SEO and Setting Goals for your Website
When designing an SEO strategy for a website, defining the goal or goals of the site can be a critical element and it’s always a good starting point. A goal can be as simple as getting a visitor to click through to another page of the site, perhaps to fill out a form. For ecommerce applications the goal is usually to get visitors to the products and shopping cart. Goals can include having end users respond to various calls to action, such as making the phone ring or sending an email or signing up for a newsletter or adding more followers to your social media accounts like Twitter or Facebook. Sites that are primarily used for adsense and affiliate marketing usually have the goal of clicking on advertising banners. Other sites are primarily used for branding and the goal is to promote the company name. Specific goals can point the way to what needs to be emphasized on a page, which in turn will affect both design and SEO elements.
Ultimately, whatever the specific goal, the general intent is to increase traffic to the website. This can be done by improving rankings in search engines, of course, but search engines are not the only source of potential traffic. Depending upon the nature of the site and its goals, there are a lot of resources online that could be utilized, such as directories, classifieds, local listings and maps, merchant services, B2B services, yellow pages, etc. For example, a real estate site in a very competitive market may never achieve those coveted first page Google rankings, but it may get a great deal of traffic from a popular real estate blog or directory.
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