What is an SEO Campaign and How to Run it

You’ve probably heard it before and wondered what an SEO campaign is and what you should do to start one.

In simple terms, an SEO campaign is a series of actions you take to improve your website ranking on search engines over time, and it can include techniques like On-page optimization, keyword research, link building and many more.

Now, let’s dive in and discover the best way to run an SEO campaign.

Find your weak points with a website audit

Before you start doing anything it’s good practice to analyze your website to find out what you need to work on and prioritize your workflow.

A website audit will reveal the overall health status of your site and show issues that could? get you penalized by search engines.

For example, you could have a beautifully designed website that loads slowly because of the heavy code running (or not running) in the background. In that case, you can use tools like PageSpeed Insight to see how fast your website is on every device and find the issues you need to fix.

Get inspired by looking at what your competitors are doing

Before you invest your resources into a strategy that you think might work, it would? be wise to see what’s working and what’s not for your competitors.

By analysing your competition,? you may uncover interesting opportunities that you can leverage, and maybe outsmart them. With tools like SEMrush, you can see things such as how your rivals get their traffic, their best performing piece of content, and their promotional strategy.

Find the best keywords

Finding the right keywords is crucial to make your website visible to your prospects.

An accurate keyword research will allow you to identify the most relevant search terms for your site, products, or services.

Now, there are several ways you can approach keyword research, but there is one important principle you should always keep in mind which is search intent.

Search intent dives a bit into the psychology of a person looking for things online. Try to get into your prospect’s shoes and think about what words could they use to look for your services or products, and what’s their intent. In other words, why are they searching for the product or service? What problem are they trying to solve? Are they just looking for general information,? or are they trying to find more details to help them make a decision? Or maybe they know what they want, and are comparing products between brands.

You can use free tools like Answer The Public to get? some? ideas of what people are searching for, especially to find long tail keywords.You can then check the metrics on Google Keyword Planner to see which keywords are the most profitable in terms of traffic.

Create and optimize your content

So you know what your competitors are doing, you know what your potential clients are looking for, and you found the words they use the most to search for the products or services you sell.

Now it’s time to create awesome content to drive those people to your website!

Depending on the strategies you choose to apply, you can either create new content, or optimize your website pages by strategically including the new keywords you found. Obviously, they need to be in the right context and the page needs to add value to the reader.

When you write a new article, the focus should be on writing it in a friendly and conversational tone. The language you use has to flow naturally and the keywords you’re targeting need to fit in the context. But it’s also good practice to place keywords strategically to help search engines understand the topic of that page. Algorithms are getting smarter so you don’t have to repeat the same keyword very often, instead try to use synonyms.

Once you’re done writing your copy don’t forget to optimize the page by adding the keywords to the Title Tag, meta description, URL, and images with alt-text.

Get some backlinks?

It will take some time for your new page to start generating organic traffic, so don’t just sit and wait for it to come to you.

Getting people to link to your new page is a good way to accelerate the process and help search engines notice your brand new content.

Hopefully, this will occur naturally over time, especially if you create something valuable and add some extra perks like infographics or tables that display all the information clearly. When readers see this kind of content, they’ll more likely share it on social media or use it as a source in their own articles and linking to yours.

But again, this will take some time. So, a way to get links faster is to use? techniques like guest blogging, which means writing articles for another website related to your industry. Doing so, you won’t just get a link, but you’ll also leverage the traffic of that website and attract? some to yours.

Study your analytics

Ultimately, you want to know if what you’re doing is working or not. That’s why tracking your progress and periodically analyzing your website’s data is crucial for growth.

There are many tools out there to analyze your website’s traffic, but in my opinion there is no reason to pay extra when you have excellent free tools like Google Analytics.

The main parameters you want to keep an eye on are:

Organic Traffic: this shows the traffic that comes? from search engines. If the trend is going up, it means you’re doing something right and that people are seeing your pages in the first results.

Keyword Rankings: use Google Search Console? to see how your keywords are ranking on the search result page, and how it changes overtime. It also shows you exactly what terms people are using to find your content (queries).

Click Through Rate (CTR): this tells you how many people are actually clicking on your link when they see it on the result page. If it’s not high enough, maybe you should change your title and meta description to make them more compelling. Or maybe you selected the wrong keyword for that search intent and people are not looking for what you are offering them.

Bounce Rate: a high bounce rate is an indication that people are leaving your page without interacting with it. It could be that your page wasn’t what they were expecting, or maybe they got the information they wanted and just left. You should always compare the bounce rate to the average session duration to understand the user behaviour and maybe optimize your page in a way to retain the traffic and keep people on your site longer.

Referral traffic and links: you can see the backlinks that you acquire over time in different ways. By checking the referrals from Google Analytics, you’ll be able to observe ? people ending up on your site from links on other websites.While on Google Search Console, under the option “Links”, you can see all the domains linking to your pages.

Build your SEO Campaign

Creating and executing an SEO campaign is not something that happens overnight. It takes hard work and dedication. You’ll need a well structured plan and to? observe the results you get in order to adjust to the situation.

I hope this post has helped you have a better understanding on what you need to do to create a successful SEO campaign.

Let me know what your next steps are in the comment below, and don’t hesitate to contact me if you need help with your website.