SEO Insights > Defining your SEO goals: the answer is in the sky

Defining your SEO goals: the answer is in the sky

Posted by Kim Dewe on April 8, 2020

Business Strategy

COVID-19 has dramatically changed the way digital marketers are running their websites and thinking about ROI from their SEO activities and wider digital marketing spend. The implementation of North Star Goals may be the key to move them closer to a performance marketing channel than ever before.

This article from our Head of SEO Kim Dewe outlines:

• What a North Star Goal is
• How digital marketers can use their existing business or department goals to establish SMART North Star Goal metrics
• How using SMART NSG metrics enables marketers to better measure the success and ROI of their SEO activities

Chapter Points

Using business goals for SEO
The North Star concept
Types of North Stars
Criteria for a good North Star

Like any function within a business, SEOs will at some point be asked to define objectives or KPIs for the forthcoming period. Whether that period spans three months or three years, it’s incredibly important that everyone understands the inherent value of aligning SEO goals with the goals of the company or the department they work within. When SEO goals consider the bigger picture, it’s easier for people to understand why we’re doing SEO in the first place.

Using business goals for SEO

Understand your business goal

Whether you’re doing SEO for a cactus tree plantation or a multinational t-shirt store, when creating your SEO strategy it’s essential to remember the wider company goals that SEO can impact. Businesses have goals which exist to steer the company in the right direction. Within larger organisations, these goals might be published within a long-term plan spanning over quarters, months or even years. (Though for small businesses they might not even be formally documented). Regardless of how they exist, it’s important that you understand what these goals are. If you know what the business wants to achieve, you can be better informed when creating an SEO strategy.

Understand your departmental goal

Knowing the business goals alone isn’t enough to build an SEO strategy. In most companies, SEOs usually sit within the marketing team, (though sometimes SEOs may even be a part of the product, analytics or even the engineering team!) Irrespective of which team they might be in, it’s quite likely that the goals of one department are quite unique from another. You should think of each department’s goals as a puzzle-piece which is tightly aligned with the overarching business goals.

Using business and departmental goals for SEO

When you think about the targets you should set for SEO, you might be thinking of things like improving page speed or increasing click-through rate. While these goals may be completely valid to an SEO, their relevance doesn’t resonate beyond your department. Instead, think more generally about the growth targets these goals are trying to achieve and how they directly contribute to your departmental or business goals. If you do not define specific goals specifically for SEO, then it’s possible your business goals and SEO results will be totally independent from each other.

With this in mind, we’re going to walk you through a concept called North Stars.

The North Star concept

The name North Star is derived from Polaris, also known as the Pole Star. Polaris is the brightest star in its constellation and holds nearly still in the sky while the entire northern sky moves around it. Why is it important to know this? Similarly to Polaris, an SEO-focused North Star acts as a focal point and that SEO strategy should revolve around. Ultimately, a North Star provides direction and should be considered as ‘the only metric that matters’.

A business-aligned North Star is critical for getting buy-in from stakeholders

A good SEO strategy can’t be done in a vacuum. Engaging critical stakeholders like the CEO, operations, customer services and development, relies on having them understand how SEO is contributing to the growth of the company.

The types of growth figures that stakeholders might care about, depends heavily on what stage your company is at. For example, a new website might initially be focused on brand visibility to validate the idea that the website can gain traction and compete within search engines. At another stage, your company might care about engagement goals and collecting feedback to validate your product or service. Though ultimately, most websites will settle on goals which focus on how SEO impacts bottom line figures ie. sales or revenue.

In practice, what does a North Star look like?

In our world as SEOs, a North Star is a single performance indicator which can be used to measure the impact of SEO activity. Often the outcome of good SEO performance will be thought of as an increase in organic traffic. Some of the more granular SEO goals, like improving page speed or increasing click-through rate may even contribute to this. While an increase in organic traffic is in most cases a good thing, often the stakeholders in a business will care more about how that increase in organic traffic has impacted the wider business goals. For example, if your website sells t-shirts, stakeholders are more likely to be focussed on the 23 sales that resulted rather than the increase in impressions which never realised any traffic.

It’s important that only one North Star exists at a single time because ultimately, the North Star should be your guide. The moment you create multiple North Stars, your attention is divided which can make it difficult to prioritise tasks in your SEO strategy. This doesn’t mean the metrics that contribute to the North Star aren’t important, but for now let’s focus on how to create a good North Star.

Types of North Stars

The key to setting achievable SEO goals is to spend time evaluating your current position but more importantly, a good North Star is a metric that SEO can directly influence over time.

At Blue Array, we primarily focus on two types of North Stars:

Traffic-focused North Star

For some websites this metric will be entrances (Google Analytics), clicks (Search Console) or unique users (Google Analytics). Depending on the website, we may also exclude the performance of branded queries or homepage / company pages, or we may only focus on certain dimensions such as specific countries or sections of a website.

In its strictest and more traditional sense (at least in the startup world) a North Star should communicate how the business is getting authentic value from the website. Some consider a purely traffic-focused North Star to be fruitless. But we’ve found this isn’t the case at all.

Many websites want a traffic-focused North Star for one of the following reasons:

• The SEO team collaborates with other functions like CRO and UX who have their own North Star which focuses on engagement metrics like conversions, leads and sales. The role of the SEOs in these scenarios is often to generate the traffic, while other functions take care of how to convert or engage that traffic.
• The website is in a phase of growth. As we mentioned earlier in this article, a new website might initially be focused on brand visibility to validate the idea that the website can gain traction and compete within search engines.

Conversion-focused North Star

Alternatively (and preferably), a North Star will be created to measure the impact of traffic on conversions or revenue. At the end of the day, SEO has the potential to be a major customer acquisition method for most businesses and most clients will be seeking a profitable return on their SEO activity. Examples of conversions include form fills and check-outs. Typically, clients should already be tracking these within Google Analytics.

While SEO can increase the traffic (which may produce a conversion), there are a greater number of variables which may affect whether or not a conversion will happen. Think of a product being out of stock or weak brand trust. Therefore, if you measure conversions or revenue, you should also be aware of how much traffic is required to reach the North Star.

Criteria for a good North Star

When it comes to SEO, there is a universal criteria you can apply when it comes to assessing whether you have a good North Star and fortunately, it’s not much different to setting a goal in any other industry. You might already be really familiar SMART goals – we apply this same framework at Blue Array.

SMART is an acronym which stands for:

• Specific
• Measurable
• Achievable
• Relevant
• Time bound

Now, let’s look at how you can apply SMART to North Stars:

Specific

This means creating a North Star which is straightforward. It should always be extremely clear what you’re aiming for.

For example, you may want to produce ‘50% more conversions’.
What exactly qualifies as a conversion? Is it a user signing up to your newsletter, a user destination like the ‘contact us’ page or an event like a user adding an item to their shopping basket? Having clear goals which ultimately can be justified as being connected to business goals, helps everyone in the company understand what SEO success looks like.

Be sure to also avoid non-specific vanity metrics such as ‘ranking number 1 for cactus’. While ranking number 1 for ‘cactus’ could certainly bring you more traffic, ultimately what you (or the person requesting that metric wants ) is more visibility in search engines so you can have more conversions.

Measurable

While it might sound obvious, don’t overlook the fact that your North Star should be measurable. It’s easy to confuse a North Star with what otherwise could form a mission statement.

For example, imagine if a Cactus Plantation created the following North Star: ‘Be the biggest cactus plantation in the whole of Aberdeen’.

You might instantly question, what does ‘biggest’ mean exactly? If they do end up the ‘biggest’ does this mean they’ve also helped the business reach their business goals? How will they know they’ve been successful? Your traffic-focused or conversion-focused North Star should have a metric associated with it, which is an absolute increase or percentage increase in a single metric.

Achievable

In any company, it can be easy to get lost chasing lofty, unattainable metrics. While it’s important you aim high, you don’t want to set your goals so high that it’s simply unrealistic. While it’s not necessary, you may want to consider performing a SWOT analysis which will help you understand your website’s current SEO position.

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