SEO 'Sales targets'

Not so much as sales targets, but the company I work for has just started implemented 'performance measures' via balanced scorecard. We are an Internet company btw. Anyway part of this is for me to forcast seo targets lol and then set thresholds?!

Anyway all these goons in the meeting were setting targets for me as in 50% organic growth per month etc.

I told them you can't do this for seo, but they just laughed! Tbh if I had seo down to that degree I wouldn't be working in house I'd be on a beach in los cabos.

Opinions?

Give them a taste of their own medicine. Devise a detailed plan about how exactly you will achieve 50% organic growth per month and clearly highlight the resources (i.e. number of content developers, no. of link builders, no. of web developers, no. of web designers) that will be required to achieve the target. Since you are working on such an ambitious project, you cant do everything by yourself. When your managers from hell will see the $$$ that will be spent in website tweaking and link building, they will automatically come back to earth

There's nothing wrong with creating measurable goals, the more you deal with people/businesses who know what they're doing the more you'll find this scenario.

However, the converse is also true as already mentioned. Don't under bid yourself if they want to ensure victory. Over-estimate what it will cost to complete their goals and then reap the monetary benefit.

You are right DJStreet. Often people come up with their own keywords list, targets and time frame without realizing the intricacies involved in a seo project. IMO the biggest challenge for an seo in this business is not getting top ranks but to handle the unrealistic expectations of his clients/managers and at the same maintain the smooth flow of income month after month.

Tell them that new, high quality content is the best way to improve the rankings of a website. So, you will need one article of 1000 to 2000 words from each of them per week that clearly describes one of the products of your business or how it is used.

You will put those on the site and let them know how much traffic and how many links they pull.

Nice. So I need an army of link builders and a CMS. They don't even have this CMS in place so we can't currently create content. Hard to do a keyword list as they have soo many urls its not even funny.

What is average growth you experience? From other sites I have worked on can be 10%-50% a month.

There are too many variables involved to say what your growth rate will be. Your industry might have a distinct sales cycle and growth can vary significantly month to month based on how many people are searching for those products or services at particular times of the year. I read a few years back that most websites get 16% - 18% of their traffic from search engines and the rest come from other Internet marketing and branding activities. What percentage of your traffic is already coming from search engines and how much can you really grow upside traffic? I have worked with and work with sites that get 80% or more of their traffic from search engines but those are the exception not the norm and they have been doing high quality SEO for a year or more.

The most important factor in my mind is what keywords will bring in real conversations and what level of competition do you face in trying to rank for those keywords phrases. You can't estimate traffic volume without knowing this first (IMO).

My recommendation is to start with a 60 day pay per click campaign on both Yahoo Marketing and Google Adwords. Make sure you have G. Analytics set up so you can track conversions. Find out which phrases are the highest converting phrases and then find the resources that can help you create a deep linking program to rank for those terms. Grabbing an artificial number of 50% growth in traffic is pointless (IMO) because less is more. Meaning fewer visitors that convert at a higher rate is much more important than a lot of visitors that convert at a lower rate. Since you don't have content you can create, you are going to need to use an outside contractor to create high quality links for you (IMO).

If you have no rankings for any of those phrases today, rest assured unless you find the right resources, it is highly unlikely you'll be ranking in the top ten at Google for any of those phrases in six months. If you find a good resource, it is possible to get into the top ten at Google for some competitive terms, but you aren't very likely to get into the top five in 90 days for any terms that are going to generate any serious revenue because most of those terms are competitive and other companies have a good head start on you.

If you need a contact at Yahoo Marketing to manage your campaign for you, send me a P.M. or give me a call. I can also recommend an Adwords Certified person to help you on Adwords side.

Also, I've worked in the corporate world in the past and there can be a lot of unrealistic expectations. In many cases, "the goons" have more clout than you. My advice is even if their expectations are unrealistic you need to state that you are on board with increasing traffic from organic search but you also need to study and come back with a plan that will tackle the issue. Based on what you are saying here, I'm not certain that SEO is the only thing that will create this desired increase in traffic. You will have to look at social media marketing and other forms of Internet marketing as a comprehensive Internet marketing plan with budgets associated. Once they see how much it might cost to achieve these things, then perhaps their unrealistic expectations will be scaled back and they will also be impressed with the seriousness you applied to researching and offering solutions to help meet corporate goals.

Where you compete and who competes there will be determining factors in how long a traffic increase can be sustained. It is easy to get more traffic in the early stages of an SEO program. It is easy to move your site up if you rank at #65.

However, you can get to the point where links become much harder to get, the remaining competitors above you become difficult or impossible to beat, and you have saturated the suite of keywords in your niche.

And, you should not forget that there are lots of people out there gunning for the same traffic. Strong, new competitors enter the web everyday and they can have you outgunned with staff, smarts, talent and resources. They can be very hard to hold off. Some of this competition will be from long established sites that simply add a few pages and they are strongly into your SERPs.

When you get to the top of the important keywords there is only one way to go and that is down - so you must fight just to hold your position.

Sales can fall because of competing price, competing product, changes in market and changes in demand. You have no control over much of this.

If your bosses are serious about this then they should give you staff and resources - your competitors probably have been working that way for years while your bosses sat ignorant.