5 Crucial Things Every SEO Campaign Needs

This post is provide by Jason Dirkham

As you’re probably aware, SEO stands for search engine optimization. It’s the central figure in your overall digital marketing strategy. Why? Because it’s focused on improving your website’s performance in searches. Why does this deserve so much focus? Well, the stats show that search is still the number one traffic source right now. In fact, 93% of online experiences all start in search engines.

So, you desperately need an excellent SEO strategy. If you have one, then it can get you to the top of the rankings and into the public eye. Sadly, search engine optimization is incredibly complex. There are so many elements that make up an SEO campaign – and you can see the most crucial ones in this article.

That’s right, if you carry on reading you will see the main things that every single SEO campaign must include:

Reports

To start, you need reports. A report will tell you everything you need to know about your SEO. You can get an SEO report template that includes information on web traffic, conversions, bounce rate, traffic sources, keyword performance, and so on. All of this is crucial information for you and your business.

Generate an initial report to view the state of your current SEO. If you’ve never done anything to improve it before, then it won’t be pretty reading. That doesn’t matter, this report is purely for comparison purposes. As you start to apply your strategy, you will create more reports at regular intervals. Then, you compare them to one another and see how things have improved. It’s the best way to track your progress and to ensure that your techniques are working.

A Target Audience

Every SEO campaign needs to have a target audience. This is straightforward; it’s the group of people that you’re aiming your website at. You need to define your target demographic as it will influence your entire campaign. We’re going to talk about keywords in the next point, but your target audience determines what keywords and phrases you want to look for.

Similarly, they determine what content needs to be on your site – which is another critical aspect of SEO. In essence, you can’t do anything until you’ve settled on your target audience.

Keyword Research

Keywords are basically the building blocks of your SEO campaign. The best way to describe them is that they’re the words & phrases that your business needs to focus on the most. These are the things that your target audience type into search engines to find your business – or businesses similar to yours.

Therefore, keyword research is absolutely essential. This is where you figure out what keywords are worth targeting more than others. It might surprise you what you need to zone in on. If you don’t conduct proper research – there are loads of tools out there – then you end up missing out on vital keywords. This means your entire campaign is built on wobbly foundations. Don’t skip this step and don’t rush through it. If you target the wrong keywords, then you will waste lots of money and see no results.

f you target the wrong keywords, then you will waste lots of money and see no results. One great way to ensure your keyword research is on point is to hire the services of SEO experts who are skilled in your niche. If you operate a law firm and want to target local clients, consider working with law firm SEO specialists to enhance your keyword research. This will help your website rank for terms that prospective clients may use when searching online for your law firm.

Content

No campaign is complete without excellent content. Obviously, this refers to everything on your site. We’re talking about web copy, blogs, even images, and videos. A great SEO strategy will have a fantastic collection of content that appeals to the target audience.

Content is important for a number of reasons. Firstly, it helps you place keywords on your website. By doing this, it increases the chances of your site ranking highly for your target keywords. You can put them in your web copy, your blog content, the headers and title tags, etc. There’s a lot to know about keyword placement, and some rules to follow. We can’t go through them all, but the main one is that you can’t stuff the keywords in your content. The content on your website must be easy to read and look natural. If it doesn’t, search engines flag it up as spam and you get hit with ranking penalties. So, there’s one thing to keep in mind when producing content; it has to actually make sense and be valuable.

Aside from keyword placement, content also helps with SEO by improving the user experience. Ultimately, that’s a key ranking factor. Search engines want to show websites that provide users with great experiences. Otherwise, it reflects badly on them. It would be like a friend who keeps recommending terrible places to eat; eventually, you’ll stop asking! Excellent and informative content will provide a better UX. It will also encourage users to stay on your website, which reduces something called a bounce rate. This term refers to when people land on your site and leave without checking anything out. The lower the bounce rate, the better your SEO will be.

Links

Links will have a significant impact on your SEO campaign. They must be included, and there are two different types:

Backlinks
Internal links

Backlinks are traditionally seen to have the most impact on SEO. These links come from other websites. They point back to your site, which sends signals to search engines telling them you must be trustworthy and have good content as loads of people are linking to you. It’s a good idea to develop a good link building strategy to help you generate as many links as possible without breaking any guidelines.

Internal links are links that connect pages of your site to one another. This is essential for maintaining a good site structure. In turn, this makes it easier for search engines to get around your site, meaning they rank it higher. Also, it contributes to improving the user experience as you make it easy to navigate your website.

In conclusion, your SEO campaign must include all of these elements. Working with an agency or a freelance SEO specialist can help you ensure that all of these things are covered. Neither of these approaches is essential, but search engine optimization can be very technical and complex. So, it’s best to have some sort of expert opinion to help you out.