How to hit your SEO TAM targeted goal
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In my prior post, I detailed how I use TAM calculations to forecast SEO upside. This is not meant to be an academic calculation to get a leader off your back rather, it should and must be an actual forecast with a deliberate effort to achieve the forecasted goals.
The goal of a forecast should be to land the resources necessary to complete an SEO effort and build a history of success at meeting targets so subsequent requests are successful, too.
SEO forecasts = Stock forecasts
All forecasting processes work best if it is continuously fine-tuned with real-world data on SEO performance, and this can’t happen if the plan is never put into place.
Think of an SEO forecast like an earnings per share forecast in the stock market. They are continuously tweaked throughout a quarter and are considered reliable enough that when companies “miss” the forecast, the share price will usually fluctuate sharply in response.
Your SEO forecast should be just as reliable and useful as stock forecasts, with rare surprises.
To be fair, it’s a lot easier to put a plan to hit a forecast into place with the SEO process I argued against a couple of weeks ago, but let’s unpack that. The keyword-focused approach simply requires writing content with those target keywords and then building links to that content. But, that’s not a plan; that’s a holiday gift wish list. Just because they have been laid out on paper, it doesn’t mean it will come true. The forecast will ultimately fail for the reasons I outlined in that prior post but not for a lack of trying.
A TAM forecasted SEO plan is a living document
In my preferred approach of penetrating an underlying target market within a TAM the actions required to hit the overarching goals are non-specific; it just requires a market penetration rate. (This is why I am very much in favor of branded SEO efforts because when the goal is revenue or conversions, this is the lowest hanging fruit. There is no requirement for an SEO plan to target the most complex slice of the market, go where the users are.)
Product-Led SEO
Here is where you can pivot into a product-led SEO approach, but this is certainly not a requirement. With a target market, the team can brainstorm what sort of experience this target market requires- the experience is the product that is to be built.
Let’s use a specific example to explain how this works. Suppose your product is home insurance. The top-level TAM is every homeowner in the USA, but the target market is narrowed down to all homeowners that are between the ages of 30-50 who use the Internet (rather than a broker) to buy home insurance. From this target market, we have come up with a market penetration target of 1%, which in this scenario might be 1 million leads for the upcoming year.
With a very specific target in mind, the team can start the brainstorming process of what to create for the search user that will get 1 million individuals to fill out a lead form for home insurance.
A number of ideas might immediately come up, but if they can’t achieve this goal of 1 million leads, they should immediately be discarded. The SEO goal is very clear, get those 1 million leads before the end of the year.
Choose and prioritize
Once the team has settled on a handful of potential ideas that are doable and can hit that target, the team can then begin to prioritize each idea based on a RICE format. With this process, they will land on a single or maybe a few SEO ideas that they can initiate that will achieve this goal.
As a part of this planning process, the team will come up with specific tasks and projects that will lay a foundation for the major work. Think of this like building a house; the roof can’t be put up until there are walls.
For example, there might not be a CMS in place or an entire new experience needs to be designed. None of these tasks will be immediately revenue driving, but each of them unlocks something important for the greater goal.
There may be entire quarters where the leads from SEO have yet to come in, but the foundational work is required if those leads are ever going to come in.
Milestones and Waypoints
A core part of this forecast -plus-planning part of this framework is that the milestones are naturally built in. The plan will outline when certain work is expected to be done as well as when the outcomes of this effort are to materialize. This makes everything very transparent for all stakeholders to know at any point if things are on track or if revisions are required.
An end-of-year SEO target might still be missed, but there should never be a surprise. The miss happens as soon as an expectation or milestone happens and the plan can be adjusted accordingly. I have seen many marketers stammer their way through excuses at end of year wrap-ups about promised traffic not arriving. It is far easier to revise a forecast immediately when a promised engineering team is pulled from a project.
When a CTO proposes pulling an engineer off of a project, this is when that forecast conversation should happen, not at the end of the year when the plan has missed.
To summarize here are the steps to meet a TAM-driven SEO plan:
Identify the target market for SEO as a subset of the TAM
Choose a market penetration goal for that target market. For new efforts, it will be a guess, while for existing efforts, it will be the base plus a growth rate.
Brainstorm products/experiences/content that might attract the segment of users in that target market.
Means test the ideas to ascertain that they will attract the right users
Prioritize the ideas with the RICE framework.
Scope a plan to build the products/projects that meet the requirements
Schedule out the work on a timeline that ends with the goal being achieved.
Just like the whole idea of using TAM for SEO forecasting is underpinned by thinking about the big picture, this building effort will make the team laser-focused on building a singular experience to hit a big, meaningful business - not SEO - goal.
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