How to Set SEO Goals That Work on Real Business Outcomes in 2026

That’s exactly why here, at SeoProfy, we begin each of our new projects by defining targets that result in actual business growth. And in this guide, we’ll share our experience (backed by 13 years in the field) on how to set realistic SEO goals based on your brand strength and domain history, as well as track progress with KPIs that reflect real business impact.

What Are SEO Goals and Why Do They Matter?

SEO goals are specific targets that outline exactly what you want to achieve with your website’s search engine optimization. They describe what will change and by how much, usually within a set time frame.

What’s important to mention here is that realistic SEO goals should connect to your broader business objectives, like acquisition (new customers and leads), revenue (higher sales), and retention (more repeat buyers or upgrades). To help you see a comparison of what makes a good and a bad goal, here’s a quick table:

When your goals are as concrete as the ones on the right side of the table, it simplifies SEO planning and makes it easier to reach them. Most importantly, the clarity in numbers makes budgeting and other resource planning clearer.

When you aim to get 40 backlinks, you can anticipate what it takes: writing guest posts, sending outreach emails, and possibly hiring link builders if your team can’t handle it alone.

Moreover, if you’re going to work with external specialists, once you’ve defined clear SEO goals, you’ll better understand which questions to ask an SEO company about their expertise.

How to Set Achievable and Realistic SEO Goals

The road to better ROI from search starts with goals that you can actually achieve. The tricky part is telling the difference between targets that move your business forward and “wish list” goals that only create pressure for your team. So in this section, we’ll share seven steps on how to set SEO goals that feel ambitious, but still realistic.

1. Analyze Your Current Performance

As we mentioned earlier, your starting point depends on more than one signal. The first is your current performance. A simple way to evaluate it is to look at three things side by side:

• Search rankings of your main pages
• How organic traffic growth changed over the past few months
• How many leads, signups, or sales come from that traffic

You can get all of this performance data from GA4 and Google Search Console, as well as paid tools like Ahrefs or Semrush. And if you want to get even deeper, you could check server logs to see how often Googlebot hits each section of your site and where it runs into errors.

All this data helps you see which parts of the site already work, and where you have room to grow before you set SEO goals.

2. Study Your Competition

Next, look at who you share the search engine results pages (SERPs) with. This is not only direct business competitors. It is anyone who ranks for the queries you want.

You can start in Google. Search a handful of your priority topics and slow down for a minute on the results page. You’re looking for two things: who shows up, and what format Google seems to prefer.

Then, open Ahrefs or Semrush and pressure-test what you saw in search results. Four checks tend to give you a pretty honest read on competitiveness.

• SERP feature analysis: Are you dealing with a map pack, shopping results, People Also Ask, videos, or image blocks? These features can soak up clicks. That changes what “success” looks like, even at a good rank.
• Authority gap analysis: Check the domains that show up. A results page full of authoritative domains usually calls for longer timeframes and more support from links and brand demand.
• Content gap analysis: Evaluate what content ranks with what you have on your site. Look at how competitors structure the page and what they answer that you don’t.
• Link gap scoring: Look at the referring domains to the top-ranking pages and compare them with your page (or the page you plan to build). This tells you how much link building you’ll need to budget for. If the top URLs sit on a pile of relevant referring domains and yours has very few, that’s not a “quick on-page win” keyword.

For example, in certain industries like ecommerce or SaaS, you might find yourself up against big names with strong domains, especially when targeting head terms. Here’s what the SERP overview looks like for a “project management software” keyword.

Notice how most of the websites have high DR scores. And, as you might’ve guessed, this matters a lot for goal-setting. You can still compete, but you may need to adjust timeframes or start with different angles where you have a better shot.

3. Use Effort vs Impact to Choose Your Battles

By this point, you probably have more ideas than you can handle. That is normal. The next step is to narrow that list into clear SEO goals for the next quarter.

An effort–impact view keeps this practical. Take your potential goals and projects and ask two simple questions:

• How much effort does this require across content, dev, design, outreach, and sign-off?
• How much impact can it have on revenue, leads, or key conversions from organic?

You end up with a rough split between quick wins, big bets, “nice to have” tasks, and work that does not justify the push. Most teams do well with a small handful of quick wins and one or two bigger bets per quarter, rather than juggling ten priorities that all move slowly.

4. Turn Broad Ideas Into SMART and CLEAR Goals

One common SEO mistake we see all the time is that businesses are setting one broad goal, like grow organic traffic or improve rankings. And even though they express the right desire, such goals do not tell your team what SEO success looks like.

This is where SMART and CLEAR frameworks help. They keep the goals more concrete. Here’s what they stand for and how they compare:

• SMART: specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, time-bound
• CLEAR: collaborative, limited, emotional, appreciable, refinable

In practice, this might change “get more organic traffic” into something like “increase organic demo requests by 30% in the next 12 months.”

The latter one says what should change, by how much, in what time frame, and why it matters. It is also easy to share with your leadership team.

5. Give Each Goal a Timeframe: Short, Mid, and Long Term

SEO goals work better when they sit on a timeline. Otherwise, a 12-month goal ends up judged on next month’s numbers. A simple way to frame your goals is this:

• Short term (0–3 months) for things like technical fixes, internal links, and updates to pages that sit close to page one.
• Mid-term (3–12 months) for ranking growth on commercial terms, new content clusters, and conversion lifts on key pages.
• Long-term (12+ months) for bigger outcomes such as owning a category, expanding into new markets, or building a content library that attracts links on its own.

Your long-term outcome sits at the top. Under that, you attach mid-term performance goals, then short-term process goals you can work on week by week.

At the same time, give yourself a regular checkpoint. Map your short-term process goals to sprints and use the end of each quarter to step back and reflect. That’s usually a good cadence to check what’s moving in your SEO campaigns and what deserves more budget or less attention.

6. Align SEO Targets to Broader Business Goals

Now comes the part that keeps your goals useful: lining them up from the business level all the way down to the page. There are three main levels you need to think about here:

• Business objectives: The outcome leadership cares about, like revenue growth, pipeline, retention, or expansion into a new market.
• Marketing goals: What marketing needs to deliver to support that objective. Possible options here are more targeted traffic, better conversion rate, higher LTV, or lower CAC from organic.
• Page-level KPIs: The numbers you track on specific pages to prove progress, such as clicks and impressions (GSC), search visibility for a certain keyword set, organic conversion rate (GA4), assisted conversions, or growth in referring domains to that URL.

Understanding these levels keeps your SEO goals grounded in the business while still giving your team something concrete to execute. It also makes reporting easier, because you can show the chain from what your team did on these pages to what changed for the business.

7. Establish Quantifiable KPIs

You’ve probably come across ads like, “We’ll get you to #1 in 6 months!” Here’s the deal: any SEO company promising guaranteed SEO results is either clueless or trying to mislead you on purpose. Google’s algorithms are always changing and use hundreds of factors, so exact predictions are out of the question.

Therefore, avoid such hollow promises; focus on measurable key performance indicators that impact your business instead. Here are the key metrics our data-driven SEO agency tracks:

• Keywords in the top 10: How many of your target keywords reach the first page of Google? It’s critical because most people hardly look beyond page one.
• Average keyword position: A quick read on overall ranking performance across your tracked set.
• Site’s organic traffic: The number of visitors coming in through the specific keywords. This tells you if you’re attracting an audience that’s interested in what you offer.
• Number of leads or conversions: How many visitors take the actions you want, like buying or signing up. This metric connects your SEO efforts to the desired outcome.
• Organic revenue and SEO ROI: Revenue attributed to organic traffic and the return you get from SEO investment over time.

Of course, there are plenty of other KPIs you can track, and the right set depends on your SEO goals and a business model (SaaS, ecommerce, legal, local). As a general list, here are the most common KPIs and the metrics you can use to evaluate them.

Many teams map their KPI set into Looker Studio dashboards, usually with GA4 and GSC as the base data sources, then review it on a monthly cadence.

8. Regularly Review and Update Goals and KPIs as Business Objectives Change

SEO is a dynamic process that requires constant adjustment. Market conditions change, competitors become stronger, and Google updates its algorithm. This is why we recommend doing weekly check-ins to monitor your SEO progress.

Take into account both overperformance and underperformance. If certain keywords rank faster than expected, you might allocate more resources to this area to strengthen your strategy further. If conversion rates aren’t improving despite higher rankings, it might be time to set some goals around content quality or user experience.

Ready to Set Your SEO Goals?

Let’s turn your SEO vision into measurable results. Our professional team will help you to:

• Set short-term and long-term SEO goals
• Prepare a well-rounded SEO strategy
• Improve website traffic and rankings

Schedule a Free Consultation

Top 7 SEO Goals for Your Website

And now we’re getting down to the main section — the actual goals you can include in your SEO strategy this year. In this section, we’ll mention traditional SEO objectives as well as the new ones related to AI search. Let’s review them one by one, starting with the most common one.

1. Increase Organic Traffic

Traffic was and still is one of the most common SEO goals. It’s also one of the easiest goals to get wrong, because more traffic can mean “more visitors who never buy.”

So the goal here isn’t just more sessions. It’s about more relevant organic visits to the pages that support your business. Here’s how you could set such goals:

• “Grow monthly organic sessions to priority pages by 30% quarter-over-quarter.”
• “Increase organic revenue from category pages by 15% over two quarters.”

To measure SEO performance related to organic traffic, you can track organic sessions and users (sitewide or by page group, like services or collections) in GA4.

 2. Get To the Top of Search Results for Priority Keywords

You’ll hear this a lot: “We need to rank #1 for our main keyword.” Fair goal — after all, higher positions in search engines for your key terms directly affect your site’s visibility and traffic. The part that trips teams up is deciding what counts as priority and which page is supposed to win that search.

Priority keywords usually map to revenue-driving pages, like service pages, product pages, category pages, pricing, and high-intent comparison pages. And as for the example SEO goals you can target here, you could try something like:

• “Move 10 priority keywords from positions 11–30 into the top 10 within 6 months.”
• “Get 5 priority keywords into the top 3 by the end of Q3.”

You can use Google Search Console to watch keyword rankings and clicks for those queries. And if needed, switch to Ahrefs or Semrush to track the movement of those terms week to week.

3. Secure More High-Quality Backlinks

Backlinks continue to be one of the top ranking factors for traditional search. And as recent studies show, they matter for AI visibility too.

Why? Because high-quality links and mentions are one of the simplest ways to prove authority. Other credible sites talk about you, so search engines and AI models have more reason to treat you as a source worth citing. A few good examples of backlink SEO goals could be:

• “Earn 40 new referring domains to our priority pages within 6 months.”
• “Increase referring domains to a particular page from 12 to 30 by the end of Q3.”

To track your backlinks, tools like Ahrefs or Semrush can help a lot. You can watch referring domains over time, catch new and lost links, and see which pages earn links in your niche. And if a competitor keeps getting mentioned in the same places, that shows you where the bar sits for your own targets.

4. Boost Local Visibility

For those businesses that operate in a specific geographic area, local visibility is one of the top SEO goals. And if you think about it, it’s easy to see why.

More than 70% of customers use Google to find services nearby, so showing up in the local pack and on Google Maps often turns into calls, direction requests, and ultimately, more bookings.

So what do good local SEO goals look like? Let’s look at these two examples:

• “Get priority keywords into the top 3 of the local pack within 6 months.”
• “Add 60 new reviews over the next 90 days and keep an average rating above 4.6.”

As for the measurement, tools like Semrush Local (Listings, Position Tracking with geo, GBP management) are built for this kind of work, and a geo-based tracker helps because map results change by location and device.

5. Maximize Conversion Rate

Traffic and rankings are great, but it’s conversions that show how many people take the next step, which is directly connected to how many leads and sales you get. So what counts as a “conversion” on your site?

That depends on what you sell. In SaaS, it’s often demo requests or trial starts. For local businesses, it can be call clicks and appointment bookings. Even though the actions change, this metric stays near the top of what you track, no matter the industry. Here are some of the example SEO goals you could set:

• “Increase organic conversion rate on our top 10 landing pages from 1.8% to 2.4% over two quarters.”
• “Reduce form-start to form-submit drop-off on organic landing pages from 48% to 35% over the next 90 days.”

You can use tools like Google Analytics and your CRM to track the full journey from organic search to conversion. Pay special attention to:

• Time to the first conversion from organic entry
• Pages viewed before converting
• Exit points in your conversion funnel
• Conversion rate differences across devices
• Effect of content updates on conversion performance

6. Improve Mobile Usability

Unsurprisingly, the mobile experience on your site connects directly to the number of conversions you get. The thing is, a big share of organic visits happens on a phone, and if navigation feels confusing or a page takes too long to load, plenty of visitors leave before they even get to the point of the page.

This is the exact reason why mobile optimization has a big place in broader technical SEO goals. As for the ideas of what good goals look like for this section, you might set targets like:

• Better page speed scores for your top landing pages
• Fewer layout shifts that make buttons hard to tap
• Form fields that work better on mobile screens

Even though these aren’t as specific as other goals we’ve covered, they give you a direction to work toward.

To see the performance of your pages on mobile, you can pair GSC data with PageSpeed Insights. The latter also has a section that shows you the exact reason why your mobile performance has a low score, with tips to fix it. You can take that as the groundwork for your mobile optimization goals.

7. Get More Mentions on Different Platforms (Reddit, LinkedIn, etc.)

Our last goal might look a bit uncommon from the traditional SEO perspective, but now that many brands also try to earn an LLM citation or simply appear in AI overviews and AI tools, it’s worth paying attention to. So why is this the case?

The data from Semrush shows that Quora is one of the most-cited sites in Google AI Overviews, with Reddit in second place. What’s interesting is that ChatGPT itself also pulls data from these platforms when it answers questions.

One thing this tells us is that businesses that want to appear in more AI responses should invest in broader content marketing efforts and show up with relevant content in the places those tools already cite. That’s also how you increase your chances to rank on ChatGPT when people search for your products or services.

As usual, here are some examples of actionable SEO goals you can target with this tactic (use numbers that match your baseline):

• “Increase brand mentions across Reddit + LinkedIn from 8/month to 20/month by the end of Q2.”
• “Earn 15 new third-party discussions that mention our product category + brand each quarter (threads, reviews, “which tool should I use” posts).”

Although mentions are a bit harder to measure than specific SEO metrics like keyword rankings, there’s still a workaround for this. You can use social listening tools like Mention and Brand24 to track when your brand comes up across different platforms, so you can see how often people talk about you and where those conversations happen.

What Factors Influence SEO Goal Setting

The goals you set for your SEO usually depend on different factors. Let’s take a closer look at each of those below.

Business Stage and Brand Strength

The first thing to look at is where your business is right now. After all, a startup with a new site usually needs different targets than an established company with years of history and a known brand.

If you run a startup with a new site, early SEO wins often come from narrower, easier opportunities, so your first goals usually focus on getting those in place. That can mean prioritizing:

• Low-difficulty, long-tail keywords
• Narrow topics with clear search intent
• A few backlinks from authoritative domains

In contrast, if you already have an established brand, you can start from a different place because you already have trust and data to work with. So, when you see stable organic traffic coming to your site, and people search for your name directly in Google, it makes sense to:

• Grow non-brand traffic with new content clusters
• Earn more authoritative backlinks that strengthen topical authority
• Target more commercial and competitive terms, your brand can now aim for

In short, the more history and brand recognition you have in the market, the more ambitious you can be with your SEO targets.

Domain Age and History

After you look at the business stage and brand, the next stop is your domain. Internally, we like to run this through a forecasting tool, SearchAnalytics, to get a sense of how fast a domain with a certain profile can move. Once you know that pace, it becomes much easier to set timelines for your goals that do not overpromise.

It also helps to look at both performance and risk indicators here, such as spam scores and spikes in referring domains. You’ll also want to review any manual actions or obvious drops after core updates.

Those checks give you a read on how quickly the domain responds to SEO work and how aggressive your timelines can be. Older domains with years of published pages and a steady backlink profile often move faster.

New domains require patience to build credibility with Google. Start by creating a strong content base and targeting less competitive long-tail keywords before moving to higher-value ones.

Traffic Patterns

Your past organic traffic should also guide the SEO goals and objectives you set. Rising numbers month after month give you room to build on that trend, while flat or falling traffic calls for more careful targets and some space to figure out what went wrong.

To see your pattern, look at traffic over the past 12 months in Google Analytics 4 and GSC. As you analyze the data, keep seasonality in mind. Many industries do not have flat demand across the year.

Retail, travel, hospitality, education, tax and accounting, real estate, and many others see traffic spikes around certain seasons and then slower stretches. Those peaks and dips should feed into your SEO goal setting, so targets match the busy and quiet months.

Current Technical Issues

Technical SEO is the next important factor to consider since it affects how users and search engines experience your site. This, in turn, connects directly to how many conversions you get from organic search.

Vodafone’s success story is a good example of why this matters. They improved the loading speed of the largest content elements on their landing page and saw an 8% increase in sales.

So if your website has serious issues on a technical side of things, put them first in your SEO goals. Only after you’ve tackled these challenges can you move on to other optimization targets.

Available Budget

Budget is the last factor, and it is not a minor one. It sets the limits for how many goals you can pursue at the same time.

A larger budget lets you engage in multiple SEO tactics simultaneously. You can fix technical issues, ship new content, improve UX on key pages, and run outreach to get high-quality backlinks. But if your resources are tight, it’s best to keep your goals narrower and focus on a few pages that have the most value for your business.

Similar to the objectives, your resources will also impact the keywords you’ll target. Suppose you’re selling a CRM product. A quick round of keyword research makes the trade-off obvious.

The keywords “best CRMs” and “best CRMs for small business” have high search volumes (1,900 and 1,300) but are more competitive (difficulty 56%), requiring more SEO effort and budget.

For a limited budget, it’s smarter to target specific, lower-difficulty keywords like “best real estate CRMs” or “best free CRMs.” Though they have fewer searches, they are easier and cheaper to rank for while effectively driving conversions by addressing specific needs.

Conclusion

If our guide shows one thing, it’s that SEO goals can only work when they are specific, measurable, and closely connected to your overall business strategy. And we hope that our 8-step goal-setting process, as well as examples, will help you set such targets. At the same time, remember that not every battle is worth fighting, so pick the ones where your site has a real shot at winning.

One last thing: don’t skip the data part. Goals that aren’t grounded in your baseline performance usually end up either too ambitious or too safe. Check where you are now, decide where you want to be, and build the steps in between.

That said, if you need a second pair of eyes on your SEO strategy, schedule a free call with our expert team. We’ll help you pressure-test your goals so that, whether you want to rank in AI overviews or get more visibility in LLMs, you have a clear plan for the next quarter that lines up the work with business results that actually matter to you.

Author

Khrystyna Dzhumaryk

Khrystyna Dzhumaryk is a content writer at SeoProfy with four years of experience in SEO and content strategy. At the company’s main blog, she writes in-depth articles and guides to help businesses improve their online visibility through proven tactics. Her work brings together hands-on SEO experience with ongoing research into algorithm updates, search trends, and the growing impact of AI on content and optimization.