There’s a lot of debate about setting SEO goals. Some good work has been done on SEO goals linked (no pun intended) to building traffic, selling more goods, branding/image marketing, lead generation and conversions, and influence through thought leadership.

Those are all good goals but we think a better goal exists. While most of our clients want to rank #1 for all of their keywords, few understand that may not be possible. Especially if they share keywords with Global 100 multi-national corporations, ranking #1 across the board isn’t always possible. And, at least initially, even if it’s doable it may be too far off, too ambitious as a starting point. So we highly recommend a simpler approach.

Pick one of your competitors and beat them into dust.

We have one client who requires that we measure them against their largest competitor every month. After about a year, when it was clear that we were performing better for selected keywords than their larger, global competitor, I recommended we stop measuring ourselves against that competitor and select someone else to “beat.”

The client, having competed against the other firm - their mortal enemy - for decades, rejected our recommendation. We understood but that hasn’t affected our recommended strategy.

Pick one competitor to measure yourself against and once you’ve beaten them in the search engine ranking game, select another target.
 

If you’re the New England Patriots setting a target of winning the Super Bowl every year may make sense but most of us aren’t the Patriots. We need to walk before we run.

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