Tips on How to Run a Strategic SEO Campaign

SEO (search engine optimization) is an important digital marketing tool. If you want to improve site traffic and get more eyes on your material, you need to implement a planned SEO strategy tailored to your objectives.

It’s important that you understand how to incorporate keywords into your content and the significance of link development. So, can you merge the various components of SEO into a result-driven marketing channel?

In this post, we’ll show you how to strategize and design your own data-backed SEO campaign, which you can alter and enhance to produce consistent results.

But first, let’s define an SEO campaign and discuss what goes into making one successful.

What Is an SEO Campaign?

An SEO campaign is a planned effort to boost a website’s organic search engine rankings using on-site and off-site optimization. Keyword research, link building, technical SEO audits, content production, and other search engine optimization strategies may be included.

What’s the Difference Between an SEO Campaign & an SEO Strategy?

An SEO campaign is a short-term, targeted effort with a specific goal, such as raising ranks for a specific set of keywords or URL, as well as a budget and schedule for attaining those goals.

In contrast, an SEO strategy is a long-term plan for increasing a website’s search prominence. It includes all of the methods and efforts required to gradually increase a website’s search engine rankings. An SEO strategy considers the general aims and objectives of the organization, the target audience, and the competitive landscape. It is a detailed plan that explains the steps that must be performed in order to attain the goals and objectives.

What Are the Key Parts of a Successful SEO Campaign?

An effective SEO campaign consists of five major components:

  1. Setting Your Goal & Benchmarking

Before you can create a campaign, you must first identify an SEO goal (or goals) and assess your present SEO rankings. This will assist you in determining which SEO methods to use in your campaign and how to track your success.

2. Keyword Research

Keyword research is fundamental to SEO and will almost always be included in an SEO campaign. Knowing the terms and phrases people use to locate your services or products is crucial for boosting optimization and generating traffic.

3. Content Creation

You’ll need appealing content on landing pages and blog articles to capitalize on your keyword research. People turn to Google for assistance in choosing a nearby restaurant, comparing washer and dryer models, or researching the best dog toys. Your content should assist you in connecting with your target audience by providing them with the necessary information as well as a pleasurable experience.

4. Technical SEO Tactics & On-Page SEO

On-page SEO is the practice of improving the technical performance of your website and optimizing your pages around your keyword research.

On-page SEO is the process of enhancing your website’s technical performance and tailoring your pages to your keyword research. Audit results should be analyzed and used to plan which opportunities will be tackled and in what order.

Regular audits will keep you informed of technical issues and assist you in allocating or reallocating resources to achieve the greatest impact.

5. Off-Page SEO Tactics

Off-page SEO refers to optimization techniques used away from a website. This includes citation and directory listings, link building, Google Business Profile optimization, and social signals. You can choose which off-page SEO strategies to concentrate on based on your objectives, though link building will be beneficial for the majority of websites.

Steps for Starting a New SEO Campaign

Now that we have a general understanding of the elements of an SEO campaign, let’s explore the steps involved in developing and managing an efficient SEO campaign.

1. Benchmark KPIs & Set Campaign Goals

Setting goals and benchmarking key performance indicators (KPIs) at the start of an SEO campaign gives you a clear starting point for tracking your progress and evaluating the effectiveness of your efforts. You can track changes over time and make data-driven decisions about how to improve or scale your campaign by establishing baseline metrics for organic traffic, keyword rankings, conversion rates, and other crucial metrics. The campaign can be focused and all efforts can be made sure to be in line with business goals by setting concrete, measurable SEO goals.

2. Conduct keyword analysis

Keywords are the building blocks of every SEO campaign. These are the words and phrases potential customers use to find your website. To make sure you’re showing up in the searches that matter, you need to identify valuable industry keywords and then optimize existing content around them or create new content for them.

  • Keywords are the cornerstone of every SEO campaign.
  • Create keyword themes around your primary target keywords to increase your chances of appearing in search results for terms that are semantically related to them.
  • Verify the rankings of the currently published content to see if the identified keywords are present. If so, consider how the content might be improved to incorporate a broad keyword theme.
  • Develop a strategy for writing optimized web pages or blog posts based on your research with your content team. For keywords with no related content, develop a keyword strategy. Give high search volume but low keyword difficulty (i.e., less competitive) keywords (i.e., those that are less competitive) priority whenever possible.  

You should look at the obstacles affecting your SEO performance once you have a list of your keywords and a general idea of where they are (and aren’t) on your page. We suggest a thorough SEO audit to accomplish this.

3. Conduct a comprehensive SEO audit.

When a campaign first launches, you should learn as much as you can about the situation in order to develop a strategy to address problems and boost success. If you haven’t already, you should perform an audit as soon as possible as part of your overall SEO strategy.

A thorough SEO audit is the magnifying glass that enables you to examine different aspects of your website and SEO performance in order to spot, identify, and resolve problems. 

In-depth SEO audits should consider the following:

  • Technical SEO factors such as whether search engines are indexing your website, how it’s set up, how well it’s performing on Core Web Vitals, whether you have an XML sitemap, and more.
  • On-page SEO elements like metadata, content, and image optimization.
  • Off-page SEO factors such as backlink parity, backlink quality, backlink velocity, and Google Business Profile optimization.

Visit our SEO audit and checklist posts to get a good idea of the various considerations that need to be made.  

After finishing your thorough SEO audit, it’s time to go through the results with a fine-tooth comb to identify:

  • Important issues that need to be resolved right away
  • Low-effort initiatives that can produce immediate improvements
  • Everything else that needs to be done
  • Things that are fine but should be evaluated again later

Okay, so you’ve established your starting point, chosen goals that align with the purposes of your business, and gathered all the information necessary to create an action plan. Now is the time to strategize the next steps in your campaign. 

You should decide who on your team will be in charge of each issue, what needs to be done, and when it needs to be done by. Depending on who will be working on what, some of the actions may take place at the same time. Even though the next three steps are listed in a particular order, they can all take place at the same time.

For instance, your content team can update existing content to align with the relevant search intent or produce new content for keywords found during your keyword research while your web developers work on enhancing page speeds, eliminating pointless redirects, and implementing robots meta tags. To develop or enhance your link-building strategy, you can also work with a service.

4. Deal with SEO technical issues

Your website developer ought to be able to address the technical problems identified in your thorough SEO audit, such as:

  • Absence of XML sitemap
  • No XML sitemap is available.
  • insufficient internal links or breadcrumbs
  • Internal search pages with indexes waste crawl budgets.
  • Core Web Vitals not working
  • canonical tags not present
  • misapplied or absent hreflang
  • errors in structured data
  • chain and loop redirection
  • Link breakdowns
  • bad or ambiguous website structure

Prioritize problems that affect how easily search crawlers can access or find your website. After all, if Googlebot cannot index your pages, you will not be able to boost your search visibility or keyword rankings.

Once the technical solutions are in place, perform your technical audit to make sure everything is operating as intended and that no new problems have emerged.

5. Create and improve content.

How well you can rank for the most difficult keywords in your niche is largely dependent on your content. Once you’ve linked your keyword research to existing content (where appropriate) and created a keyword strategy outlining the types of content your team needs to produce (landing page or blog post? ), you can assign this task to your content team for completion. 

Then, your content team can start setting priorities and drafting briefs and outlines for the required content. Check the internal links to the relevant pages after they publish the content. For instance, our article on SEO audits contains a link to our services page for SEO audits. This demonstrates to readers and search engines that the pages are related and enables the blog post to transfer link value to the landing page.

6. Address Off-Site SEO Using Link Building & Other Techniques 

Your SEO team or a reputable link building service can help you with off-site SEO tasks. Depending on your goals, you may need to:

  • Increase your efforts to create links to pages with high value.
  • Improve the effectiveness of your Google Business Profile.
  • Get more citations or directory listings
  • All listings’ NAPs (name, address, and phone) should be fixed.

Creating Links

Off-page SEO must include link building as a key component. Google views backlinks from various referring domains that are of high caliber as endorsing your website. Backlinks show that your website is reputable and authoritative. Furthermore, they can direct referral traffic to your pages.

Your most crucial pages should be the focus of your link-building efforts. Find the difference in the number of backlinks between your main pages and those of your rivals.

In other words, how many more backlinks do the pages that rank highest for your keywords have?

Once you are aware of the gap, you can formulate a strategy to increase link velocity and close the gap.  

Google Business Profile & Citations

Google My- Business (GMB) plays an outsized role in local SEO. If you service particular areas or have brick-and-mortar locations, make sure your GBP is up to date and properly optimized. You can also seek out additional directory listings to help boost local signals. For example, if your local newspaper has a business directory, you can make sure you have a listing and that it links to your website.

When checking your GMB profile and seeking out citation opportunities, make sure your business name, address, and phone number are the same everywhere. This helps establish trust with both Google and potential customers.

Evaluation of Your SEO Campaign’s Performance

As you roll out your campaign, you’ll want to evaluate the results and make modifications as appropriate. SEO takes time to produce results. However, if your efforts aren’t yielding results after a few months, you should reconsider your approach and its objectives, or seek advice from a knowledgeable SEO agency.

You should evaluate the results of your efforts as you launch your campaign and adjust as necessary. Have you increased your search visibility by ranking for more keywords? Are you performing better for your most crucial keywords? Are the pages you’ve improved receiving more organic traffic? Are your high-value pages seeing more conversions?

Popular SEO Campaign FAQs

How soon does an SEO campaign start to show results?

The use of SEO is a long-term tactic. The results also take time to manifest. Around the four to six month mark, the majority of businesses start to notice better rankings and more organic traffic. In a highly competitive market, it might take longer.

Implementing your SEO campaign methodically will increase your chances of success. For example, if you’ve identified missing meta descriptions, either create a process for writing the missing descriptions and updating the pages or implement the process you already have in place and set a clear deadline.

Once you start seeing results, don’t stop! SEO is an ongoing process. If you stop, eventually, your results will diminish. To maintain and improve your rankings, you need to adjust your SEO strategy and keep going.

How long is a typical SEO campaign?

An SEO campaign is part of a larger SEO strategy. It’s goal-oriented and lasts until the goal is accomplished. Then, a new campaign can be structured around another goal. You can run multiple SEO campaigns at once. In fact, this is recommended if you have different websites or subdomains you want to rank higher. These SEO campaigns may have different goals, which could also lead to different timelines.

Because SEO takes time, a typical SEO campaign should last at least 12 months. This is just an estimate, though. It might take less time for some campaigns and more time for others. 

How can you measure the effectiveness of an SEO campaign?

SEO metrics tracking is essential for any SEO campaign. You can’t increase your SEO performance if you can’t track it.

Identifying the key performance indicators (KPIs) that will provide information regarding the effectiveness of an SEO campaign is critical. If you want to increase organic traffic to your service pages, for example, you should monitor metrics such as organic click-through rate, time on page, and conversions, as well as organic search traffic to each of the most important pages.

You can track the effectiveness of your SEO effort using a range of free and paid tools.

Google Analytics is a free solution. Users can view organic traffic trends, conversion rates, individual page performance, and click-through rates in Google Analytics. While Google Analytics only provides a limited view of keyword positioning and growth when linked to Google Search Console, it can certainly assist a fledgling SEO marketing team in keeping track of success.

Google Search Console is a distinct tool for tracking your SEO performance. This is one of the greatest SEO tools for measuring and tracking organic search traffic, exposure, and performance on your website.

It’s also beneficial to use a paid tool, such as Ahrefs or SEMrush, to track keyword rankings over time. These tools can also aid with SEO duties such as backlink analysis and content auditing.

Furthermore, if you deal with us, we may provide tracking and monthly reports to demonstrate the efficacy of their efforts. This can include tracking certain keywords or metrics related to your SEO objectives.

Are You Ready to Begin Your SEO Campaign?

Now that we’ve covered what goes into an SEO campaign, you can launch and execute your own and hope for the best, or you can work with a data-driven SEO agency to create a unique SEO strategy tailored to your business goals.

Here at Texas Digital Pros, we use search to unleash every company’s true digital marketing potential. Our customers have a dedicated project manager that knows SEO and serves as their point of contact. This makes discussing and tracking your SEO campaigns and ensuring they align with your business goals easier.

Learn more about how partnering with us can help you supercharge your efforts. Schedule a free consultation today.  

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