To take the shortest route, you need to know the destination...
Why set goals?
Semji has been designed to help you improve the SEO performance of your content. Thanks to its relevant recommendations and playful interface, you can either optimize existing content to increase its ability to attract traffic, or create new, well-optimized content.
In addition to providing you with concrete SEO recommendations for writing each and every piece of content, Semji enables you to build your SEO Content strategy:
- Identify which of your site's URLs to optimize in priority to maximize your earnings
- Find new content ideas to enrich your site, improve your visibility, semantic authority and traffic acquisition.
Define your macro objectives
First, you need to have a pretty clear idea of your business goals. Do you want to increase sales? Capture more leads? Gain awareness and visibility on your key topics?
Once you have listed and prioritized them, they can be translated into production objectives and clear monitoring KPIs.
As an example, your content strategy will be different depending on whether you want to trigger product purchases via transactional pages or reinforce your brand awareness using informational pages.
Are you familiar with the SMART method of defining objectives?
This method summarizes the right definition of an objective by the following criteria:
- S for Specific and Simple
- M as in Measurable
- A is for Ambitious and Accepted
- R is for Realistic
- T is for Temporal, Time limited
Use this method to define your goals effectively.
1. Know your target
In a previous content, we explained how important it was to know your target audience and identify users' search intent, a notion that is increasingly key in the Google algorithm.
For example, it is crucial to know if you are targeting a large part of the population or a niche group: this will allow you to define your maximum audience. By also understanding how your target audience searches the internet, what they want to find and what motivates them, you will have a better chance of catching their attention and starting a fruitful relationship.
The first distinction to be made is to divide your business according to your audience type:
- B to C (Business to Consumers): your customers are the final consumers
- B to B (Business to Business): your customers are companies and professionals with business issues
End consumers and professionals within companies do not have the same needs, nor the same issues. They will not use the same search terms on Google for a similar product or service. Make sure you understand your future customers and their online behavior to be able to set SMART goals for your SEO content production!
2. Know your market and your competitors
You also need to know your market and your competitors.
Who are the players trusting the first positions on Google on your topic? Do you know their turnover? How many clients they have? The monthly traffic of their site? Do you know which keywords are most profitable for them in terms of sales or views?
With these data, you will get a first idea of your growth potential.
Then look in detail at their content production, it will also give you good indications on behaviors and practices that Google likes and that you can learn from:
- What are the keywords your competitors are ranking for ?
- What type of content (text, video...) seem successful?
- What length of text? How often do they publish ?
- Are articles written by experts? ...
They are plenty of opportunities. One thing for sure: as long as you aren't number one, you can do better!
Note: depending on your subscription package, your Customer Success Manager can provide you with a complete competitive analysis. It will give you a good vision of your competitors' SEO performance and will help you identify their best practices in terms of content production. You will then be able to create a new strategy with a clear action plan.
Define your micro objectives
With a good vision of your business challenges and your growth potential, setting clear objectives for your SEO content production becomes easier.
1. Formalize your strategic objectives
With your competitors' performance in mind, list the objectives that seem desirable and realistic: capture X% more market share, catch up with competitor Y, overtake it...
What gains to expect and how to measure them?
- Sales generation, conversion rate / number of triggered events
- Volume of additional traffic (per content or for your global site) Example: +20% of global organic traffic in 12 months
- CTR (click-through rate on the SERP)
- Other user behavior indicators: time spent on the page, number of pages per session, bounce rate...
Don't forget to set a deadline for reaching these objectives.
2. Formalize your operational objectives
With these profit objectives in mind, you will have a better idea of what to do:
- How much content per month can you optimize?
- How much new content per month can you create?
- How many writers do you have? How many experts in your field ?
- How often can you update your content? (Example: every 6 months)
Of course, if these operational criteria are too restrictive - and production resources often are - they can help you rethink your goals. Keep in mind that these objectives must be ambitious, but remain realistic! There is no point in planning 50 pieces of content per month if your writer can only produce one per day...
Once your objectives are set, all you have to do is to define your editorial planning, including content optimization actions and new content creation.
Your Customer Success Manager will regularly provide you with ideas of new content to produce. He will also make sure you work primarily on profitable content. Don't hesitate to share your priority topics to get useful insights.
Thanks to its Prioritization score, Semji Platform helps you identify, at a glance, existing content you should optimize first for more gain. Want to know more? Check out How to optimize existing content with Semji?