Taking the right approach to your SEO campaign can help you get the best results.
To point you in the right direction, read on for some guidance on SEO campaign management from Ignite Visibility’s Digital SEO Strategist, Tanisha Mitchell.
What You’ll Learn
- What is an SEO Campaign?
- Why Do Some SEO Campaigns Fail
- 4 Tips to Produce a Successful SEO Campaign
- Create Your Own SEO Campaign
- Metrics to Measure SEO Campaign Success
My Expert Opinion on SEO Campaigns
I’ve found that the SEO landscape is always changing and requires plenty of diligence to keep campaigns working the way they should.
While it can seem overwhelming to balance everything from on-page SEO to technical tasks, the right strategy can keep things organized and help you get the desired results with every SEO campaign.
The key to developing a solid SEO strategy is to set clear goals for your campaign, target the most valuable keywords, and develop top-quality user-centric content in addition to some of the more technical aspects.
With a good approach to SEO, you can dominate search engine rankings and supplement your other digital marketing efforts, including paid media and social media campaigns, giving you a long-term competitive edge.
What Is An SEO Campaign?
So, what is an SEO campaign, exactly?
An SEO campaign involves optimizing parts of your website and certain off-site content to boost search engine rankings. Higher rankings mean more visibility and, subsequently, website traffic.
Every type of business can benefit from implementing SEO campaigns to stay competitive and attract more traffic to their websites via Google and other search engines.
Why Do Some SEO Campaigns Fail?
There could be a variety of reasons why your campaign isn’t performing as well as you expected it to.
Let’s look at the top 3.
Reason #1: You Don’t Know How to Prioritize
To make the most out of your time, be sure to focus on the tips and tricks that are most likely to improve your ranking.
A big marketing mistake I see often is when marketers spend too much time on things like alt tags and schema. While important, there are easier and quicker ways to make a big improvement in your SEO campaign.
The same goes for focusing on pages that aren’t already getting much traffic or dead links that aren’t sending traffic your way. It’s a good idea to clean these things up later when you have more time. If you want your SEO campaign to take off quickly, focus on other SEO tasks and table these ones for later.
Reason #2: You’re Focusing on Something That Doesn’t Work
Sometimes, while you’re working on your SEO campaign, you’ll come across URLs that you want to change. Don’t! When you make the wrong update to a URL, you could set yourself back 3-6 months.
Even if these URLs are not currently converting, be sure to check their history. Look to see when they did convert and if there were any redirects associated with them.
Avoid a major setback and do your research into the history of the URL before making any changes.
Another big marketing mistake a lot of people make is going into this work thinking that any content is good content. This could not be further from the truth. The days of keyword stuffing your website are long gone.
When you add content to your pages for the sake of adding it, you run the risk of being marked as spam by Google. If Google doesn’t understand how your content fits in the page or if it registers it as duplicated content from elsewhere on your site, it will do more harm than good to your SEO campaign.
Reason #3: Your Site is Technically Flawed From The Beginning
Be sure to check what Javascript you may be running. Do this within the first 3 months of your SEO campaign. If anything seems to be negatively impacting your results, fix it.
The same goes for your page speed.
Google wants to send its users to quality sites. If your site has a slow page speed, Google will disregard it as spam and won’t rank it high on the search results page. If your site isn’t ranking, it isn’t converting.
Lastly, check your Core Web Vitals. You can do this by going into your Google Search Console and making sure that everything looks good on that end. If your Core Web Vitals are bad, Google will rank your page poorly, or maybe even not at all. The biggest SEO campaign in the world won’t help a page with poor Core Web Vitals.
4 Tips to Produce a Successful SEO Campaign
In addition to avoiding the above marketing mistakes, here are some things you can do proactively to increase your search engine ranking.
Tip #1: Ensure Your Site is Technically Correct
Any SEO campaign should start with a full deep-dive audit of the site.
Take a look at the backend of your Google console. Be sure that there aren’t a bunch of scammy backlinks targeting your site. Handle any manual action items that might be assigned to your site. Both of these things will have a huge negative impact on your ranking.
You can also use a tool like SEMRush to look at all the Google algorithm updates over the past 3-4 years. Have any of these algorithms affected your site? If so, how?
Tip #2: Focus on Your Money Pages
There are probably 10-15 pages that are driving 90% of the revenue for your site. If you don’t already know which pages are your “money pages,” you can determine it by checking Google Analytics to see which pages are performing the best.
When you start your SEO campaign, start with these pages. You know they are already receiving decent traffic, so consider ways to increase it. Build them up in a way that Google will be more drawn to them.
Understanding your money pages is an important part of the puzzle to understanding the keywords that are driving traffic to your site. Having this knowledge will help you know that you’re focusing your SEO efforts on the right pages.
Tip #3: Utilize a Multi-Channel Approach
SEO remains the #1 channel for driving conversions. A lot of people are using Google every day and that means there are a lot of opportunities to draw traffic to your site.
And, while this is very important, it’s not the only way to build your audience. You should explore how to use a multi-channel approach.
Don’t ignore other channels like social media, marketing lists, and e-mail captures. Create a cohesive strategy where all of these channels work together. This is a great way to re-target your traffic and utilize them again and again.
Tip #4: Understand Your User’s Intent
Knowing and understanding what your users are looking for when they find your site is one of the most important steps of an SEO campaign.
When you know why traffic is landing on your site, you can use that information to capitalize on those users. Build your pages to resonate with them and their intended purpose. When your pages answer a question or solve a problem for a user, they are more likely to return.
How to Create an SEO Campaign
Want to build a strong SEO strategy from scratch? Here, you’ll learn all about how to create an SEO campaign with the right approach.
To demonstrate how this process would work practically, we’ll use the SEO campaign example of an auto body shop that wants to achieve high local rankings.
1. Review and Run an SEO Audit
Before determining how to create an SEO campaign that works for you, the first step will involve conducting an in-depth SEO audit. Using an auditing tool, you can scan your website and figure out what’s working in your SEO campaign and what could benefit from improvements.
Some items to assess in your audit include:
- Onsite optimization
- Content
- Social media integration
- Keyword usage
- Linkbuilding efforts
- Website design
- Search rankings
- Current website traffic
Take our auto body SEO campaign example: The website could be targeting many relevant keywords like “auto repair” and “body shop in [city],” but the content could be too thin to effectively utilize them, resulting in low rankings.
Based on this launching point, you can guide the rest of your campaign to get better results.
2. Select a Target Campaign Goal
Next, consider what you want to achieve with your SEO efforts and set a specific goal. Create a SMART goal, ensuring that your goals are specific, measurable, attainable, realistic and relevant, and timely.
There are many goals you can set for your campaigns, such as:
- A certain amount of website traffic
- Specific rankings for particular keywords
- Reduced bounce rate
- Increased conversions
Based on the goals you set, you can then determine which key performance indicators (KPIs) to track to measure the results.
For instance, the aforementioned auto body shop may want to boost traffic, in which case the primary metrics to measure would include keyword rankings, organic click-through rates, and organic traffic. If conversion is the goal, the best KPIs would include conversions, bounce rate, and session duration to measure engagement.
3. Identify the Right Keywords
There are plenty of tools out there to help with keyword research, including Google’s free Keyword Planner. You’ll want to find high-volume keywords, but it’s often best to go for long-tail terms of three words or longer that aren’t highly competitive at first, eventually working up to broader short-tail keywords as your site builds more authority.
Also, consider the intent behind each search term. What is the user trying to find with a keyword at each stage of the buyer’s journey? Knowing intent can help you determine what kinds of content to write around each term.
This is what keyword research might look like for our auto body shop:
4. Build a Pillar Page
With your keyword research completed, it’s time to start mapping out pillar pages with topic clusters.
The purpose of a pillar page is to serve as a kind of central hub for a broader topic, with topic clusters branching out from that primary topic. From there, you can build shorter pages that cover each topic cluster more in-depth and link to them from the pillar page.
In the case of an auto body shop, you might have a pillar page that covers various auto repair services. The page would discuss auto repair in a broader sense, but then it might go into the following topic clusters:
- Vehicle maintenance
- Tire alignment and replacement
- Car repairs
- Truck repairs
- Transmission repair
- Brake repair
5. Create Helpful, Quality Content
Another critical requirement to keep in mind is the need for quality content. In the old days of SEO, you could rank well just by having a lot of keyword-stuffed content, but today Google is all about quality over quantity.
Google E-E-A-T provides specific guidelines on how to develop high-quality content that appeals to users. E-E-A-T stands for Expertise, Experience, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. If your content meets all of these criteria and focuses on the user over search engines, with optimization included, it will likely go far.
The auto body example might have a blog that covers various topics that vehicle owners might want to know more about, such as when to take a car in for repairs or what certain lights on the dashboard indicate, for instance. These pages could include keywords and other on-site optimization elements, which we’ll go into next.
6. On-Page Optimization
Your web pages should include a variety of on-page SEO elements that help them rank well in search engines.
There are many components you should cover, including:
- Keyword-rich headers and subheaders
- Title tags and meta descriptions that appear on Google
- Internal links
- Optimized images with alt text describing image content
- Optimized URLs
- Relevant, naturally incorporated keywords
7. Build Backlinks
You’ll also want a healthy backlink profile that builds your website’s authority.
Backlinks are links that lead back to your website from other authoritative, industry-related sites. The more high-quality backlinks you have on the internet, the more likely search engines are to rank your site over less authoritative competitors.
You can use various tools to perform a backlink gap analysis and gauge your site’s overall backlink health. This is what an analysis might look like:
You can then work to build more backlinks in a number of ways. For example, an auto body shop might reach out to online automotive publications and pitch a guest post that links back to the website.
Another way to naturally get more backlinks is to create linkable assets, such as extremely helpful blog posts that people are likely to share on various platforms.
8. Technical SEO
There are also many technical SEO aspects to consider for your site, such as:
- Structured data markup
- Page load speeds
- Overall site architecture and sitemaps
- Mobile-responsiveness to attract mobile users
- Eliminating duplicate content
- Hreflang tags to optimize international websites
9. Off-Page SEO
To further maximize your site’s visibility online, you must integrate an off-page SEO strategy that supplements on-page efforts.
Some of these elements can include the following:
- Backlinks that appear on external sites and lead back to yours
- Social media engagement
- Brand mentions and citations appearing on other websites
- Customer ratings and reviews
- Directory listings with accurate business information
- Influencer outreach to get others to share content
An auto body shop, for instance, might engage with users on social media to advertise services and have local listings on platforms like Google Business Profile and Yelp.
10. Measure the Results
To ensure your SEO campaigns are working, be sure to measure the results with the right tools and metrics.
Compare the results against your goals and see what you might be able to do to improve your efforts.
Try to generate and review regular reports to gauge progress, and take the necessary steps to continue optimizing for better results.
Eventually, you’ll be able to perfect your campaigns.
Metrics to Measure SEO Campaign Success
It’s important to know how to measure the success of SEO campaigns. Here are some key metrics to help with this:
Keyword Rankings
Keyword rankings measure the position of your pages for certain terms, along with fluctuations in rankings.
The following is what a keyword ranking report might look like using the Ahrefs Keyword Checker.
Organic Traffic
You can also measure organic traffic from search engines to determine how many users are coming from relevant searches on Google and other platforms.
For example, you can use a tool like Google Analytics to track traffic from organic search:
Bounce Rate
The bounce rate measures the rate at which users immediately leave a web page after landing on it. A high bounce rate could indicate that your pages aren’t helpful or relevant to their connected search terms.
You can measure your site’s bounce rate by taking all single-page sessions in analytics and dividing them by all sessions.
Backlinks
Backlinks keep track of how many links to your site show up on other websites. A large number of authoritative backlinks can significantly help your rankings.
Using certain backlink checker tools, you can analyze backlinks and see if there are any gaps you need to fill or if you need to replace dead links.
Develop the Ideal SEO Campaign with Ignite Visibility
Want to learn more about how to create an SEO campaign or how to measure the success of SEO campaigns? Ignite Visibility can give you clear guidance to get the most from search engine optimization along with many other digital marketing efforts.
With our experts behind your efforts, you can:
- Identify the right keywords to target for SEO
- Set the best goals for your strategy
- Measure the results of your efforts for continual improvement
- Develop high-quality SEO-optimized content
- And more!
Reach out to us today to learn how we can supercharge your SEO strategy.
