Six things you need to consider when planning successful SEO campaign
SEO has been an essential part of marketing for the past few years, and for good reason. Get SEO right and it can help you to grow your brand and extend its reach.
If you want to rank high up on search engine results pages, you need a long-term SEO strategy that includes several essential elements. Once you properly understand SEO, you’ll find it relatively easy to navigate and help your website get found by search engines like Google for the right search terms.
But that said, navigating the SEO landscape to find the right SEO services can be challenging for someone new. So it is no surprise that many businesses choose to hire an SEO agency to assist them. It is easy enough too find a reputable agency to help. For example, if you live in North America you can search for “Professional SEO Services in USA” and you will have numerous options on Google to choose from.
Whether you are planning to do your SEO yourself or hire an expert to help, it is important to understand the essential elements of SEO. Here are six things you need to consider when planning a launch a successful SEO campaign.
1) Your website setup
Your website is one of the most critical elements of your SEO campaign, so it is crucial to analyze your website pages and ensure there are no issues when consumers visit them. A poorly maintained website can significantly affect your SEO campaign.
One key point you need to remember is to ensure your website is mobile friendly. The majority of consumers browse brands using mobile devices. Once people reach your website, how fast your pages load up on desktop and mobile devices is also vital in capturing potential customers.
And finally, it would help if you had SSL enabled. This is instrumental in securing consumer data and building trust with your customers.
2) An SEO audit
To fully prepare your website for oncoming traffic, it is important to perform an SEO audit. This is particularly necessary if you are starting your first campaign.
During an audit, you will be able to gauge the vital technical structures of your website, such as your URL structure and website structure, which should be limited to a maximum of three levels deep. You can also see the status of your canonical URLs, txt SEO settings to mitigate indexing errors and how optimized your XML sitemap is.
3) Campaign goals
When planning an SEO campaign, you must establish your goals and targets. Each campaign will have specific markers you need to achieve for it to be a success. For example, if your current keywords do not have any presence yet, an SEO campaign could be used to increase your brand’s visibility on a search engine.
Look for services which provide affordable SEO packages. The right campaign can be used to improve SERP rankings for your current website pages for specific keywords.
4) Topic and keyword research
The next step in your campaign would be to conduct topic and keyword research. And to start, you need to know what each is.
A keyword is a specific search term, while a topic is a set of relatable search terms. For example, a topic could be SEO marketing, but the keyword would be SEO marketing courses. It is usually best to start with topic research before conducting keyword research, because you need to learn as much as possible from your topic first.
Specifically, you need to find the total search volume for all the keywords that make a topic, work out competition levels and the type of content that appears first on search engines like Google. Narrowing down these topics will help you select keywords that will promote better results for your campaign.
5) On page SEO
Another significant element of a successful SEO campaign is on page SEO. This helps make your content more SEO friendly, so search engines have an easier job recognizing it and ranking your content higher.
There are some tips you can follow to optimize this parameter. These are:
- Adding target keywords directly to your URL
- Make sure you mention your keyword in the opening paragraph of your webpage
- Add a target keyword to your H1 tag
- Related keywords should be added to H2 & H3 tags
- Ensure you have mentioned long-tail keywords in your content
- Add images and optimize the alt text
6) Promotion
An essential part of your SEO campaign should be promoting your content. Once you have conducted an audit, selected your keywords, created exciting content and optimized your web pages, the next step is to promote it.
There are two ways by which promotion can take place, the first being promoting internally and the second being promoting externally.
When you promote internally, you are using internal linking as your technique. This happens after you publish a post. Once your post is live, you find related pages on your website and add internal links to the new post. The anchor text of these links can be modified to match your high ranking keywords.
When your internal link old posts, search engines pick this up and recognize your new pages. This also means your pages share page rank, which helps rank new content a lot quicker.
To promote externally, you must build backlinks from other websites. If your backlinks are high quality, you will also receive a good rank on SERP. However, it is important to remember that you should only build links to websites that efficiently promote your content.
SEO is an important part of marketing today
These tips should give you a better insight into beginning your SEO campaign without any hitches. SEO will be a big part of every marketer’s or business’ life, and it is vital to learn how to navigate this technological field properly.
Listen to the experts and start your testing to identify what SEO strategy and techniques work for you, and what doesn’t.
Dileep Thekkethil, a Journalism Postgraduate, was formerly with a US-based online magazine and is the Associate Director, Digital Content at Stan Ventures. He is a frequent blogger who keeps a tab on the latest updates in the SEO and technology arena. You can reach him at Mail | LinkedIn | Twitter | Facebook or View all posts by Dileep
