The problem with picking the wrong goal is that it is often not detected until a lot of money and energy has been spent. The aim of any SEO campaign and more to the point any marketing campaign should be to get the highest return on investment as possible. A well thought out and planned SEO campaign should generate a very high ROI and should be one of your best forms of advertising. However you need to make sure you are targeting correctly. Below I have put a couple of examples of goals that are not great:

1. Get High Rankings

This might seem like a really good idea, what harm can there be in being the top of the search engines for your chosen keywords. However there are a lot of things to consider with this. Many people will come to me and tell me the keywords they want to rank highly for but what research have they done? The answer to that is usually none.

You might find that you will need to spend a lot of time and money getting to the top of the rankings for your chosen keywords and in reality this will only increase your sales by a small amount. Although the general keywords are great for branding they are not usually used by people who are looking to buy. Those potential customers will tend to use longer more specific keywords when they are looking to buy. For example suppose you offer cleaning services in London, to get to the top for "cleaning" will be costly and time consuming. However people looking to buy your services may be searching for terms like "office cleaners in London" or "affordable home cleaning services". These are more specific and if you concentrate on more of these you may be able to get a high ROI.

2. Get More Traffic

This is more of what we would focus on as the more people you get to your website the greater the chance of getting more sales. However this is not always the case. The aim should be to get targeted traffic that is actually looking to buy.

A good example of this is an experiment we did on Stumble. We did a bit of networking and pushed our own website out there for others to see. This resulted in a massive peaking in our traffic, more than doubling what we normally had for the period of a couple of weeks. Potentially this looks fantastic. The problem with it was we had a very high bounce rate that saw people leaving very quickly. We had no increase in sales or conversions of any type. So the conclusion was it was completely pointless. You should always take the type of traffic you are attracting into account as well as the amount.

On conclusion it is important to say that increased rankings and traffic should be a part of anyone’s SEO goals. However this should be specified in more detail with a focus on bringing target traffic from effective keywords and rankings. Without this clarification you could find yourself throwing good money after bad.