What is SEO success?
When people think of a “successful business”, everyone has their idea of what it means to be successful.
Some may view success as being the most known company within their sector.
Others may think that a company is successful if they make over £1 million.
The truth is, not every company will make £1 million and people view success differently.
SEO campaigns and goals
By performing SEO campaigns, it can help you achieve that as long as your goals are SMART!
- Specific
- Measurable
- Achievable
- Relevant
- Time-bound
You might think that this is simple, but some people do not think of how they will achieve their goals.
It’s easy to have specific goals.
Such as I want my website to get 1000 views every day.
While it is good that you have a specific idea of your goal, you need to factor in the other elements of SMART goals.
The SMART goal criteria do not only apply to business plans, it can help you with any part of your business!
One of the most common mistakes that business owners make is being vague.
Being vague makes it harder for goals to be achieved, so more detail will give you more chances of success.
Although we do not provide SEO services, we work closely with consulants who provide digital marketing services that can help any business improve its rankings on Google. Click here to see more about what they do.
How can SEO help my business?
People may think SEO is only for well-known businesses that want to appeal to a new market.
Or, they may think it’s only for new businesses that want to market to a specific niche.
You should not treat SEO campaigns as unimportant.
The right SEO can have your website on the top page of Google if the right keywords are chosen.
SEO companies do not prioritise a new company over an established one, so you do not need to worry about “not meeting a criteria”.
Successful SEO
Like we said at the beginning: everyone views success differently.
For many people that invest in SEO campaigns, their main campaign target would be to get on the first page of Google.
That is not an unrealistic goal if you get the right SEO provider.
However, that goal cannot always be achieved if the SMART goals are followed.
It would be ideal if you and your SEO provider discuss all your SMART goals so your expected results can happen!
What is the value of a search query? Most of us carry out dozens of searches every day. The value for us is that we can find the information we are looking for, whether that means the latest sports news, travel information, product reviews or whatever. However, when captured on a grand scale, search data also has monetary value.
Understanding your market
When it comes to internet marketing, search volumes provide valuable information about user behaviour. If we see that one search term is being used far more frequently than a synonym, we know that a website stands to gain more traffic if it targets that term. Set against that is the fact that there is likely to be more competition as well. A digital marketing strategy must take into account both factors in order to prove effective.
Predicting the market
But search data doesn’t just indicate what people are searching for, it also provides an insight into what they are thinking. If you can gather data in sufficient volume, you gain a valuable window into the thoughts of the population as a whole.
Is this of value? Well, consider the stock market. Seo for Personal Injury Lawyers. Here public confidence has a tangible impact on share value. Investment drives values upwards while uncertainty tends to lead to a fall. If you have your finger on the pulse of the market, you conceivably have a means of predicting when share prices will rise and fall and can therefore profit from that knowledge.
You may be thinking about this in terms of gathering information about a particular company, but research published in the journal Scientific Reports looked at whether searches for financial terms could be used to predict the direction of the stock market as a whole. They found that when there was an increase in the number of searches involving terms such as ‘stocks’ and ‘economics’ this tended to precede a decline in the stock market.
Basically, such searches appear to indicate that people are worried. The researchers say that if a person had adopted a short-term investment strategy based on the frequency of searches for the word ‘debt’ between 2004 and 2011, they could have made a 326 per cent profit.
Influencing the market
However, the above example comes with the benefit of hindsight. There is no saying such trends will continue, particularly where such a strategy become widely adopted. Even mere awareness of such a method is sufficient to change people’s behaviour and therefore how the stock market reacts.
Nevertheless, this study does help indicate the potential value of large volumes of search data. Put simply, it provides a small but meaningful snapshot of people’s thinking at any given time. One can only wonder (and perhaps worry) at the many ways in which Google can exploit this rich mine of information.