HSG Global Services

By Link Moser
June 10, 2010

Define Your Goals and Identify How to Measure Success

Before you start working on any SEO project, you need to know three things.

• Who your target audience is
• what your message is
• how is it relevant to your audience

Without these key items, there is no need to proceed. Once you identify your audience, you may want to further segment that audience.  Next, define your goals for the SEO project. Do you want to increase traffic to the web site? If so, by how much? Are you looking to generate more ‘buzz’ and PR for your company brand through social media? If so, how will you measure this? If you conduct commerce on your web site, maybe you want to increase sales by X percent. Regardless of your company size or industry, you need to clearly define your goals for any SEO investment in advance and define how you measure them.

If you have a web site with lots of content, you may need to define multiple goals for different sections. For example, you may want to increase online sales by 10% and increase white paper downloads by 25% over the next six months. Be as specific as possible when it comes to your goals and be realistic when settings them.

Luckily, online marketing is highly tractable. Tools like Google Analytics give users a wealth of data including metrics like number of visits, length on page, top content/entry pages, traffic sources and more. Funnels can be setup that track site visitor’s actions through your site. This feedback is extremely helpful when it comes to determining the ROI for SEO investment. Accurately measuring your efforts will keep the SEO team from chasing it’s tale and make the most of the company’s investment.

Get Your Organization On Board with the SEO Campaign

You realize the value that a search engine optimized web site can bring to your business. However, your boss may not. In order for SEO to really succeed, several key departments need to be on board. Management is first. Without them, checks may not be written and the project will fail before it gets started.  Most managers will be asking what the return on investment is. Below are some compelling charts to help illustrate the value and help you ‘build your case’.

This graphic shows that web sites with more pages of quality content receive a substantially larger number of leads per month.

More leads means more sales. That isn’t difficult to understand. Clearly a content-rich website that participates in social media and blogging is more likely to realize a substantial increase in leads per month. Depending on the resistance you get to starting an SEO project, you may want to try and get permission to conduct a small test campaign first. Select a dozen or so pages for optimization and target a single keyword phrase. The larger the company and it’s web site, the longer it will take to educate key stakeholders to the value that SEO can bring to the organization. For more details and ideas on changing the tides, read this post.

Building Your SEO Team

Maybe your boss told you to look into ‘optimizing’ the company web site one Friday afternoon, thinking it would be a quick little project. Perhaps you are the IT guy and because web sites have to do with computers, were tasked with SEO.  There is often confusion and false assumptions about who is responsible for search engine optimization and online marketing within a company.  More often than not, someone in management decides that SEO needs some attention and then they go looking for someone to assign this to.

Your SEO team is made up of several departments.  Each one is critical to the success of the project.

• Creatives – The creatives are from marketing, public relations, and advertising. They are the team members who will answer questions like “Who are we targeting?”, “What is our message?”, and “Why does our target want what we offer?”.  The creative team members will be instrumental in researching keyword phrases, determining the context and content for web pages, and learning how to optimize future content for SEO.
• Technicals – The creatives may understand the message but they can’t deliver it without the help of the IT department and web team.  Those in charge of managing the company web server and web site must be onboard and work with the creative team members to deliver and implement their content.  The team leader must balance, and sometimes interpret, the needs of both the creatives and technical team members.  Because technical and creative people tend to use opposite sides of the brain, be warned that the two may have disagreements or fail to understand the other’s point of view. As team leader, you need to ref this situation and speak to both sides of the fence.
• Key Management Stakeholders – The key members from management should be part of your team. They may not be involved on a day to day basis but should be aware of milestones and have a basic understanding of the objectives. These are the people who have the power to authorize additional spending and secure outside resources, if needed. You want them to be on board and aware. Depending on the size of your organization, this might be the CEO, CMO, VP or marketing managers.

With your team in place, set your goals and work flow processes. Schedule regular meetings so that feedback and milestones can be discussed and reviewed. Constant communication among team members is critical to the success of your project. Even if you are a team of one or two people, it is important to define everyone’s responsibilities so that your project remains on track and your goals are met.

Link Moser is the Director of Online Strategies for HSG Global Services, Inc. HSG Global Services, Inc. provides management consulting and outsourced services to the international business community.