You may be thinking user engagement is a CRO metric. But remember, Google’s own SEO Starter guide says, “any optimization should be geared toward making the user experience better.”
Historically, SEOs measured engagement using bounce rate and time on page. These are poor metrics to use because they often don’t align with user behavior.
For example, let’s say that you sit down to read a ~2K word blog post. This website says that even a slow reader would get through that in 20 minutes. If you close the browser as soon as you’re done, that session would technically count as a bounce.
Luckily, Google Analytics 4 has a more robust metric we can use to measure UX: Engagement rate.
Engagement rate more accurately measures whether a user interacted with your website or left, so a good outcome goal would be to “increase organic engagement rate by 10% in 6 months.”
It’s specific because it specifies a percentage and timeframe.
It’s measurable using the User Acquisition report in GA4:
It’s achievable because there are things within our control we can change to impact this metric.
It’s relevant because we want to improve UX, and engagement rate measures this more accurately than bounce rate or time on page.
It’s time-based because we specified a timeframe (6 months).
Now for the performance goal(s).
Let’s keep things simple again and just set one: “increase the number of unique user scrolls by 30% on low scroll pages that have high-value to our company.”
To find the pages where we need to improve UX, we can check the Engagement Pages and screens report in GA4, filter to organic users, and view the table by unique user scrolls.
Given our performance goal, our process goal may be rewriting introductory paragraphs on low scroll pages so that more people are sold on the article and stick around to read it. Again, this can be measured manually.
The workload like this whatsapp number list allows both the vendor and the affiliate to focus on. Clicks are the number of clicks coming to your website’s URL from organic search results.
Example SEO goal #3: Achieve $10,000 in sales from organic traffic in month 6
Making more money is the ultimate goal of SEO. To stand the best chance of this happening, we need to convert the vague goal of “make more money” into a SMART outcome goal like “achieve $10,000 in sales from organic traffic in month 6.”
This goal is specific because we’ve specified the amount and timeframe.
It’s easily measurable with Google Analytics.
It’s achievable because our hypothetical site isn’t particularly seasonal and is already doing ~$9K/month in sales from organic—so this is only an increase of ~11%.
SIDENOTE. A good outcome goal has to be both motivating and realistic. When setting a sales-based goal, consider the organic channel’s previous sales history and upcoming seasonal trends.
It’s relevant because, again, making more money is the ultimate goal of SEO.
It’s time-based because we specified a timeframe.