Goal and OKR setting for 2026
Just as you don’t set out on a journey without a sense of where you want to end up, you shouldn’t begin a new year without defined goals.
This week’s newsletter is sponsored by North Star Inbound and Airops.
Just as you don’t set out on a journey without a sense of where you want to end up, you shouldn’t begin a new year without defined goals. (Paid users see this guide for annual planning) Some of you might be in the fortunate position of not being required by your employer to set formal goals for the year, which you may or may not be measured against, but it is still worth the time to set goals for yourself. I personally do this as a consultant every December.
[Sponsored by Airops]
As teams lock in their 2026 OKRs, one question keeps coming up in boardrooms:
“Are we visible where decisions actually happen now?”
Search didn’t disappear, but the decision layer moved. Rankings and traffic no longer tell the full story when buyers are influenced by AI-generated answers.
AirOps released The Complete AI Search Playbook for Marketers, breaking down what’s actually getting cited in AI answers, and what isn’t, based on real patterns across Google, ChatGPT, Gemini and more.
Inside the playbook:
Why freshness, originality, and off-site credibility now drive visibility
How leading teams treating AI visibility as an operating model, not a tactic
What to measure as you plan for 2026
If AI visibility is going to be a winning part of your 2026 growth goals, this is worth reading before you finalize your roadmap.
👉 Read The Complete AI Search Playbook for Marketers
From my experience, the most effective way to set goals, called OKRs (objectives and key results) for those of you in a corporate environment, is to use the SMART framework. SMART is an acronym for Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Timebound.
(Paid users check out this guide on how to do this)
SEO benefits from SMART goals
The reality is that many SEO team goals can be messy, depending on the audience, if a framework like SMART is not required. Since SEO frequently falls in a tactics-and-outcomes gray area, SEO goals can end up even more esoteric than other teams’ worst attempts.
SEO teams set objectives like “improving visibility” without defining what visibility means. They pick key results like “publish 20 pieces of content” that measure effort instead of impact. They choose metrics like rankings without any ability to control them.
The fix starts with establishing what you’re actually trying to accomplish. Not what you think will be good in a large font on a title slide. The goals should be based on what the business needs from the SEO channel and what you can deliver.
Specific
A SMART goal has to be specific. A common SEO team goal, like “Increase organic traffic,” is not specific. “Increase non-branded organic traffic from product pages by 15,000 monthly sessions” is specific. The difference matters because the first version lets you claim success by improving branded search or by getting a seasonal bump, neither of which might matter to the business. The second version tells leadership exactly what you plan to do.
Specificity forces you to think through what you’re actually measuring. Are you tracking all organic traffic or just traffic that converts? Are you including branded searches or only non-branded? Are you looking at sessions, users, or rankings? Each of these choices shapes what you’re striving to achieve and informs the downstream tactics and tools you will need.
Measureable
Goals need to be measurable, or they aren’t really goals. You need to be able to track your progress with actual numbers, not feelings about whether things are going well. You don’t need a crazy BI dashboard to support your goal; it just needs to have a number to which you can make a binary call of whether you hit or missed the goal. A goal of “launch a new navigation header” is measurable; “improve the header” is not.
When you are using numbers to support a goal like “increase paid users by x%”, measurable means you can track that number consistently over time and separate your impact from everything else that’s changing. If your analytics are broken or your tracking is inconsistent, you need to fix that before you commit to goals based on that data. Fixing the data stream can itself become a subgoal.
Finding a metric by which to measure your goal shouldn’t be difficult if it's a real goal. Remember, it can be completely binary: indexed or not, launched or not yet launched. It can also be linear, where you can end up hitting a portion of the goal if it’s a stretch goal. 100% increase in clicks. 15% more impressions. 5% improved conversion rate.
One final note on measurability: the goal must have a business impact. The measurement should also benefit the business. Increases in conversions and newly launched websites do have a business impact, while rankings, page views, and prompt visibility are less likely to have a business impact. Metrics like traffic fall into that in-between area because they depend on traffic quality.
Achievable
It is admirable to set goals that push you to stretch, but they are only helpful if they are achievable. You need to be honest with yourself and your manager about whether you have the resources to accomplish what you want. This doesn’t mean you should sandbag your goals down to what you know for sure you will achieve; it means you need to push your goals beyond your threshold, but not so far that miracles or fantastic luck would be required.
As you craft your goal, declare your dependencies. If they are unrealistic, the goal might not be achievable. If you expect to increase conversions by 10% on what basis do you think that will happen? If that is just a wish, not a plan, that is not an achievable goal. Before you commit to a goal, map out what has to happen for you to hit it.
For each initiative, identify the resources you need and the teams that need to be involved. SEO always needs the collaboration of other teams, and if you don’t have commitments from all those teams, your goal isn’t achievable. Achievable also means accounting for risks and dependencies. If your plan depends on something going smoothly, what happens if it doesn’t?
Many SEO goals fail, even with excellent teamwork, because the team is too ambitious. The team sets an ambitious target and then spends the year fighting for resources that were never secured in the first place. By Q3, they’re making excuses about why they’re behind, and by Q4, everyone has quietly stopped talking about it. The goal wasn’t bad, it just wasn’t achievable given the constraints.
Relavant
Along the lines of measurability, the goal itself must align with the business and the goals of other teams. This means not having a goal of achieving SEO best practices while the company is experimenting with a new initiative that will require all SEO hands to be on deck. If another team has a goal of launching a CMS, the SEO team should have a similar goal of supporting that launch.
Relevant goals require understanding the bigger picture and aligning with the company's full-year priorities. SEO should be shown where it fits within those priorities. While you are planning goals just for the SEO team, there will be a doc with all the company goals. You don’t want SEO goals to stick out in an unhelpful way. I have seen those executive presentations, and they lead to very uncomfortable conversations or worse.
If the company is trying to improve customer retention, maybe SEO should focus on content that supports existing customers rather than just acquisition. (See my Comcast callout in this newsletter). The SEO team’s goals should align with the company's goals through that SEO lens. Goals are also not the time to score points. If the broader marketing team is striving for AI visibility and you believe that is a waste of time, do something on your team to support that goal.
Timebound
The requirement to have a time-bound goal, in my opinion, is the most critical aspect of a SMART goal. You can argue over every other input of a SMART goal, but the timebound part is a cold, hard fact. Either the goal was hit by 11:59 pm at the end of the deadline, or it wasn’t. Attaching a time aspect to the goal means it’s not a hypothetical wish in perpetuity.
The requirement to be time-bound doesn’t give the goal permission to stretch beyond what it needs. If an end-of-quarter goal is what is required to keep the team on track, it shouldn’t be time-bound to the end of the year. Many SEO teams set vague end-of-year goals in the hopes that the stars will align a year from now, but that is not a goal. A real end-of-year goal should have milestones throughout the year to keep it on track for completion. The milestones can either be identifying what needs to happen by the end of the year and allocating them to earlier time periods, or they can go the other way: define the milestones and build them up to the annual goal.
Paid users can access a download template here.
Turn these into OKRs
An OKR is just an objective (the goal) and the result. Here are the SMART goals turned into OKRs.
Key Result 1: Increase monthly organic sessions to product and category pages from 120,000 to 155,000 by Q4 2026. That’s specific about which pages, measurable in analytics, achievable if they execute their content plan, relevant to the revenue goal, and time-bound to Q4.
Key Result 2: Improve sitewide conversion rate from organic traffic from 2.8% to 3.2% by Q3 2026. Again, specific about the metric, measurable, achievable if they work with the conversion team, relevant because more conversions mean more revenue, and time-bound to Q3 so they can see the impact before year-end.
Key Result 3: Launch 50 new buying guide pages targeting comparison and “best” keywords by Q2 2026. This one is about a specific initiative, measurable by counting pages, achievable if they have the resources lined up, relevant because those keyword types drive high-intent traffic, and time-bound to Q2, so the pages have time to become visible before their busy season.
Each of these key results supports the main objective. Each one is clear enough that you’ll know whether you hit it. Each one connects to business outcomes. And each one has a timeline that makes sense, given when the work needs to happen.
The difference between good OKRs and bad ones often comes down to whether you’ve thought through the details. Bad OKRs sound impressive but don’t survive contact with reality. Good OKRs might look boring on a slide, but they’re actually achievable, and they drive real results.
Don’t shoot for the moon
Most SEO managers would benefit from setting fewer, clearer goals rather than a long list of things they hope to accomplish. Three solid objectives with three key results each is better than ten objectives you’ll never hit. Focus matters more than ambition. Pick the things that will actually move the business forward, make sure they meet the SMART criteria, structure them as proper OKRs, and then execute relentlessly.
The goals themselves aren’t magic. They’re just a tool to focus your work and measure progress. They help you say no to distractions and prioritize when you have too much to do. They give you a way to demonstrate impact when review time comes, making it much harder for your work to get deprioritized when something shiny catches everyone’s attention.
Remember, set goals you can actually hit, measure them honestly, and adjust when needed. Even if you are setting your own personal goals, you want to have goals and OKRs you achieve, not just things you paste to the wall.
Good luck setting OKRs, and let me know if I can help.
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