If you want to improve your online visibility and reach the top of the SERPs – inconsistent SEO efforts aren’t going to cut it.
In other words, publishing one blog every few months with little to no keyword optimization won’t cause your brand to explode in popularity.
Instead, you need to launch a consistent, well-thought-out SEO campaign to achieve the kind of results that you want.
The good news?
Here at The HOTH, we’ve put together countless winning SEO campaigns for a diverse mix of clients from many different industries.
That means we know what works and what doesn’t for SEO based on our real-world experience.
If you want to find success with an SEO campaign for your business, you need to know what you should focus on the most.
What makes SEO confusing is how often it changes, as what worked just a few years ago won’t yield any results in today’s age.
With constant Google algorithm updates, Bing adding ChatGPT to their search engine, and new Quality Rater Guidelines, SEO looks a lot different than it did three years ago.
Yet, a traditional SEO campaign is still the most reliable way to improve your online visibility, generate organic traffic, and increase conversions.
Bearing that in mind, we’re going to cover 6 easy steps for creating and launching an SEO campaign.
Do SEO Campaigns Still Work?
Declaring that SEO is dead has been done so many times that it’s become a tired cliche at this point.
Yet, here we are in 2023, and SEO is still going as strong as ever.
What many fail to realize is that SEO will probably never go away, only change forms and evolve.
To prove our point, where do you go whenever you want to buy something?
If you said Google, you’re certainly not alone.
Search engines are still by far the most popular choice for researching purchases, as 70% of consumers start their buyer’s journey by browsing search engine results.
Not only that, but search engines are also most people’s go-to whenever they need a question answered or want to learn a new skill.
That’s why SEO campaigns still hold so much power, as you can create keyword-optimized content to intercept all those users looking for the type of products and services you provide.
Content like ultimate guides, how-to’s, product reviews, and listicles are excellent ways to attract members of your target audience to your website.
From there, if you’ve optimized your content for conversions, you can transform your organic visitors into new leads and customers.
Take it from us; our SEO, PPC, and link-building services are still providing outstanding results for our clients – so launching an SEO campaign is definitely worth the time and effort.
6 Steps to Create and Launch an SEO Campaign
Now that you know that SEO is still worth the effort, it’s time to get into the nitty-gritty details of launching an organized campaign.
There’s a very specific order to the steps of an SEO campaign, and it’s crucial not to mix things up.
For instance, if you try to publish content before conducting keyword research, your SEO efforts won’t get very far.
Why is that?
It’s because without uncovering relevant keywords that your target audience searches for every day, you won’t know which topics to write about.
As a result, it’s highly likely that you’ll wind up writing articles that nobody wants to read (or you may inadvertently rank for keywords unrelated to your products and services).
At its core, an SEO campaign is all about satisfying the search intent of your target audience through meaningful content that informs, educates, entertains, and ultimately converts.
By following these 6 steps in order, you’ll be able to develop an SEO campaign that’ll consistently generate traffic, leads, and customers.
Step #1: Conduct an SEO audit
Even before you conduct keyword research, you need to know where you currently stand SEO-wise, so you’ll need to audit your website.
During an SEO audit, you need to analyze the following:
- Current SERP rankings (especially for your most important keywords)
- Backlink profile (total number of links pointing to your site plus your domain rating)
- Site structure (URL and internal linking structure)
- Content quality and length
- Keyword optimization
- Site speed
- Mobile-friendliness
- Crawling/indexing errors
That’s quite a lengthy list, but they’re all necessary factors to check during an SEO audit.
That’s because, by the end of the audit, your website should be fully optimized and ready to rank high on the SERPs.
Our free SEO audit tool really helps with this process, as you’ll be able to get a solid overview of the ranking strength of your website and individual web pages.
The tool is able to detect and report issues related to page speed, keyword placement, metadata, content quality, and more.
Don’t forget to use Google Search Console’s Page Indexing Report to find out if your site has any major crawling or indexing errors. If Google isn’t able to properly crawl and index your most important web pages, they won’t appear in the SERPs.
Remove or improve any low-value pages on your site, such as blogs that contain less than 700 words (Google sees this as thin content).
Broken links, orphan pages, and duplicate content
Before you call it quits on your SEO audit, you need to make sure your website doesn’t contain any duplicate content, orphan pages, or broken links.
These will all hurt your optimization efforts, so it’s best to get rid of them during the audit stage.
A broken link is a hyperlink that points to a resource or page that doesn’t exist.
Most of the time, it’s because the page in question was moved or deleted without setting up a redirect. As a result, the link returns an error message, and any user clicking on it won’t be able to access your content.
This becomes a real problem when links to your most important content become broken (such as a product page that provides you with lots of sales).
To find broken links on your website, you can use Ahrefs’ broken link checker.
Duplicate content (two or more identical pages attempting to rank for the same keyword) is another problem for SEO, as it confuses search engines since they don’t know which page to rank.
If you find any duplicate pages, either delete them or hit them with a noindex tag – which will let Google know not to index them.
Orphan pages are web pages that don’t contain any internal links pointing at them, making them incredibly difficult for users and search engine crawlers to find.
To find them, you can use a tool like Screaming Frog to run a crawl for website pages containing zero inbound links.
Step #2: Make essential on-page optimizations
Next, you need to make crucial on-page tweaks to your existing content to get it into tip-top ranking shape.
On-page SEO represents all optimizations that occur on your website, hence the name.
Here’s a glance at the most important areas to focus on:
- Title tags. A title tag is an HTML element that serves as the name for your web page in the SERPs. In other words, it’s the text that will appear as a blue hyperlink on Google search results. All title tags should contain relevant titles and target keywords.
- Meta descriptions. Do you know the brief line of text that appears under each link on Google? Those are meta descriptions, and they need to contain a convincing pitch for users to click on your link (including your keyword can help, too, but this is mainly for users).
- URLs. Yes, even your URLs need to contain your target keywords (especially for Bing SEO campaigns). Additionally, you should use a consistent URL naming structure for your entire website.
- Header tags. Every blog post should contain relevant header tags (i.e., H1, H2, H3, H4) that A) contain your target keywords and B) break up the content to make it scannable.
- Images. High-resolution images that relate to your content are excellent for SEO, but you need to ensure they contain keyword-rich alt text (a brief line of text that describes the content of an image).
- Content. Last but not least, you should include your target keywords organically within your content. Only use them when it makes sense to. Otherwise, you may get flagged for keyword spam.
Step #3: Dive into keyword research
After your audit is complete, the next step is to find suitable keywords to target for your content efforts. You can use our free keyword planner tool to help you out.
Keywords are search terms that users enter into search engines, and by researching them – you can discover the types of things your target audience looks for every day.
For example, if you sell gardening tools and notice decent search volume, low keyword difficulty, and an upward search trend for the long-tail keyword ‘raised bed vegetable gardening for beginners,’ it’s a sign that lots of people are interested in learning how to grow vegetables in a contained bed of soil.
That means if you create a long-form blog post called something like ‘The Beginner’s Guide to Raised Bed Vegetable Gardening,’ you’ll satisfy the search intent for the keyword (which is informational, by the way) and generate organic traffic from would-be
gardeners.
Since the intent for this keyword is informational (as noted by the lowercase i in the keyword results), your goal is to educate your readers to establish yourself as a trusted source for gardening tips and tricks.
That’s how keyword research informs your content strategy and why it’s so vital to compile a list of relevant keywords before you start creating blogs, videos, and infographics.
To ensure you not only build brand awareness but also generate leads and sales, you’ll need to target keywords that have commercial and transactional intent as well.
These are keywords that contain phrases like ‘best,’ ‘buy now,’ ‘cheapest,’ ‘high-quality,’ and ‘reviews.’
Step #4: Look out for ‘easy win’ keywords
Before you put away your keyword tool of choice, you should keep an eye out for ‘quick win’ keywords.
What are those?
These are terms that you already rank relatively high for (positions 4 to 30) but aren’t high enough to reap any benefits from them.
Yet, with a little clever optimization, you can push these keywords to the top – and it won’t take very long, either. That’s why they’re known as ‘quick win’ or ‘easy win’ keywords.
Should you find some quick win keywords, here’s how you should optimize the content for a much-needed ranking boost:
- Ensure proper keyword placement
- Beef up the content if it’s too thin
- Add relevant images and videos
- Ensure fast loading speed
- Acquire more high-quality backlinks for quick win pages
If you do it right, you should see results within a few weeks or months.
Step #5: Publish outstanding content
Now it’s time to put the keywords you researched to good use. Ideally, you should have a lengthy list of keywords that contain informational, transactional, and commercial intent.
For each keyword, try to imagine the type of content that suits it the best.
Should you create a long-form blog post, or do you have the resources to shoot a video?
Also, you should create an editorial content calendar that contains a consistent release schedule.
Try to publish blogs at least 2 to 4 times a week, with videos, infographics, and podcasts peppered in throughout.
During the content creation process, tell your writers to provide evidence of first-hand experience through anecdotes, stories, and customer case studies.
Google recently updated its Quality Rater Guidelines to include an extra E in the acronym E-A-T (expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness) – and it stands for experience.
For Google’s quality raters to consider your content high-quality, it needs to demonstrate real-world experience and expertise with all your topics.
Step #6: Build high-authority backlinks
Link-building is a huge aspect of an SEO campaign, as a strong backlink profile is important to Google.
Guest posting, link insertions, and unlinked brand mentions are all viable link-building tactics.
Also, building relationships has been lauded as the new way to build links in recent years. By forming ‘link partnerships’ with relevant websites in your industry, you can obtain countless high-authority links.
For more on link-building, check out our extensive guide on getting backlinks.
The Wrap-Up: Launching a Successful SEO Campaign
With a solid SEO campaign in place, you can go from being virtually unknown to outright dominating the SERPs in your industry.
How do we know?
We do because that’s what we achieve for our clients every single day.
Thanks to our hard work, SEO knowledge, and expertise, we’ve bore witness to the awesome power of SEO time and time again.
If you want to enjoy the benefits of a successful SEO campaign for your business, don’t hesitate to sign up for HOTH X, our managed SEO services.
