How SMART and SEO works together

Make your SEO efforts SMART [Simple, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Timely]

Simple

SEO works great if you have simple goal(s) to start with. By simplicity, I mean that your SEO goal(s) should be very straight forward and specified in couple of plain sentences. Anyone reading it should be able to understand that what you are going to achieve in the future. For example, I am going to launch a brand new site for Cars (Sell and Purchase). My Goal statement can be as follows:

“To make a Car (sell and purchase) website for UK region specifically and achieving 3000 registered website users in next 6 months, and a regular traffic of 500+ visitors/day from search engines at that time.”

This statement is very simple and general in nature. I will definitely plan and devise methods to achieve those goals but technical details should not be the part of Goal statement. I will make my plan revolving around this particular goal that I have made. At this stage, I will list all possible activities that I would need to perform to obtain those figures specified in Goal statement. This is somehow called a Work breakdown structure of activities. I can make two level plans approach here. First level plan will describe only the major activities and the second specifying further details under each major activity.
My first level plan may include the following major activities just to give you an idea:

• Professional website Design
• Slicing and Publishing of Website
• Building quality Content
• Website and Search Engine Sitemaps
• Discussion Forum
• Social Media Marketing
• Directory Submissions

Measurable

This is rather a very important criterion for your Goals to be evaluated fairly. In real world, we compare things by features, aesthetics, comfort, design, reliability, durability etc. In SMART methodology, firstly you should have a set of characteristics against which to measure. Once you are clear about those parameters, measure them one by one and in-depth. You can also measure your success by building benchmarking criteria’s. You can measure your position with respect to your competitors. SEO is an activity which starts right with the creation of website. So you cannot delay your measuring process until the deadline, instead you should start measuring your results continuously and make adjustments in the plan if something is going wrong or anything unforeseen happens.
You should always take help from the tools. For example, Google Analytics is one of the tools that you can use to measure your results constantly. There are lot more in the market, but you should use one which best fulfill your needs.

Achievable

The Goal(s) you specify for your SEO campaign should be achievable. You can set the challenging goals but yet they should be achievable on ground realities. Making goals out of bound will make your plans always slip with respect to time, budget and scope. Carefully plan your resources and expenses well ahead of kick start of the SEO project. For instance, If you are an entrepreneur; evaluate your skills, abilities and knowledge from your past history and prior achievements and then estimate your efforts required for the SEO activities. After this, you will be in good position to check whether this project is achievable for you in the given timeframe. Always make adjustments to the plan as you go along with the various stages of your SEO project and put things on track.

Relevant

You should not throw the arrow in the air and then draw your target. Always keep laser focus on the Goal(s) you want to accomplish. Always make sure, all of your SEO activities are revolving around those goals. For instance, let’s consider our above example which we specified in “Simple” for Cars website, suppose we need to build inbound links to our Auto’s website. My first priority should be to get the links from existing Autos websites in the UK region. It would be difficult but it is highly relevant to my niche area and region. My priority afterwards then would be to acquire links from article submission websites with high PR and getting links with my desired relevant words in the anchor tag.

Now see this from another angle. I want to promote my website by running Ad campaign. Now there are many ways to do so. I can use Google Adwords, Linkedin, Facebook, and AdBrite etc. But choosing Adwords would be more relevant and appropriate for my Auto’s website promotion. Linkedin is a website for professionals, so it can give me best results if lets say I have a jobs website. So linkedin network for my Auto’s business will be an irrelevant selection for Ad campaign.

Timely

The “timely” factor is the most critical from SEO perspective. Once you have an online presence, you need to remain in-touch with your visitors or customers; you would never want that relationship to break. Because once your site is up, and you started receiving traffic, then you should be very efficient and effective in delivering fresh and relevant content to your visitor, which will convert them to returning visitors and then finally to customers. Even when you are performing SEO activities, you should keep in mind that search engines love fresh and updated content with uniqueness and relevancy. So if you respect time, it can give you long lasting results.