The new year is here, and optimism is at its peak as everyone turns to setting goals for self-improvement. Besides personal resolutions like “exercising more” or “traveling more,” you should really think about laying out some New Year’s resolutions for your business as well. Now is the best time to reflect on your business’s progress and start planning how you want to further develop your business in 2018.

First Thing’s First: SEO Audit

Before you set goals for anything, you must begin with assessing your current situation. An SEO audit will show you the current strengths and weaknesses of your website. You should be looking at areas such as domain maturity, broken links, and your site’s internal structure.

Pay Attention to What Competitors are Doing

It doesn’t hurt to scope out the competition every now and then. Looking at your competitors’ websites can give you insight into their strategy as well as sharpen your knowledge of target keywords. Look at the types of keywords that keep reappearing on their site and use it to your advantage.

For example, perhaps you are an emergency veterinarian in Tampa, Florida and you see other vets in the area using keywords like “Florida Vet” or “Veterinarian Near Me.” Those keywords likely have a lot of competition for them, so instead of trying to compete with every other vet out there, look for gaps, be more specific, and use keywords such as “Emergency Vet Near Me,” “Tampa Urgent Care Veterinarian,” or “Tampa Emergency Vet.” You might not rank on Google’s first search page under those more generic terms, but the customers that do find you using the more specific keywords are more likely to convert to an actual sale.

Keep Your Budget in Mind

Once you have your target audience and a few keywords figured out, you can now start building the foundations of your SEO strategy. At thirteen05 creative, we offer a wide array of services that are sure to boost your SEO. Take a look at the things we offer, whether it’s content writing, pay-per-click, or remarketing ads, and see which ones you can reasonably accommodate into your budget. Every business is different, so it’s important to know which services will benefit your business the most.

Identify Measurable Goals

I’m sure you have some general goals for where you want your business to go this year. Frequent answers are “I want to more products online,” or “I want to find new customers online.” We all want to pull in more customers to our business, thirteen05 creative included, however it’s important to make sure these desires can be measured.

Is your goal to gain more customers? Increasing the number of visitors to your webpage is an easily measurable goal. Organic traffic volume, website impressions, and website clicks are all measurable aspects that will help you know if you’re heading in the right direction. Want to turn more website visitors into paying customers? Look at your website conversion rate, organic conversion rate, and the return on investment you have made in SEO campaigns.

Optimizing Content Should Always be a Goal

If your goal is to get more visitors to find, read, and interact with the content on your site, there are several things to look at. Look to see how many times your visitors share your content on social media, this will tell you who finds your content useful and how much reach your content is getting. The bounce rate on a single page of your site is useful to you in that it shows the percentage of visitors that came to the page and immediately left, essentially because your content did not meet their expectations.

Finally, you can also measure the amount of time your audience spends looking at your content. This information will help you determine how best to optimize your content, through blog posts, videos, call to actions, etc. so that your audience benefits from your website and buys your product or service.

Be Realistic

Most importantly, your SEO goals for 2018 should be realistic and grounded. With SEO, slow and steady definitely wins the race, and it takes time to build up your SEO profile and really establish yourself in your industry. Don’t immediately try to go toe-to-toe with giant companies like Walmart or Facebook, who have enough money and resources that they don’t always have to follow the best practices of SEO.

Instead, play to your strengths and start local. The majority of customers prefer to patron businesses they can build a lasting relationship with, online or in-person. Make effectively engaging with your target audience a goal for 2018, because once you master that, everything else falls into place.