SEO Targets: Stop Chasing Rankings That Won’t Make You Money

SEO targets are the specific keywords, pages, and positions you decide to pursue before you write a single word or build a single link. Done well, they turn SEO from a vague content programme into a measurable commercial activity. Done poorly, they produce traffic that looks impressive in a dashboard and contributes nothing to revenue.

The distinction matters more than most SEO practitioners admit. Ranking for the wrong terms, at the wrong stage of the funnel, for the wrong audience, is not a partial win. It is a full waste of budget.

What Makes an SEO Target Worth Pursuing?

I spent years watching agencies pitch clients on keyword lists that were built around volume. The logic was simple: more searches means more potential traffic means more potential revenue. It sounds reasonable until you look at the conversion data and realise that the terms driving the most sessions are generating the least pipeline.

A good SEO target has three properties working together. First, it has genuine commercial relevance, meaning the person searching for that term has a problem your product or service can solve. Second, it is achievable within a realistic timeframe given your current domain authority and content depth. Third, the volume is sufficient to justify the investment, which is a lower bar than most people think for high-intent terms.

When I was scaling iProspect from around 20 people to over 100, one of the consistent patterns I saw in underperforming SEO programmes was a disconnect between the targets the SEO team had set and the targets the commercial team actually cared about. The SEO team was proud of ranking improvements. The commercial team had no idea those rankings existed because the terms were not connected to any product, service, or customer experience they recognised.

That gap is not a measurement problem. It is a target-setting problem. Fix the targets and the measurement problem largely resolves itself.

If you are building or rebuilding an SEO programme, the broader framework behind target selection is covered in the Complete SEO Strategy hub, which connects keyword targeting to technical foundations, content planning, and link acquisition in a single coherent approach.

How Do You Identify the Right Keywords to Target?

Keyword research is a well-documented process. The tools are good. Ahrefs, Semrush, and Google Search Console will give you more data than you need. The problem is not access to data, it is knowing which data to act on.

Start with your commercial offer, not with a keyword tool. Write down the problems your customers have, the language they use to describe those problems, and the solutions you provide. That list becomes your seed keyword set. Then use tools to expand, validate, and prioritise. If you start with the tool and work backwards to commercial relevance, you will spend weeks building a keyword universe that is technically complete and commercially useless.

The filters that matter when narrowing a keyword list are intent, competition, and volume, roughly in that order of importance. Intent tells you whether the person searching is likely to convert. Competition tells you whether ranking is realistic. Volume tells you whether it is worth the effort if you do rank. Most keyword prioritisation frameworks invert this order and optimise for volume first, which is why so many SEO programmes produce traffic without revenue.

There is a useful framing from Moz on approaching SEO with a product mindset that applies here. When you treat your keyword targets as a product decision rather than a content decision, you start asking different questions. Not “what can we rank for?” but “what do our customers need, and what terms reflect that need at the point where we can add value?”

Practically, I recommend building your target list in three tiers. Tier one is high-intent, high-commercial-value terms where you have a realistic path to the first page within six to twelve months. Tier two is medium-intent terms that build topical authority and drive qualified research-phase traffic. Tier three is informational terms that support the content cluster but are not expected to convert directly. Each tier needs a different content approach and a different success metric.

How Should You Assess Keyword Difficulty Without Getting Paralysed?

Keyword difficulty scores are useful as a rough signal and dangerous as a hard filter. I have seen teams refuse to target a keyword with a difficulty score above 50 because someone had read that anything above that threshold was “too competitive.” The result was a keyword list full of low-volume, low-competition terms that no one was searching for.

Difficulty scores are a composite of the link profiles of pages currently ranking. They tell you something about the barrier to entry, but they do not tell you about content quality gaps, intent mismatches, or the fact that three of the top five results are tangentially relevant at best. Those gaps are where you win.

When I evaluate keyword difficulty in practice, I look at the actual SERPs rather than the score. Who is ranking? Are they directly competing with me or are they adjacent? Is the content on those pages genuinely good, or is it a 2019 listicle that has coasted on domain authority? Is there a featured snippet that could be taken with a well-structured answer? The score gives me a starting point. The SERP gives me a plan.

One pattern worth knowing: high-difficulty terms at the category level often have lower-difficulty variations at the specific-use-case level. “Project management software” is brutally competitive. “Project management software for construction teams” is a different conversation. The volume is lower, but the intent is sharper and the competition is thinner. For most businesses outside the top-tier platforms, specificity is the competitive advantage.

What Is the Relationship Between SEO Targets and Business Stage?

This is the part of SEO target-setting that almost nobody talks about, and it is the part that causes the most misalignment between SEO programmes and business outcomes.

A business in early-stage growth has different SEO priorities than a business in consolidation. A business launching a new product line needs different targets than a business defending market share in a category it already owns. A business with a six-month runway needs to target terms that convert in weeks, not terms that will build authority over two years.

I have worked with businesses in genuine financial difficulty who were being advised by their SEO agency to invest in long-form content targeting informational terms that might rank in eighteen months. The advice was not wrong in isolation. It was catastrophically wrong given the context. The business needed revenue now, not brand awareness later.

When I took on turnaround work with loss-making agencies, one of the first things I did was audit where resource was going. Invariably, there was effort being spent on activities that were theoretically correct but practically irrelevant to the immediate commercial problem. SEO target-setting has the same failure mode. The targets might be technically sound and commercially irrelevant at the same time.

Match your SEO targets to your business horizon. If you need short-term revenue, target high-intent, lower-funnel terms even if the volume is modest. If you are building for the long term and have the runway to do it, invest in topical authority across the full funnel. If you are somewhere in between, be explicit about which targets serve which timeline and resource accordingly.

For smaller businesses specifically, the calculus around SEO investment is often different from enterprise. SMBs typically have fewer resources to spread across a large keyword universe and are better served by a tightly focused target set than a comprehensive one. Depth beats breadth when budget is constrained.

How Do You Build a Target List That Holds Up to Commercial Scrutiny?

The test I use is simple: if I showed this keyword list to the CFO and the head of sales, would they recognise these as terms their customers use? Would they understand why ranking for these terms would generate revenue? If the answer is no, the list needs work.

This is not about dumbing down SEO for non-practitioners. It is about ensuring that the targets you have chosen are connected to a commercial model that someone other than you can verify. SEO teams that cannot explain their target choices in commercial terms are usually working from a technically coherent but strategically disconnected brief.

Building a commercially defensible target list involves a few specific steps. Start by mapping your customer experience and identifying the questions customers ask at each stage. Then identify which of those questions have search volume. Then assess which you can realistically rank for given your current authority and content depth. The intersection of those three filters is your starting target list.

From there, prioritise by expected commercial impact, not by volume or difficulty. A term with 200 monthly searches that converts at 8% is worth more than a term with 8,000 monthly searches that converts at 0.1%. Most keyword prioritisation frameworks do not account for conversion rate because conversion rate data lives in a different system from keyword data. Bridge that gap deliberately.

One thing I have found useful is running a quick sense-check against what competitors are ranking for. Not to copy their strategy, but to identify gaps. If a direct competitor is ranking well for a term you have not considered, that is worth investigating. If every competitor is ranking for a term and none of them are doing it particularly well, that is an opportunity. If every competitor is ranking for a term and the top results are genuinely excellent, that is a signal to look for a different angle rather than trying to produce a marginally better version of what already exists.

How Many SEO Targets Should You Have?

There is no universal answer, but there is a useful principle: the right number of targets is the number you can actually execute against with the resources you have.

I have seen SEO strategies with 500 target keywords and a team of two people trying to execute them. The inevitable result is shallow content across too many topics, thin link acquisition spread too wide, and nothing ranking well for anything. The strategy looked thorough in a spreadsheet. In practice, it was resource dilution dressed up as ambition.

A focused programme with 30 to 50 well-chosen primary targets, each supported by a cluster of related secondary terms, will outperform a sprawling programme with 300 loosely connected targets almost every time. The reason is simple: search engines reward depth and authority. You build both by going deep on a defined set of topics, not by producing thin coverage across a wide surface area.

The Moz perspective on where SEO is heading reinforces this. As search engines get better at understanding topical context and entity relationships, the advantage increasingly goes to sites that have built genuine depth in a defined area rather than sites that have accumulated a large number of loosely related pages. Target selection is the upstream decision that determines whether you are building depth or accumulating noise.

How Do You Set Ranking Targets Without Fabricating Precision?

One of the persistent problems in SEO reporting is the tendency to set overly precise targets that create the illusion of rigour. “We will rank in the top 3 for this term within 90 days” sounds like a concrete goal. It is usually a guess dressed up as a commitment.

I have judged enough marketing effectiveness cases at the Effies to know that the difference between a convincing case and a weak one is usually not the ambition of the targets. It is the quality of the thinking behind them. Vague targets are a problem. But fabricated precision is worse, because it creates accountability for a number that was never grounded in reality.

A more honest approach to ranking targets works in ranges and conditions. “Given our current domain authority, the content we plan to produce, and the link acquisition activity we have budgeted for, we expect to reach page one for this term within six to twelve months, assuming no major algorithm changes and no significant competitor investment in the same area.” That is not a weak target. It is an honest one, and it is far more useful for planning than a precise number that was invented.

Set targets at the outcome level rather than the ranking level where possible. Traffic from organic search to this category of pages. Leads generated from organic search. Revenue attributed to organic search. These are the numbers that connect SEO targets to business outcomes. Rankings are an intermediate metric, useful for diagnosing performance but not the end goal.

When Should You Abandon an SEO Target?

This is a question most SEO frameworks do not address, which is an oversight. Persistence is a virtue in SEO, but it can also be a failure mode. Knowing when to stop pursuing a target is as important as knowing which targets to pursue.

There are three situations where abandoning a target is the right decision. First, when the competitive landscape has changed materially since you set the target. A term that was achievable twelve months ago may now be dominated by a well-resourced competitor who has invested heavily in content and links. Continuing to pursue it is not tenacity, it is sunk cost thinking.

Second, when the business context has changed. A product line that was central to your offer twelve months ago may have been deprioritised, repriced, or discontinued. Continuing to drive traffic to a page that no longer reflects your commercial priorities is at best neutral and at worst confusing to prospects who arrive expecting something you no longer offer.

Third, when the evidence suggests the term does not convert even when you do rank for it. I have seen businesses hold onto targets for years because they ranked well for them, even though the traffic consistently failed to convert. The ranking felt like an asset. The traffic was actually a liability because it was consuming crawl budget, inflating session counts, and creating a false impression of organic performance.

Reviewing your target list quarterly and being willing to cut targets that no longer serve the business is not admitting failure. It is applying the same commercial discipline to SEO that you would apply to any other marketing investment. The targets that survive the review are the ones worth fighting for.

Target-setting is one component of a broader SEO system. If you want to see how it connects to content architecture, technical performance, and link strategy, the Complete SEO Strategy hub covers the full picture in a way that keeps commercial outcomes at the centre rather than treating them as an afterthought.

About the Author

Keith Lacy is a marketing strategist and former agency CEO with 20+ years of experience across agency leadership, performance marketing, and commercial strategy. He writes The Marketing Juice to cut through the noise and share what works.

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