Introduction

Please note that this is a summarised version of the webinar I ran. You can see the full version here:

Setting SEO targets can feel daunting. 

Set them incorrectly, and you risk losing internal trust, budget, or team morale. To make matters worse, unless you’re running controlled SEO tests, it’s almost impossible to measure the impact of the changes you are making, so it can feel like you don’t have a lot of influence over whether you hit them or not.

Here’s what we’re going to cover:

1. Benchmarking where you are now
2. How to pick the right targets
3. Picking the right metrics to measure and track your success

Let’s get started

How to benchmark your current performance

“If you don’t know where you’ve come from, you don’t know where you’re going.” — Maya Angelou

I had a conversation with a prospect recently that went like this:

Me: How have things been going?

Them: Not great, we’re down 30% YOY

Me: Oof, that’s rough. What’s the cause?

Them: We’re not entirely sure.

Me: What are your goals this year?

Them: To get back to where we were.

Me: So that means growing over 40%* to get back to where you were?

Them: Yup.

I’ve had quite a few conversations like that over the years. While I admire the ambition, rarely is it realistic. 

Your goals need to be grounded in reality. If they’re not, you’re just setting yourself up for failure. 

Caption: Showing how hard it is to recover from large drops in traffic - source

There are three primary sources of data I recommend when going through a benchmarking exercise.

Your analytics

Your own analytics is going to be the best source of historical data, assuming GA 4 didn’t completely trash it — thanks Google.

Break your organic traffic into your primary business units so you can see trends disaggregated. Straight away this will give you a clearer view of where the real issues lie. See my made up example below:

The level of detail you go to here is completely up to you.

Macro environment

The second area you should consider is the macro environment. This post from Erik MacKinnon illustrates this nicely.

If you’re in an industry that’s going through big change like this one, it’s really important to be realistic about what’s in your control and what’s not. 

Whatever data you get from the first step of looking at your analytics, you want to take it one step further and understand if everyone else is up/down in that category or if it’s just you. There are plenty of third-party tools for looking at general traffic trends.

Comparisons and/or competitors

An extension of the macro-environment step is ensuring you’re looking at fair comparisons and competitors. Tom Critchlow talks about this in detail in his post Managing Expectations by finding Good Comparisons.

The criteria you use to decide on fair comparisons will vary depending on your site, but since we’re talking about retail, let’s use that as an example.

If I put a brand like Macy’s into a couple of SEO tools like Ahrefs and Moz, this is what I get.

Ahrefs top 10 competing domains

Moz top 10 competing domains

Straight away, you’ll notice there’s quite a mix of companies. You could compare these in a number of ways. A few key properties are location, brand and competition type. For example:

1. Location: Does the company sell online, offline or both?
2. Brand: Is this company a single brand like Ralph Lauren, or do they sell multiple brands like Macy’s and Nordstrom?
3. Competition type: Are they multi-categories like home, fashion, electronics, etc? A single category like fashion or a niche specialist like just watches.

When you put that together for a few examples, it looks like this.

You can see already that if you were to do this for 10-15 of your competitors, some patterns would emerge.

You’ll also notice that you have more competitors than you realise. For example, someone like Macy’s isn’t just competing with horizontal competitors like Nordstrom; they have vertical-specific competitors for every category.

Caption: An example of horizontal and vertical competition for Macy’s

Recognising both horizontal and vertical competition is a crucial step in benchmarking. In general, vertical competitors are harder to keep up with because they focus entirely on that specific vertical, whereas for Macy’s, it’s just one of many areas of competition. It follows the ‘law of strawberry jam’—as Gerald M. Weinberg put it: ‘The more you spread it, the thinner it gets.’

I recommend looking at growth rates for multiple brands. Do it for some that are multi-brand and single brands. That should give you a good sense of what low, medium and high growth rates are and those can act as useful upper and lower bounds of the targets you should be setting.

How to pick targets

When it comes to picking the main metric to track against, we strongly recommend picking YOY organic traffic by month as your primary metric. 

While it can be tempting to go for something more tactical, like keywords or the number of keywords rankings in certain positions, ultimately, those are just proxies for the real goal, which is traffic. 

Consider depreciation

Before setting growth goals, it’s important to consider what would happen if you did nothing. 

In a recent webinar, SearchPilot CEO, Will Critchlow covered this in detail. You can watch that here. In the meantime, the main thing I wanted to highlight is that the default assumption shouldn’t be growth. You should assume that unless you have a plan, your traffic will likely decay. Will says:

“In my recent webinar, Making SEO a Performance Channel for ecommerce, I argued that if we did no SEO at all we would expect a drop in performance.

I think this is relatively unsurprising - it's a competitive world, and everyone else would be continuing to invest while you stood still - but it's striking to me how many organisations assume that performance would stay flat if they did nothing.

Many SEO programs are judged against their year over year (YoY) performance which is another way of saying that they assume that this year would be the same as last year if they did nothing.”

When you think about it like this, you realise that what you’re actually interested in is the net forecasted growth after taking into account any depreciation.

The amount of depreciation will vary a lot depending on your company, but somewhere between 10-20% seems a sensible starting point.

The only three plans you need — C-90%, C-60%, C-10%

The next step is to set your targets while considering all of these factors. Unfortunately, there’s always a mix of art and science involved. I personally struggle with finding the balance between setting ambitious goals that would be great outcomes and avoiding goals that feel so unrealistic they become demotivating. That’s why I like the C-90%, C-60%, C-10% framework from Jason Lemkin. It lets me set three goals.

The idea is that you make three plans, where the C stands for confidence. 

Your base plan —C-60%

To create your C-60% plan, take the year-over-year (YOY) growth rate from the last four months, calculate the average, and use that as the assumed growth rate for the year. This method is fairly blunt but ensures your forecast is grounded in reality.

This plan should be hard, but it should be more likely that you hit it than not. This is probably the plan you want to use for forecasting and hiring plans.

The plan you’ll hit even in a bad year —C-90%

Take your C-60% plan and take 10% to 20% off it. This would be a bad outcome for the year, but things happen, and it’s always better to have a plan. This is likely what would happen if you decided to cut investment in SEO. This isn’t the plan you’re aiming for but you can use it as a conservative data point when planning scenarios.

The stretch plan C-10%

Take the C-60% plan and add 10-20%. This will be very hard to hit, you should expect that you won’t but it’s great to have something great to aim for. This shouldn’t be used for any investment of hiring purposes.

When you put it together it looks like this:

And you get a forecast something like this to track against:

Tracking against your goals

I’ve previously done a webinar on tracking against your SEO goals. You can watch that webinar on tracking SEO goals here so in this article I’m only going to cover the core points.

Phrase your goal clearly as “From X to Y by {Date}”

To make a good lag metric, you want it to be phrase in this format so that it’s measurable, specific and timely. In an example of a site that’s had a bad year, it would be something like: 

“Go from -20% YOY Growth to break even by the end of 2025”.

See some other examples below. 

Then you need to select lead measures that you think can influence that lag metric.

A lead measure is essentially a bet. You’re betting if you take certain actions or hit certain mini-outcomes that it will have an impact on the lag metric. Good lead metrics are:

1. Predictive of achieving the goal
2. Influenced by team members

Here’s an example of it put together:

As the year goes on, you should be tracking against the progress you’re making on the lead metrics and hopefully seeing it impact the lag metric. See the completed example below:

If you find out that your lead measures aren’t having the intended effect on the lag metric (it can happen) then consider changing lead metric. We find that 3-6 months is enough time to really give something a chance to work.

In summary, the three steps are:

1. Benchmark your current performance against horizontal and vertical competitors
2. Create your C-90%, C-60% and C-10% plans
3. Track against progress with lead measures

Do this and it’s the only dashboard you need to look at to see if you’re on track.