How to Design an SEO Campaign that Delivers Remarkable Results

The number one search result on the first page of Google gets a CTR of more than 30%. This is substantially higher than the other results on the same page. The best way to get on top of the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) is to design a solid SEO campaign.

SEO refers to techniques that focus on bringing organic traffic from the search engines to your website. With SEO, your brand can boost your brand awareness, sales, and visibility. It’s a long-term strategy that can help you grow your business.

SEO is necessary for all businesses because the search engines do not understand the content on a website. Through an SEO campaign, you can communicate what your website is about to the search engines. This, in turn, can help you get a top ranking on the SERPs.

Now that you know why SEO is important, let’s see how you can design a solid SEO campaign.

Key Elements of a Successful SEO Campaign

All successful SEO strategies require consistent hard work. The prerequisite to designing a successful SEO campaign is the willingness to devote a lot of time and effort to it.

Here are the key elements that you will need to work on:

1. Keyword Research

Your entire SEO campaign depends on your keywords. They are phrases or words that your audience is most likely to use in search queries. If you use the right keywords, you’re likely to get more traffic and better rankings.

Image via Google

To find the most popular keywords in your niche, you can use keyword research tools. SEMrush, KWFinder, and Google Keyword Planner are great tools to get suggestions of suitable keywords.

While picking keywords, keep in mind your audience’s interests and preferences. To understand these better, look at the kind of content they resonate with.

It’s also a good idea to identify your competitors and look at their targeted keywords. You can find your competitors’ keywords through the keyword tools mentioned above.

Another easy way to find keywords is through discussion forums. For this, enter search queries that are relevant to your business on Reddit and Quora.

On these platforms, dig in to find the most popular discussion threads. This will give you an idea of what your target audience is talking about.

In addition to this, take into account search queries that come from voice search. Typically, they are longer and have a conversational tone. Many voice search queries are local in nature and include phrases like “near me.”

Once you have a list of keywords that you think are worth targeting, it’s time to analyze them. Check how easy or difficult it is to rank for a keyword. While most keyword research tools have this feature, you can also check it another way.

For this, you need to install the Moz toolbar on your web browser. Search for your target keywords on Google and look at the first few results.

For each of the links, check out the domain authority (DA) score through Moz toolbar. If most of these sites have DA score below 50, you have a fairly good chance of ranking for it.

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2. Create a Solid Content Strategy

For any successful SEO campaign, content is always king. The quality of content you create has a great impact on your search rankings. Based on the keywords that you shortlist, you need to create high-quality content.

For crawlers to understand what your content is about, keywords are important. Therefore, you should seamlessly integrate your keywords into your content. Ideally, for long-tail, semantic, and LSI keywords, you should keep the keyword density at 0.5% – 1%.

However, do not stuff your content with keywords. It can be counterproductive for your SEO campaign. Google’s Panda update was introduced to penalize websites that indulged in unfair, black hat tactics. Duplicating content, keyword stuffing, and content scraping can put you at risk of being penalized.

To create high-quality content, try to put yourself in the shoes of your target audience. What are the questions they are likely to have? Your content should aim to address their questions and problems.

In addition to this, make sure your content is easily scannable for mobile users. It’s a good idea to write short paragraphs and to divide your content into logical sections.

Not only will it make your content look more organized, it will also decrease your bounce rate and increase your dwell time.

To prevent your content from becoming outdated, try to pick evergreen topics. For any non-evergreen topics, update your content regularly so that it stays accurate and relevant.

You can repurpose your old content and adapt it into different formats to create fresh content. For instance, you can turn a blog post into a podcast or an infographic.

In addition to this, you should produce more video content. A Cisco survey revealed that 82% of all consumer internet traffic would be comprised of video content by 2021. While a high retention rate is an added advantage, videos can also impact your SEO campaign directly as well.

Google now features video content in search results. So, pay attention to the meta descriptions and titles of your videos and include keywords in both. This will help make sure your videos appear for related searches.

Continue reading this article on Shane Barker's blog.