Steps To Ensure You Make A Successful SEO Campaign

Starting an SEO campaign can feel like a scary prospect at the start of the project. There is a substantial amount to plan and prepare for, not to mention many different tasks that need to be implemented. It can be overwhelming, especially if you’re unsure of the specifics that need to be done.

A lot of hard work and time goes into creating an SEO campaign. Due to that, it can be disheartening if it’s not successful when it goes live. This is why it’s important to put an emphasis on figuring out what needs to be done to ensure that your SEO campaign generates the results that you’re looking for.

There’s no specific and rigid blueprint to follow that will guarantee that your campaign is a success. Every business is different and will require different focuses. However, there are a few steps that you can follow that are all universal. When adhered to, these will teach you how to run a successful SEO campaign and give you a better chance of launching a killer SEO campaign!

Step 1: Find Keywords

Search engine optimisation is all about making your content better suited to rank on Google and other big search engines. Of course, to ensure that your content is relevant and provides a good user experience, you want to make sure that your domain targets and ranks for the right keywords.

The keywords you use can make or break your SEO campaign, so it’s vital that you spend the necessary time to figure out which ones best suit your business. There are multiple ways to find and source good, competitive, and useful keywords, with some of the best tactics being:

• Using the Google Keyword PlannerThe Google Keyword Planner Tool helps you find new keywords and synonyms based on the ones you already rank for. tool
• Using the keywords your competitors target
• Trying tools like Keyworddit and KWFinder

These tactics will allow you to source and come up with good options. You then need to isolate and choose the ten best keywords that you want to target from what you generate. To do this, you need to evaluate your keywords and make sure that they meet a few pieces of criteria.

The first factor that you need to consider is how competitive the keywordKeywords are the words and phrases that potential customers might search for to find your business. is. A highly competitive keyword is one where many different websites target it, meaning that it can be tough to stand out among the crowd. This is why it’s good to find a keyword with a low competition rate, as it will mean that you will be competing against fewer people. A good way to figure out the competitiveness of a keyword is to simply Google it and see how many authoritative sites pop up. This can give you a good indication, but for a more accurate evaluation, a keyword researchKeyword research helps websites unearth the best keywords to drive traffic and visibility. This research is supported by a number of powerful web-based tools, the best of which we’ve listed here. tool such as the ones provided by SEMRush Or Ahrefs can give you a quantifiable score into how competitive each keyword is.

Once you’ve figured out the competitiveness of these keywords, you then need to analyse their search volume. To maximise your chances of your SEO campaign being a success, you want to find a keyword with many users searching for it. The catch here is that popular keywords tend to be far more competitive, so it’s best to go for keywords that might not be searched as much that have a lower competitiveness rating.

For example, one keyword might have 600,000 searchers but an SEO difficulty of 65/100. Instead of going for that one, it might make more sense to go for a keyword with 400,000 searchers but an SEO difficulty of 50/100.

The final thing you need to consider when picking your keywords is to make sure they fit your customer. You want your keywords to be relevant, so if your domain or page doesn’t match up with the search intent of a keyword, it’s not worth targeting.

Step 2: Create Good Content

With your keywords chosen, the next thing you need to do is incorporate those keywords into your content. Doing this lets Google and website-crawlers know what search results your pages should rank for. However, when creating content and adding keywords into them, you want to make sure that you don’t overdo it and stuff these words in there. Instead, it’s best to have those keywords incorporated naturally into the text.

In addition to this, there are plenty of other things you need to do to your content to ensure that your SEO campaign strategy is a success. Here are the main things that you need to be doing to ensure that your content is good and well optimised for SEO:

• Write long content – It used to be the case that short articles under 500 words would be good enough to rank well. However, as time moved on, trends have shown that longer pieces perform a lot better, so it’s a good idea to provide value to your readers and create long-form content.
• Use visuals – You simply can’t create a good piece of content without visuals these days, and that is because adding things like pictures, graphs, videos, and infographics makes your articles more shareable, which can help generate backlinks and boost search visibility Plus, a more engaging piece of content provides a better user experience.
• Create authoritative content – To make sure that your content is valuable, you want to ensure that what you’re writing has value and is worth reading. This means providing content that is fresh and that displays expert knowledge on a topic. By writing authoritative content, you make it more likely that users will link back to your pages.

Step 3: Focus On On-Site Optimisation

Now that you have a great piece of content created that features the targeted keywords you generated in step one, the next step in your SEO campaign strategy is to optimise that content. This is a step that is essential in how to run a successful SEO campaign and intimidates many first-time marketers, as there are many different things that you can do. Due to the ever-changing nature of SEO, the best practices alter year after year. Here are few things you need to do on your pages to ensure that they’re well optimised for this day and age:

• Use short URLs that feature your keywords, as this helps Google with indexing.
• Put your keyword in your meta descriptionWebsite meta descriptions are used to inform web users on search engines about the content of webpages. and ensure your keyword features in the first 150 words of the content, as this will let Google know that it’s important.
• Use internal linksHyperlinks, also known as links, are the connection points on a webpage that take you to other webpages. from your new piece of content to other pages on your website and vice versa. This will help the page rank better as it passes page authority to it.
• Add synonyms of your keyword within your content, as this provides Google with a better understanding of it.

These are just the main things that need to be done on-site to boost your SEO and ensure that it’s successful. Other more advanced things such as adding alt text, creating sitemaps, and optimising the source code should also be explored, and you can learn more about them on our Managed SEO guides.

Step 4: Build Backlinks

Backlinks are a major part of any SEO campaign and are used to help boost the authority of your website and pages. A backlink is a hyperlink from another website on the internet that links back to your domain. Think of these backlinks as digital recommendations. The more you get, the more trust Google can put into your content and the better authority it can have.

The issue with backlinks is that they’re super hard to obtain because you’re relying on others to link back to you. This is why many businesses opt to employ the services of an SEO agency, as they’ll be able to source websites and blogs and get backlinks created for your pages.

Backlinking is not just a numbers game. Although it might sound like having way more backlinks than your competitors will help you rank higher than them, this will only be the case if these backlinks come from high authority and well-respected sources. This is why when implementing this technique, you need to research with websites you’re trying to obtain backlinks from, as getting them from bad websites can actively harm your SEO campaign strategy. It’s also a good idea to try and make sure your backlink comes from relevant websites, as you can get penalised by Google if you obtain backlinks from websites that don’t fit your niche.

Step 5: Track Your Campaign

SEO campaigns are continuous endeavours, and even when one goes live, it’s not the end of it. Instead, a vital step of your campaign strategy is to monitor how well it performs. This is because you can learn a lot about what went well and what didn’t go so well and then use those findings to improve campaigns in the future.

One of the main things you want to track to help you evaluate how successful your campaign was is how much organic trafficOrganic search traffic (sometimes called natural or unpaid search) is the traffic that's driven to a website because of unpaid placement on a search engine results page. your campaign generated. This is because an increase in organic traffic will demonstrate that your campaign worked, and more users clicked on your pages as it was more visible to them. You can track organic traffic in Google Analytics.

It’s also a good idea to track how well your keywords ranked with the Google Search Console, as this will let you know if your keywords are breaking into that first page on Google or if other keywords are beating them out.

Conclusion

These five steps for a successful SEO campaign are not the be-all and end-all, and they’re certainly not a comprehensive list of all the things you can do to boost your SEO. They are, however, the essentials that must be followed as they inform you on how to run a successful SEO campaign and ensure that your campaign has a chance of generating results. SEO can be hard, and even the masters can get things wrong! However, with these five steps leading the way, you should have a solid foundation to improve your SEO efforts.