Search engine optimization is an integral part of your inbound marketing effort. Regardless of the stage of your campaign, you need to employ high-quality management tactics.
SEO campaign management requires extensive research, an understanding of important metrics, employing SEO campaign management software, and much more. Even if your website is showing excellent results on search engines, it doesn’t mean you should stop SEO management.
By planning a high-quality SEO campaign and employing the latest campaign management tactics, you can ensure a smooth rise to the top spots of the SERP (search engine page results). Let’s take a look at 6 in-depth SEO campaign management tips from the inbound marketing experts.
Before we start with the tips, let’s define an SEO campaign. An SEO campaign involves optimizing your site to rank high on search engines. It’s an integral part of a solid digital marketing effort for any company, be it an offline flower shop or a SaaS provider.
The campaign usually involves creating and arranging high-quality content based on the target audiences’ needs. It also revolves around creating backlinks from authority sites, optimizing website structure, implementing a keyword placement strategy, and much more.
You can look at SEO campaign examples when analyzing your competition. Numerous spy tools exist to look up what your competitors are doing with backlinking, content management, and keyword targeting.
Coupled with paid search efforts, SEO can create a high-quality digital marketing campaign that generates traffic with high conversion potential and establish the company as an industry leader.
Even if you’ve already started your SEO campaign, it’s not too late to review its goals. If you are just starting to work with search engine optimization, these goals can help you structure the entire strategy and simplify its management.
Instead of simply planning to get to the top of search engine results pages, you can try to align your SEO goals with business goals. Review your company’s priorities and use them to set up marketing goals. Ask yourself the following questions:
Who is my target audience? (Who am I trying to bring to my site?)
Why am I trying to bring these people to my site (lead generation, sales, retention)
How will I measure the progress of the campaign? (common metrics)
If you have vague goals, consider these common SEO campaign goals for businesses across different industries:
Lead generation
Increase of traffic to the website
Top SERP positions
Increase of e-commerce sales
Brand awareness
Reputation management
Specific person/company targeting
Customer education
Once you set these goals, they can help drive your entire search engine optimization campaign and boost marketing efforts.
As soon as you determine your SEO goals, you can start with the keyword research process to determine the pillars of your unique campaign. To identify target keywords, you can use the following tactics.
Discuss all keywords related to your industry as well as to your unique offering. Run them through a keyword management tool to determine where these keywords stand and figure out related terms.
Once you do keyword research with the available tools, you can run another brainstorming session to come up with terms you may have overlooked.
Let’s be honest, you probably have many competitors in the industry. In the 21st century, it’s hard to offer something truly unique. When it comes to keyword research, your competition can become your best friend.
To identify who your competitors are, you can type your keywords into a search engine and see what comes up. Do it with several keywords to see which websites rank high for them. Take advantage of spy tools to peek into the strategy your competition is using. You can look at:
Social presence
Targeted keywords
Link building tactics
This information can help you figure out which tactics are worth employing for your SEO campaign. You can also find out where your competition is lacking to capitalize on their failures.
Once you have a list of keywords and know all about your competition, your search engine optimization process will get a strong boost.
Since content is the king, its structure and quality are integral to your SEO campaigns. If you are starting from scratch, you need to implement a content plan. It should include:
A mandatory new piece of content at least once a week.
A content calendar with a list of topics (and perhaps outlines) scheduled for the month ahead.
Internal linking strategy.
Today, Google is prioritizing websites with a topic cluster structure. Instead of writing several random articles that focus on a certain set of keywords, you can create a topic cluster. The topic cluster includes:
Pillar page – an article with generalized content
Supporting pages – articles that go into depth on the subjects discussed on the pillar page.
Internal links – links from the pillar page to supporting pages and vice versa.
An example of a topic cluster would be:
Pillar page: An Extensive Guide to Your SEO Campaign Strategy
Supporting pages:
How to write SEO-oriented content
Top link building practices
How to conduct a keyword search.
Without organizing your content into topic clusters, you could be hindering your SEO efforts. One page could be stealing traffic from another, not allowing you to conquer the search engines.
If you already have many pieces of content on your website, consider reviewing them closely and arranging what you can into clusters.
Another way to manage your old content is to update it. By adding new information to some of your articles, you won’t just channel traffic to them, you could stick to the content writing schedule without creating brand new pieces.
Google favors content updates. By turning an old article into a new one, you save time and effort while keeping the website content fresh.
You can’t learn how to run SEO campaigns without knowing the importance of the technical website aspects. No matter how well you structure your content and work on link building, a poorly designed website can hinder all of your efforts. To make sure Google ranks your website high enough, you have to look at the following factors:
Loading time
Mobile-friendliness
Updated platform
In 2021, Google is introducing Core Web Vitals that make some elements of website design and structure a ranking factor. To make sure your website gains high positions on search engine results, you have to make sure it loads quickly and has a highly responsive interface to improve user experience.
Right now is the perfect time to review your website structure and make the necessary adjustments. Search engines stress user experience. You need to make sure it’s stellar. Otherwise, the site may never appear on top of the search results.
Tracking and analyzing your SEO efforts is the key to optimizing your climb to the top of the search engine results pages. Just like any other part of digital marketing, SEO requires continuous monitoring. SEO audit is a major part of all SEO campaigns.
Since it takes a while for the visible results of SEO to appear, you need to make adjustments long before you see the website on the first pages of search results.
Keyword ranking – the positive change in keyword rankings is much more important than the consistency. When you see the rise in rankings, you can be sure your SEO campaign is going well. You can easily track the progress using such readily available tools as Google Analytics.
Website traffic – measuring traffic to the website is the key to understanding the success of SEO campaigns. However, bare numbers shouldn’t be the only results you focus on. A big influx of traffic doesn’t mean you can achieve high conversions. Visitors should interact with your site, visit other pages, make purchases, follow CTAs, etc.
When it comes to digital marketing, you have to make a list of metrics to follow. For SEO, the list can be rather long. Make sure to single out the most important SEO KPIs and metrics for your campaign. Some examples are:
Organic traffic
Bounce rate
Conversion rate
Pages per session
Organic CTR (click-through rate)
Domain authority
Search engine results page dominance
Page speed
Number and quality of backlinks
Mobile rankings
By closely monitoring the progress of your SEO campaign, you have higher chances of placing your page on top of search results without facing unreasonable marketing expenses.
One of the most important parts of your SEO strategy is backlinking. As soon as you get a sufficient number of links from authority sites to yours, search engines start seeing it as highly useful for people who search for related topics.
You need to acquire as many authority links as possible without using any black or grey hat linking tactics. Any suspicious marketing efforts can raise a huge red flag for Google, leading to unfortunate consequences, such as bans.
When managing your SEO efforts, you need to review your link building methods.
Improve content quality
Write guest posts
Review listings in trustworthy directories
You can also get inspiration by studying where your competitions gets its backlinks. You could build relationships with the same sites.
SEO is an integral part of high-quality marketing. By managing your SEO tactics continuously, you have an opportunity to take full advantage of them without incurring unexpected expenses.
A variety of tactics exists to get your site to the top spots of the SERPs. By implementing 360° SEO campaign management, you can outdo the competition, boost your marketing efforts, appear on the top page of Google search, and establish yourself as an industry leader.