Hi there, and welcome to the first issue of the Outranked SEO newsletter.
In this issue, I’m breaking down why most SEO goals miss the mark, and how shifting my thinking transformed the way I approach putting together strategies.
You’ll learn:
- Why most SEO goals don’t help you build strategy or get buy-in
- How thinking commercially changes the way you prioritise and plan SEO
- The one mindset shift that helped me go from tactics to outcomes
Let’s get into it.
Most SEO goals are pointless. Here’s how to fix that.
Too many SEO strategies start with vague goals.
- Increase traffic
- Rank higher
- Publish more content.
They sound sensible, but they’re not strategic.
They don’t connect to what the business actually cares about.
They don’t help you prioritise and they don’t guide decision-making.
And what happens next?
We jump straight into tactics.
We build a to-do list. Fix technical issues. Create content. Build links.
It feels productive, but it doesn’t answer the most important question... why are we doing these things?
Too often, SEO ends up being a case of throwing s**t at the wall and hoping something sticks. Too much is done blind.
That’s the real problem. And it stems from a lack of proper goals.
Most SEO goals are pointless...
They’re vague, tactical, and they’re not aligned with commercial outcomes.
But the deeper issue is that many SEOs haven’t been given the opportunity to think commercially.
They stay in their lane, focused on technical fixes, on content or link acquisition, without exposure to how a business actually grows.
I want to help change that.
You don’t need more traffic. You need more revenue.
You don’t need to “rank better.” You need to show up when someone is searching for something that brings them closer to buying from you or making an enquiry.
Tactics don’t come first. Strategy does. And strategy starts with a clear commercial goal.
The book that changed how I think about SEO strategy...
My mindset around SEO goals and strategy changed when I read Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon, a book by two former Amazon execs, Colin Bryar and Bill Carr.
It’s not an SEO book.
It’s about how Amazon builds products by starting with the desired customer outcome and working backwards.
But it completely changed how I think about SEO.
Because the principle is the same: start with the outcome and work backwards from it.
How to map a revenue goal to SEO activity...
Let’s make it practical.
Say your commercial goal is to drive £1,000,000 in additional revenue from organic search over the next 12 months.
Don’t just guess this figure, though. Get to it by understanding what the business is aiming for in terms of financial performance and the % that organic search needs to contribute.
Your average order value is £100.
Your organic conversion rate is 2%.
That means you need 10,000 additional orders, which means 500,000 extra organic sessions.
Now you’ve got a meaningful target to build a strategy around.
From here, you can start asking the right questions:
↳ Which product ranges or services overperform?
Do any have higher AOV or conversion rates that would reduce the traffic needed to hit our target?
↳ Where can we drive the traffic we need from?
Which keyword groups and pages need to be more visible?
↳ Why aren’t we already ranking higher for these?
What do we need to do to make this happen?
↳ What are competitor pages that outrank us for these areas doing that we're not?
What needs to change for us to compete and where do we focus our efforts?
This is what it looks like to work backwards from a commercial goal to SEO tactics.
You're not just setting 'finger-in-the-air' targets or throwing a bunch of tactics at it to see what sticks.
You're working out exactly how much traffic you need to drive, identifying where it can come from, and figuring out what needs to change to make it happen.
It's reverse engineering your strategy from your goal.
Working out what it'll take to actually hit your goal...
You’re no longer guessing. You’re building a strategy that maps directly to growth.
And when you work this way, you don’t just get clarity on what needs to be done, you get clarity on what it will take to do it.
You can make informed decisions (and recommendations) about:
- How much resource you’ll need
- Whether the goals are realistic
- What investment will be needed to actually hit them
- The acquisition cost of SEO vs other channels. Would more budget let it scale faster and bring in ‘cheaper’ sales than other channels?
This is the level of thinking that gets stakeholder buy-in. Because it ties SEO to real business outcomes, not activity for activity’s sake.
Requesting budget shouldn't be a guessing game. Work backwards from your commercial goals and you can pretty accurately plan what you need to do to hit these, and cost out the resources for this.
Forecasts then happens 'top down' as part of your strategy work.
And whilst these numbers will likely (definitely) change as we head into this new era of AI-powered search, where clicks will decrease (and therefore, conversion rates change), the principles remain the same.
If you don’t know where you’re going, how can you figure out how to get there?
A simple framework for setting SEO goals...
Let's break all of this down into a simple framework you can use to set SEO goals.
1️⃣ What’s the business outcome we need to impact? (Revenue, leads, orders; not just “traffic.”)
2️⃣ What numbers define that outcome? (How much revenue? How many leads? What’s the target?)
3️⃣ What will it take to hit those numbers through SEO? (How much traffic? How many conversions? Work backwards to estimate this.)
4️⃣ What needs to change to make that happen? (Which pages, keywords, or site areas need to perform better, and why aren’t they already?)
The takeaway…
Most SEO goals don’t support real strategy because they’re disconnected from how the business grows.
So start by setting a clear commercial goal.
Use metrics like AOV and conversion rate to calculate what it’ll take to hit it, then work backwards and build your strategy around that.
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If you learned something from this issue or it’s made you think about SEO a little differently, please consider forwarding it to someone else on your team.
I’m on a mission to make sure more SEO investment actually has an impact on real business metrics and that more SEOs master commercial awareness.
Appreciate you making it to the end; same time next week?
- James Brockbank
P.S. If you ever need expert support with SEO or digital PR and want to drive results that actually matter, I’d love to chat. Let’s talk.
✍️ From the Loft...
Fresh from our side of the web; here’s a few things me and other Lofties put out into the world this week.
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📌 This week’s bookmarks:
If I could only send three links to a fellow marketer this week, it’d be these…
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👋 Hi, I'm James...
Managing Director & Founder at Digitaloft.
I've spent the last 10 years building an agency that's perfectly positioned to help ambitious brands to drive real business growth from SEO and digital PR.
You might have seen me speaking at events like BrightonSEO, SMX and the International Search Summit.
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