You’ve probably heard of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) by now (if you haven’t yet, do check out some of the topics we’ve covered on SEO in our previous articles!).
Hence, if you’re a business owner with your very own website, you’d know how crucial SEO is for your content to enhance your online presence and reach a wider audience.
However, have you heard of an SEO campaign?
If you have not, then you’re in the right place because we are going to touch on this topic and how you can plan a successful SEO campaign that works. Effective SEO campaigns are super helpful in improving your website’s SEO rankings.
Hence, let’s get right into these planning tips so you can kickstart your SEO campaign right away!
What is An SEO Campaign?
An SEO campaign refers to a selection of SEO strategies and techniques to generate specific outcomes, such as developing an SEO boost or rank for a particular keyword.
In other words, an SEO campaign is also a planned effort to optimise your page or website; to improve its SEO rankings.
It is often a long-term project that involves a few components, such as keyword research, SEO analysis, on-page optimisation, and more.
Although planning an SEO campaign may sound complicated at first, your brand or business can benefit from a well-executed SEO campaign, no matter the size of your company.
Not only will you increase your visibility online, but you can also drive traffic to your site and reach out to an even broader audience.
Tips to Plan An SEO Campaign that Works
1. Perform an SEO Audit
An SEO audit is done at the start of the campaign.
Hence, it is essential to understand how to perform an SEO audit. By completing this audit, website owners can identify areas that need further improvement regarding on-page SEO.
Not only that, but it can also help determine your strengths and weaknesses of your off-page SEO.
Although an SEO audit varies, you can evaluate on your on-site optimisation and technical evaluation.
Here are a few things you can consider when performing an SEO audit:
- Evaluate Page Inventory. Get an inventory of all the URLs, Meta Titles and Meta Descriptions of your pages. From there, you can see whether the URLs make sense when Google crawls through the site and evaluate what needs to be optimised from your Meta Titles and Descriptions.
- Check Accessibility Issues. Website owners can also make use of Google Search Console to see if any ongoing technical issues arise on the website. For example, problems like duplicated content, blocking of important pages and 404 errors (where search engines and users are unable to access your site) can be detected and managed by the Google Search Console.
- On-Site Optimisation Overview. You can then evaluate your on-site optimisation by running your website through online SEO tools. These tools can help you determine any optimisation errors that may exist in your websites such as missing alt-text, Meta Title/Description issues, URL structure problems and more.
2. Define Your SEO Goals
Before you proceed with the practical steps of an SEO campaign, you should start by deciding how you define success and progress towards your objectives.
Business owners can start by understanding their business and marketing goals beforehand and let these goals define their SEO goals.
Here are a few questions to help all the business owners out there to better plan and define their SEO goals :
- Who are you trying to reach? This question can help you establish a target audience and buyer personas.
- Why do you try to bring your target audience to your site? Define the business goal you would want to achieve. Do these goals include generating leads, sales or something else? Don’t just focus on the site traffic, but try to be as specific as you can with your business goals in mind.
- How will you measure the progress? It is vital to measure your progress to monitor the success rate of your effort. Business owners can measure their progress by using metrics such as conversion rates or subscribed memberships. Other defined objectives can be used as well to measure the progress.
3. Analyse Your Current Website
Another primary step before you get started on your SEO planning is to analyse your website. A couple of good questions to think about when evaluating your site is to know what platform your website is on, and if you need a change of design.
It is so vital for website owners to know if their site is based on a modern or outdated platform. A modern platform would be faster, secure and easier to optimise.
Plus, it will be more flexible when it comes to design and to make small changes.
Another factor to consider is if you need to change your current design. That is because if your website is not up-to-date, or not user-friendly, then the SEO campaign will have minimal effect.
These issues must be taken care of before the optimisation stage, as we need more than the right keywords and optimisation strategy to excel.
READ MORE: SEO Case Study: 5 Successful SEO Case Study in Malaysia
4. Keyword Research
Once you have set your SEO goals and evaluated your website, you can begin the keyword research process to identify your competitors and targeted keywords. There are likely many other sites that are offering the same products and services as your company.
Hence, knowing your online competitors and their operations can come in handy to determine your long-term strategy.
You can identify your SEO competitors by typing in your targeted keyword in Google and see which domain is ranking.
Then, you can analyse your competitors and see what products or services they are offering. You can also check on your competitor’s social presence, coverage, link building tactics, the topics they are targeting, and their estimated search traffic.
Besides researching our competitors, we should also utilise keyword research to see what type of keywords within a particular topic we want to optimise for as well.
After you brainstorm on the topics, it is good to choose keywords with a higher search volume, already well-ranked and attainable.
You will not only have the topics to base all your content around, but you will also have keywords that you can optimise the website around as well.
5. Optimise Keyword Placement Strategy
Another important note to consider during your SEO campaign planning is the keyword placement strategy.
Many website owners make the mistake of inserting keywords at random places and thinking that it will have the same effect on their rankings.
However, the search engine algorithm analyses these keywords based on their placements as well.
Hence, website owners should take heed in placing their keywords in places like the page title, URLs, meta descriptions and headings or subheadings.
Not only do these keywords help your viewers notice you better, but it can also ensure Google’s algorithm to locate your terms clearly when they crawl on your site.
6. Utilise Long-Tailed Keywords
The Internet is home to countless websites. Hence, it is essential to focus your effort in establishing your presence online, especially if you are a small company or SMEs.
With that said, long-tailed keywords may be able to serve you for the better. You can enhance your online presence by looking for relevant keywords with low competition.
Long-tailed keywords can single your brand out among other competitors. When visitors visit your site from these specific keywords, they are more likely to convert and generate sales for you.
In other words, long-tailed keywords can have high conversion potential for your web users to turn from visitors into leads or buyers.
7. On-Site Optimisation
Another phase in your SEO campaign planning is optimising your on-site content. In the process of optimising your site, here are a few tips to take note of for an even effective SEO campaign:
- Short URLs with Main Keywords. URLs are necessary to convey what your viewers can expect to see from your page. Therefore, readability and your main keywords should be present in your URLs. Do make sure it is short as well to minimise the possibility of viewers typing the wrong web address, thus unable to locate your site.
- Place Keywords In Front of Title Tag and Content. Search engines put more focus on terms that show up early in your Meta Title. Not only that, when Google sees a keyword early in your page’s HTML, it shows that the terms you use are important and relate to your content.
- Internal Linking. Internal links can help Google find and index all your pages. Specifically, you can conduct internal linking that links from your new post to other pages on your site, or link from other pages to your new or old content to drive traffic.
- Use Similar Words to Your Keywords. Adding in similar words of your keywords on your page can help Google have a deeper understanding of your content. That way, you can better optimise your page or content and allow viewers to search for you easily through these related keywords.
READ MORE: Branding vs Marketing: Difference Between Branding and Marketing
8. Build Backlinks
Your SEO campaign will not be complete without link building.
A backlink refers to when someone else is linking back to your website. In building backlinks, website owners need to pay attention to the quality of the backlinks instead of its quantity.
With that said, there are plenty of ways for you to create backlinks. One of them is a competitive link building.
Through this link-building method, you can look into your competitor’s backlink profile, see what they do and try to get links on the same websites to compete for a top spot in Google.
Another way for you to build backlinks is through industry-related directory link building.
Although finding industry-specific directories with trust and authority can be challenging, through this process, website owners can find a backlink that is relevant to their space.
When you promote your content to the people who have the power to share it, then you can get legitimate links from these authority sites.
9. Track Your Goals
The last step is to see how well your SEO campaign performed. You can do so through tools such as Google Analytics or Google Search Console. For example, if you’d like to know if your SEO is working or not, you can check your organic traffic at Google Analytics. If it went up, then you’re on the right track, but do note that SEO results don’t happen overnight!
Besides that, you can also check keyword rankings with the Google Search Console.
While Google Analytics can give you an overview of the changes in your search engine traffic, Google Search Console can tell you how many people came to your site from Google; the keywords used to find your site and the pages that bring in the most traffic.
There you have it! We hope this article has given you an idea of what an SEO campaign is, and how to effectively kickstart it for your website.
It may not seem easy at first, but SEO campaigns can work wonders for you by creating a strong online presence for your brand and business.
For those who are somewhat new to this but want some help in building an SEO campaign for your website; let us propose to you an SEO service that is not only comprehensive but also at an affordable and reasonable rate.
With that said, why not engage with Walk Production today for an extensive SEO service that includes keyword research, on-page SEO, SEO content writing and more!
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