jam-packed with self-promotion is best, or any potential customers may lose interest. Once you have a lead on your end goal, you can focus on other things, like the amount of traffic you wish to generate.

Define your plan of action

There are many ways to expand your SEO footprint, and you should know how your traffic quality can shift based on the content changes you make so ensure you really focus on what’s important. Make a plan of action on the most important tasks so you can work through them.

Monitor organic impressions

Impressions aren’t always the best form of metrics to discuss, as they aren’t directly connected to revenue. However, this doesn’t mean they aren’t important. As mentioned by Google, impressions are:

“The number of times any URL from your site appeared in search results viewed by a user, not including paid Google Ads search impressions.”

Organic impressions reflect indexation and ranking growth and can be a great signal that the content you’re publishing is getting indexed in search engines. From then, your impressions will grow, increasing your rankings in the SERPs and gaining more visibility.

Additionally, organic impressions can also be a strong indicator of brand awareness. Your impression growth can also help you understand the volume of users that are seeing your content appear in search results, especially for your targeted queries.

Monitor organic clicks

Organic clicks are going to be one of the more important metrics to prioritize because they’re the clearest representation of organic traffic to your website. Depending on what type of content you’re producing or the topics you’re targeting, you’ll want to have a detailed understanding of what organic click behaviour on your website looks like.

Googles definition states:

“For most result types, any click that sends the user to a page outside of Google Search, Discover, or News is counted as a click; clicking a link that stays inside the Google platform is not counted as a click.”

Organic clicks are important as they represent traffic and page-level click data shown in Google Search Console. This data can assist you with quantifying the volume of traffic over time for queries you’re intentionally targeting and discovering others you may not have been aware of.

This data also tells you if your content has been optimised properly, and organic data can provide a clear understanding of how well your content is optimised for the targeted query or topic.

Target organic keyword volume growth

When it comes to keywords and your site’s topic, there could be an endless number of relevant keyword opportunities. If this is true for your site, it can be very tough to know where your starting point is and what you think a healthy number of keywords should be. There isn’t a set amount, as it’s all about healthy growth over time.

If you’re targeting the most appropriate topics for your audience, publishing consistently, and distributing across relevant channels, the number of keywords driving traffic to your site will grow. If you aren’t experiencing growth, you may have maxed out the number of relevant topics you can write about, or your product isn’t growing.

Organic growth is important as it’s a key indicator of increasing demand- An individual piece of content can generate traffic from hundreds and thousands of keyword variations. However, this does depend on the targeted topic. If you notice the number continuing to grow, it means there is organic interest developing over time.

When this happens, it can influence new content creation — sometimes the content will generate keywords that don’t match the intent of the topic. In many cases, it creates an opportunity to use the keyword to generate new content that you may not have been aware to create originally.

Increase your CTR of current SERPs

Consider the last time you searched for your brand’s name, and check if you can visibly see any factors why people aren’t clicking on your current SERPs.

Things to check when reviewing your current SERPs:

  • Title – Is this optimized?
  • Meta tags – Are these correct or misleading?
  • Reviews/ratings – Is your site showing poor reviews/ratings?

Increase conversions from existing traffic

UX is essential for conversions and sales, and you can use various tools to track and monitor your customer navigation. This will help you understand how users navigate your site and where they appear to be getting stuck. This can also help gain more value from the existing traffic.

Avoid rank loss threats

Regarding SEO and ranking, technical pressures can cause SEO site damage over time. When this happens, you must prioritise critical errors in your yearly SEO plan.

Final thoughts

When setting goals for SEO-focused content, the biggest thing to consider is to weigh in your available resources, budget, and time scale. Once you have set these realistic goals and begin to put your work into practice, you will start to see results and be on the road to SEO success.