Search engine optimization (SEO) is one of the key elements of any digital marketing strategy. Before you launch an SEO campaign, you need to work on an SEO plan & strategy that accomplishes your set goals like making the visitors finally convert into customers. SEO involves working on different techniques like keyword research, content marketing, link building, auditing, etc. If these points are applied precisely, it will increase the visibility of your website, bring relevant links to it, and much more. Running a trouble-free SEO campaign is quite vital in the SEO process, so below are some tips that can help you to optimize an SEO campaign.
If you are facing trouble following these, you can always outsource SEO services to a reputed digital marketing company where an SEO specialist will develop a strategy to run the campaign and help achieve your business goals.
Tips to optimize SEO campaign
1. Set goals for your SEO campaign
Before developing a strategy, you should understand what you want to achieve with SEO. Having a clear and achievable goal in place for your SEO strategy will make it easier for you to track your campaign performance. Hence, setting goals is a vital task. A goal will define the scope of work you would have to put in based on which the whole plan of action will be created.
First of all, you should be clear about the target that you want to achieve and then work accordingly. Figure out the number of customers, leads, opportunities, relevant traffic, etc. that you want to bring to your website to achieve your goals. It is the best way to start an SEO campaign because once you are aware of what you want, you can move on that path to make it happen.
2. Competition analysis
Competition analysis is researching and analyzing the competitors' strategies to break down their strengths and weaknesses. By conducting this process, you become aware of what techniques your competitors are planning and applying to attract users to their websites. It is a fact that you and your competitors are fighting against each other to get the top spot on SERPs and grab the attention of the visitors. Audiences will select between many search results when they search a query and may prefer other pages instead of yours. So, to stand out, you need to know competitors’ techniques and analyze them to have better results for your business. This method will help you optimize your SEO campaign and nudge you to a result-driven spot.
3. Keyword research
You need to be aware of your audiences’ need and their search intent. Search intent will help you understand what the audience is looking for when they make a query on search engine platforms like Google, Bing, etc. Hence, for that, you need to conduct proper keyword research. Relevant keywords bring high-quality traffic to your website. If you are using appropriate keywords that address the audiences’ search intent, then the possibility of displaying your website related to the search queries in SERPs would be high. For that, you need to start with keyword research. You can use different tools for that like Google Ads keyword planner tool or Google Trends. Now, you end up with a set of high-traffic relevant keywords that can show your webpage whenever a user searches a query related to your keywords. This will help to achieve a top rank in SERPs and will optimize your SEO campaign.
4. Go for content marketing
Having completed the analysis and research work, to make the visitors stay on your webpage you need to work on content marketing. To do so, you need to have the relevant information that keeps the interest of the users engaged so that they end up finally making a purchase. Inserting high traffic relevant keywords and surpassing meta descriptions can increase the number of visitors to your website and also helps in reducing the bounce rate. Hence, writing topic-related engaging content with appropriate infographic and images is equally important.
If you wish your visitors to stay on the destination page, you must become a content specialist and know how to create amazing content. You can use different genres like "A guide to" content, "Tip to" content, “How to” content, etc. It will bring relevant traffic to your page. You can also track your content with KPIs. You can publish your content on different social media platforms as it is a great idea for content marketing.
5. Build internal and external links
Another way to optimize the SEO campaign is to work on link-building techniques. This is an important point to focus on and can be done by working on internal linking and external linking.
Internal linking means giving links to other pages of your website from your current web page. Both the users and search engines navigate through your website and find the related content via appropriate links.
External links are links that redirect the visitors to a website that has high traffic and helps in building brand awareness. You always need to be very careful while working on external links so that they do not get redirected to non-authoritative, paid and non-relevant websites. These come under gray hat SEO or black hat SEO and can lead to plagiarism.
You should be very clear of link-building techniques so that it brings effective results should be clear to you so that it will bring effective results and the number of broken links becomes void.
6. Get links from reputed websites
There are different digital marketing strategies for top ranking on SERPs, and getting links from websites is one of them. These are called backlinks, i.e., receiving links from reputed and authoritative websites. Please always consider white hat backlinks from reputed websites. These backlinks increase the visibility of your website, which helps to rank it. Many effective ways can help you to get it from authoritative and reputed websites; one of them is guest posting.
7. Guest posting
It is a great way for a link-building strategy that can directly affect your SEO campaign. In guest posting, you write content that is featured on an authoritative website in your niche. While picking a website for guest blogging, you should be careful, as writing a blog for an irrelevant website where you can't promote your business is of no use. If you write a good piece of content then it definitely attracts more readers and this increases the chances to get backlinks from authoritative websites.
8. Opting for video SEO
Video SEO is a method through which you or the digital marketing agency (that you hired), builds video metadata of your business or content to display it on different SERPs. It increases the visibility of your website and generates traffic for it. You need a presentable video with an attractive call to action that will bring high-quality traffic to your website. It is one of the best ways to connect to the viewers by promoting the content in front of the right audience. To optimize the SEO campaign, you can post short-form videos that help in promoting your website and help in ranking on top in the SERPs.
9. Manage page loading speed
Suppose your website has great content, links to relevant anchor text, and gets links from authoritative websites, but still, your website is not able to clutch a good position in SERPs; a possible reason could be page loading speed. If the page load time goes from 1 second to 3 seconds, the probability of bounce increases by 32%. If a user clicks on your website and the page is taking long enough to load, then the users won't prefer to wait for long. So, to make the users stay on your website, it is essential to optimize site loading speed. For that, you should insert quality images and infographics of the ideal size that do not takes enough time to load.
10. Make your website mobile friendly
Nowadays, people prefer to explore through a mobile phone rather than a laptop or a personal computer and due to the increase in demand for the mobile website, it is quite necessary that you work on mobile-first indexing. Your website should appear in such a way that a mobile user can access it without any trouble. More users will be connected to your website and hence you will get relevant traffic on it. The SEO campaign should be optimized so that it runs smoothly, as now the website is accessible both on mobile as well as desktop.
11. Optimize images
The process of optimizing images contains several steps. You need to choose images that are relevant to the topic plus the size should be precise. Large-sized images may take a longer time to load whereas small-sized images may not look good, so the idea of using these images is not so appropriate.
The image should be responsive so that it does not ruin a mobile user's experience. Choose the right name for your image, and if you are applying alt text, then it should be short and descriptive. Alt text is of utmost importance as it helps the search engines understand the context of the image.
12. Responsive web design
The users always appreciate a responsive web design. A responsive web design is all about using HTML and CSS to automatically resize, shrink, highlight or enlarge a website when the device is changed. As different users explore websites through various devices, there is a chance that your website may appear nicely on a device but may have some issues on the other devices. So, to run the SEO campaign effectively, the website must look good on all the devices (like mobiles, laptops, tablets, etc.). You can take the help of a digital marketing agency to develop web design for you.
Social media marketing (SMM) is making use of social media platforms to connect with your audience to build your brand, increase sales, and drive traffic to the website. This increases the brand awareness and visibility of the website. Social media platforms are the strongest way to reach millions of users at the same time. You may face much competition if you are choosing to represent your website on these platforms. Social networking sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, Snapchat, etc. are some social media marketing platforms where you can post your content related to business. It helps in achieving your marketing goals plus promoting your website. It is a smart way to connect to a huge number of users in less time through these social media platforms.
14. Email marketing
You can boost your SEO with email marketing very effectively. It is a way to send some information about your products and services to the users via email. Email marketing is a quick response strategy that helps in connecting with the audience directly. Through this marketing strategy, you send bulk messages related to the products, newsletters and much more that further improves your ROI and sales. It is a cheap method, but sending random emails won't be beneficial. You need to figure out a list where you can name those email ids that might be willing to obtain the products and services provided by you and after that you are ready to proceed.
15. Local SEO
Spreading business globally is the desire of every company but let's give a second here and think, won't it would be beneficial if we target local users? I think yes. Local SEO is the technique where you focus on increasing your brand's visibility in near geographical locations. These days, users go for nearby services, as it is easy and convenient, so targeting the local crowd can improve sales. They also give genuine reviews that help build trust between you and the users. Local SEO content should have clarity, correctness, and relevant keywords; it will improve the ranking that affects the SEO campaign empathically.
16. Adding rich snippets
Rich snippets are normal Google search results with some extra data like reviews, ratings, votes, etc., that is structured along with the websites. Adding these to your website URL will attract visitors and help create the customers' trust in your product or services. Rich snippets make your website look a little more attractive on SERPs, which results in dragging high traffic to it. It will increase the brand awareness and click-through rate, as consumers prefer to choose your website despite others. They make your website more appealing in search results that obviously increase its ranking. This way, it helps to optimize the SEO campaign.
17. Conversion tracking
Conversion tracking is used to track whether the visitors after navigating through different sections on the website finally convert into customers or not. It allows you to see what happens after a user interacts with your website. There are many ways to optimize the conversion rate like generating leads, creating an engaging call to action, etc. You can also use urgency to increase the conversion. It increases the conversion rate on mobile websites as well as desktop websites. You can use Google Ads and Google Analytics for conversion tracking. You should work on various SEO KPI metrics to figure out what points need to be worked on. These data help you to understand how your advertising is helping you in accomplishing important business goals.
18. Go for SEO audit
If your SEO campaign is not running properly, then it can negatively impact your website ranking. So, in this case, you should focus on performing a complete SEO audit. This will highlight the problems, and you can work on the issues to improve your SEO campaign performance. You need to analyze every stat from the SEO audit report and then take the appropriate steps to get rid of the obstacle. SEO audit increases the campaign's performance by detecting problems so that an SEO specialist can find an approachable solution. It is a bit of time taking process, so it's better to hire a digital marketing agency to perform an SEO audit service.
19. Report generation
Generating reports is mandatory for every SEO campaign. It analyzes every part of the campaign plus you get structured data where you can acknowledge the success of your SEO campaign. You can get an idea of where your hard work is leading you as compared to your competitors. An SEO campaign report identifies the traffic rate, conversion rate, and other important metrics. Reports like MTD, QTD, YTD, etc. are the most preferable reports. Generating reports is a critical process so it is better to hire an SEO specialist from a credible digital marketing agency. You can further analyze the data to optimize your SEO campaign.
20. Detox and penalty removal
After everything is fulfilled you should go for detox and penalty removal. It is an essential process applied to analyze the website where an SEO specialist checks if every link is working properly or not. Detox links can drop the ranking of your website and to avoid that you need to detox it where you can remove these links. You also need to check whether the anchor text is relevant according to the link provided or not. This process also includes the monitoring of backlinks and newly inserted links. With the process of detoxing, your website becomes free from the Google penalties.
Wrap up
In the above blog, you must have got an idea of how to optimize your SEO campaign. There are different ways to do so like content marketing, conversion tracking, adding rich snippets, local SEO, email marketing, etc. All these processes help you to optimize SEO campaign and rank your website on top. If you face difficulty in any of the above-given processes, then you can always take the help of a credible digital marketing agency that can provide you an SEO specialist for each task. Following these tips will optimize the campaign and boost your website to rank top in the SERPs.