How to Build a Successful SEO Campaign

What is an SEO Campaign?

SEO is essentially an art: some websites have mastered this art of ranking and consistently rank highly in search engine results. However, some websites continue to struggle with this concept, and even when a customer searches for a key phrase that directly relates to their business, their website will not even come up.

An SEO campaign is a planned effort of optimizing a website or a page to improve its Google rankings. It’s often a long term project that involves many different components, such as keyword research, website audit, SEO analysis, on-page optimization, link building, and many more.

Any type of brand or business can benefit from a well-executed SEO campaign, whether you’re a solo entrepreneur or a large multinational company.

So how do you launch an SEO campaign

Here are 9 steps to follow in order to run a successful SEO campaign:

1. Analyze your website setup

Before you begin your SEO campaign, you need to know basic information about your website. Here are the things you need to look for when analyzing your setup:

What is your website platform: Knowing if your site is based on a modern or outdated platform is crucial as a modern platform is much faster, secure, and easier to optimize. It is also more flexible when it comes to design and making small changes to your website. On the other hand, if your platform is outdated, It is suggested to switch over to a modern platform (eg. WordPress or Marketo).
Do you need to change your current design: Take a good look at your current website design and make note if you do need to make a change as may not be the most user-friendly and well-designed website for SEO purposes. If you are changing to a new platform, this can be an easy process because you can usually just change it to a new theme and customize it the way you want it.

If either of these issues exists, it is crucial that they are taken care of before the optimization stage as if your website is poor, out-of-date, or not user-friendly, an SEO campaign is going to have very little effect because you need much more than just a good keyword and optimization strategy to succeed.

2. Perform an SEO Audit

If you want your content to be relevant to the people who show up to your site an SEO audit is crucial. The old SEO tactics of keyword stuffing, setting up multiple pages for different keywords, and trying to use multiple microsites to drive traffic won’t work anymore. The criteria and ranking factors in SERP have changed dramatically. Sites that are mobile-friendly and optimized for user intent are favored. Search engines such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo have algorithms in place that crawl through your website and compare your website using different ranking factors indicating usability and relevance.

3. Set your Campaign Goals

This means that before you start a campaign, you should define exactly what you want to achieve. For Example: To increase visibility on Google for keywords that you don’t have any presence yet. To improve the rankings of existing pages, for specific keywords. Setting your campaign goals is crucial to your campaign.

Using the SMART goals methodology can help you set and achieve dynamic, yet realistic goals. SMART is a clever acronym for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Timebound. Keep the goals in mind while creating the campaign and keep optimizing it over time.

4. Undertake a Topic & Keyword Research

After having set your SMART goals it’s time to put it in action. The reason for undertaking topic research first and not go directly into keyword research is to learn as many details as possible about your decided topic and more in particular things like:

The total search volume of all keywords that make up a topic.
The competition levels
The type of content that appears on the top of Google search results.

Knowing this in advance will help you design your campaign to go after keywords that are realistic to target and not waste your time on keywords that cannot achieve high rankings.

5. Decide on a Page Title

The page title is one of the most important elements in SEO. Your title should not only be SEO friendly, but it should also be unique and enticing for the users to click on. Some tips to follow while deciding on a title:

Create a title that contains your target keywords but is not the same as what is already available on Google.
Perform a Google search using your chosen keywords.
Observe the results that appear on the first page

6. Publish Relevant Content

Quality content is how you engage, inform, support, and entice your audiences. Creating authentic, relevant content is also critical for search engine visibility. Whether it’s blog articles, product pages, the about page, videos, testimonial page or anything else you create for your audience, getting your content right means you’ve got a framework to support all your other SEO efforts.

7. On-Page SEO

SEO friendly content makes the job of search engines easier and this can potentially translate to higher rankings. Following are some tips to keep in mind for on-page SEO:

Add your target keyword in the URL.
Ensure that you mention your target keyword in your opening paragraph.
Include the target keyword in your H1 Tag.
Add related keywords in your H2 and H3 tags.
Add long-tail keywords and semantically related keywords in your content.
Add images and make sure that you optimize the ALT Text.

8. Promote your Content

Promote your content with internal linking as well as building backlinks from other websites. Finding related pages on your website and adding internal links in the new post can help search engines discover your new pages and as well as your old ones.

Link building is the process of building backlinks from other websites. Good quality backlinks give credibility to your page and this will help your page rank higher in search results

9. Track your SEO performance

Track and evaluate the effectiveness of your SEO campaigns by using the following metrics:

Number of backlinks
Number of social shares
Ranking position in Google
Number of visits
Number of comments
Bounce Rate

Conclusion

One of the best ways to maximize the return of your SEO campaign is to run targeted SEO campaigns by breaking down your overall goals into smaller achievable tasks and running a campaign for each and you’ll be able to achieve better results.

You should give each campaign a few months to gauge its efficacy and you should always review your SEO practices to see where you can make improvements.

We at Social Pill the holistic Digital Marketing Agency can help you build your brand.