How to run a strategic SEO campaign
Are you ready to run your first SEO campaign? In this article, we’ll take an in-depth look at strategy and building your own data-driven, results-driven SEO campaign.
Buckle up and take notes.
When starting an SEO campaign, you will need to address the main areas of the strategy, such as:
- Which keywords to target
- How to optimize your site
- What kind of content to create
- Where to put keywords
- How to get the best backlinks
- How to track results
These are just a few of the hundreds of variables that need optimization to get a fully optimized SEO marketing campaign.
Luckily for you, while creating SEO campaigns is a complex process, we can break it down for you into simple, actionable steps.
Today we will dive straight into the process, but first let’s establish the definition of an SEO campaign and explain how to do an SEO campaign that brings concrete results
What is an SEO campaign?
In essence, a successful SEO campaign is a long-term data-driven strategy designed to increase your website’s organic traffic and conversions, coming from organic traffic.
The purpose of SEO is to increase the quantity and quality of traffic on your website through organic search results. To be more precise, it is a continuous process of optimizing your website and executing strategies SEO off -page that will demonstrate to Google that your site is an authority in your niche.
If successful, a well-executed SEO campaign will result in increased traffic to your site from targeted customers who are actively searching for what you have to offer.
What are the components of a successful SEO campaign?
There are three main components to running a successful SEO campaign:
Content: The first and most important way to create a strong SEO campaign is through the composition of strategic and highly optimized content.
Content is one of the fundamental elements of Google, which wants to provide its users with the highest quality and most relevant content. That said, content will always impact where you end up in the SERPs, it’s important that you keep user intent in mind when producing content.
To write strategic and highly optimized content, you will need to conduct keyword research to find the most profitable terms and start ranking for them.
SEO on-page: this is the practice to technically optimize the pages of your website in order to rank higher. On-page SEO is typically the easiest thing to do and helps improve your rankings, as you are in full control of your site.
Off-page SEO: The last component of running a successful SEO campaign is what we call Off-page SEO, which involves building backlinks of high authority from other websites and relevant content. We will analyze these three components in more detail below.
At Ottobix, we have tested and proven specific methodologies to create a profitable Search Engine Optimization campaign in virtually every industry.
Now let’s get into the process of how to run a successful SEO marketing campaign.
What is the process of SEO campaigns?
Now that we’ve looked at what SEO campaign means and touched on the three parts, we can get into the specific steps of creating your SEO campaign.
Search by keywords
Keywords are the building blocks of any successful SEO campaign. There are a number of free tools that you should have in your pocket when you start your keyword research.
Some of these tools include:
Google Keyword Planner
this SEO tool is great for keyword research to add to current or new content. You can sort keywords in your niche to follow using statistics on search volume, expected clicks, estimated conversions, CPC, and even your competition on Google Ads.
SurferSEO
SurferSEO basically looks at search volume for similar and related keywords.
An interesting thing about Surfer SEO is that the extension also shows backlinks and visibility correlations, which are two graphs showing the quality of the backlinks and the estimated traffic for each SERPs. These resources will give you a better idea of the most relevant keywords in your niche that you can rank for.
If you are looking to dig deeper and get a better understanding For keywords where you are ranking well and where improvements can be made, we recommend using Ahrefs or SEMrush (which are paid tools).
Ahrefs
Ahrefs is a well-known SEO software tool where you can analyze your SEO data. We use Ahrefs daily to conduct keyword research, analyze anchor text and backlinks, track keyword rankings, even look at competitor data, and so much more.
You can break down keywords on specific pages or understand which terms your competitors rank for and where their backlinks are coming from
SEMrush
Semrush bills itself as an “all-in-one marketing toolkit”. Similar to Ahrefs, SEMrush helps you do SEO, PPC, social media, and content marketing, however, SEMrush started out as a keyword research tool (compared to Ahrefs, which started out as a backlink analysis tool).
This SEO software tool can be used to view Domain Audit, Keyword Audit and optimize your content and so much more.
To make sure we hit our goals during an SEO marketing campaign, we want to make sure we pay attention to these aspects of proper keyword research:
- Intent: what is the intent of the typer (a search query such as “veterinary Rome prices” denotes a transactional intention regarding a visit to a vet)
- Volume: how many times a keyword is searched
- Competition: how difficult it is to rank for the word cost per click (CPC): how much others pay to show up on Google
You shouldn’t be afraid to target competitive keywords, but it’s also helpful to think outside the box and look for long-tail keywords that may have less competition.
Here is a small overview of what we mean by less competitive keywords, a term like “SEO Consultant” has a high volume of 4,400 searches per month making it a keyword that many others are searching for, thus making harder to rank for that keyword.
Ottobix’s suggestions
Use non-branded keywords to garner an audience outside of those who already know about your business.
NB. “Ottobix” is a branded keyword. This implies that whoever types it on Google is already aware of our brand.
longtail keywords are terms that may be less searched for, but with these you will be able being able to reach a specific audience who know exactly what they want, making them more likely to purchase something or submit a form for more information.
NB. “Vicenza interior architect” is an example of a longtail keyword
Content optimization
In the SEO world, content is always king.
It is the heart of your website and the reason people keep coming to you. Think of it this way: Without optimized content present on your pages, Google will have no idea what you do.
Content plays a major role in how you are able to rank for the most competitive keywords in your niche. As Google continues to evolve, our content must evolve alongside it. Google is constantly making updates and changes to its algorithm that directly affect SERP rankings.
For example, not so long ago SEO was mostly focused on finding keywords in your niche and using them as much as possible in your content.
As artificial intelligence and machine learning developed over time, it became impossible to use this tactic, Google released an algorithm update in late 2019 called BERT.
BERT stands for Bidirectional Encoder Representation from Transformers which allows computers to better understand human language through NLPs (natural language processors). As of right now, BERT has no direct effect on SEO rankings, however, we think that will change in the future.
The main philosophy of the Google search engine is to present the most relevant quality content to users. The goal of having quality content is to build a better presence on Google so as to drive traffic to your site, improve SERPs and overall your site is getting more conversions.
To get your site in front of the correct audience and stand out from Google, we want make sure you are using keyword research to create quality content.
You should use both primary and secondary keywords to ensure that Google understands what your content is about and can rank it for multiple keywords at once.
Top keywords are the main keywords you want to rank for. These keywords are typically those that are associated with a high volume of searches to drive traffic to your site.
This is a keyword that we will want to use not only for content but also for on-page and off-page optimization (page titles, anchor text, etc).
Secondary keywords are terms used to support the primary keyword on that specific page.
You will also need to include these keywords in your content writing so that Google can detect the different variations of your main keyword.
While using primary and secondary keywords in your content is important, it’s only one variable you need to get first page results.
Length of SEO content
While not defined, studies have shown that SEO content length also correlates with SERP rankings.
With this variable, you’ll want your content to be similar in length to what your competitors are writing, however, your goal should be to provide the best, most useful (and optimized) version of the content for your target audience. destination that matches their intentions.
Another variable that directly affects rankings is internal linking, the meaning of this element is to show Google how the pages of your website are all related to each other. You should always use internal links within your website and blog (like the one in this paragraph).
You intend to work on your site as if it were its own network of internally linking pages to other pages, as opposed to different sites. Metadata Optimization is a behind-the-scenes variable that directly affects search rankings.
Meta tag optimization is important for search engines to understand more information about your web page. Meta tags consist of both meta descriptions and meta keywords, they are placed in the HEAD section of your page’s HTML structure to help search engines determine what the page is about.
A final variable is the hierarchy of headers, headers communicate the organization of content on the page. They are used to provide in-page navigation, H1 are the largest and most important headings and H6 are the smallest and least important, these sets of HTML tags have intended to define headers on your page, not to format just the text on your page.
Finally, it’s a good idea to optimize your content for the best user (and search engine) experience: use relevant visuals to spice up the article.
The purpose of having visuals is to break up the article and make it easier for users to read, engage and visually see what you are talking about throughout the post.
What NOT to do: Create short, keyword-heavy content.
Google doesn’t like “thin” content.
Be prepared to write a lot 😉
On-page SEO: optimizing your website
Part of a well-executed SEO campaign is making sure you conduct an SEO audit. The purpose of a technical audit is to diagnose and correct the obstacles that limit Google’s ability to understand and rank your website in search.
Your company website must be extremely easy to crawl by Google’s “spider” the point of the crawl is:
- Make sure your website is easily indexable and readable by a search engine
- Check if your site is comfortable to access and navigate from any device sure you are free from errors that could raise red flags when your site is crawled by bots.
Be careful: Does your website have more than 10,000 indexed pages? Your website may suffer from “index bloat” and no longer index keywords on the SERP.
Once an audit has identified your website’s technical roadblocks, a developer will implement the changes, which can take anywhere from a few hours to a few weeks, depending on the extent of the roadblocks found.
