How to Start an Effective SEO Campaign

This is the simplest fact of the internet age: if you want your website to be found, you need to be visible.

And the only way to be visible on the web is to follow great SEO practices.

While the "rules" of good Search Engine Optimization may change through the years, the importance of following them doesn't. You'll get more clicks, more engagement, and more revenue the higher your ranking.

So how do you go about improving your ranking? With a great SEO campaign.

See what I did there?

It's never too early to start following great SEO practices for all of your posts and website pages. And they're not magical, mystical formulas, either. Search engines look for very specific things on your website to increase your rankings, and an effective SEO campaign will help you hit on them.

So let's get started!

Create Topics

What is your website about? What is it specifically that you want your overall site to provide visitors with? You need to be able to answer this easily if you want to have effective SEO.

If you don't, ask yourself a few questions:

• Why would someone visit your website?
• What will you give them?
• Is there a specific message or "culture" you want to show?
• What will your posts be about?

These questions will give you answers to the information you will have on your website. If you sell boats, not only can you write about the best boats to buy, but you can create posts about general boating history, or funny anecdotes about boating, or any number of other topics related to watercraft but not directly selling them.

This will give you plenty of opportunities to create new content at regular intervals, something that search engines love.

Choose Keywords

Once you know what topics you will be writing about, it's time to choose your keywords.

Keywords are the driving factor in a good SEO campaign. They are the breadcrumbs that search engines follow to see what your website is about and whether you can be considered an "authoritative" site rather than some random personal blog.

This means that choosing the right keyword(s) for your posts is crucial.

The easiest way to do this is to jot down a list of words that relate to your website. If you are a law firm, then you'll want to try words like "lawyer," "attorney," "legal representation," "lawsuit," and "legal trouble."

Include local information in your keywords as well, like "legal representation in San Fransico," or "affordable lawyers in Des Moines" in order to grab more local clients.

Once you have a list, you can use Google Trends to see how often your keywords get searched for. From there, you can tweak your keywords and phrases to make the most out of each post.

Conduct an SEO Audit

You can't know where you're going without a clear picture of where you are.

In order to show constant improvement with your site-wide SEO, you need to understand what you are currently doing and how you can improve your practices.

There are many steps to a complete SEO audit, but some of the things you want to look for are:

• Do your URLs make sense to search engine crawlers?
• Are your meta titles and descriptions optimized?
• Are the homepage tags confusing?
• Is your content unique, or are there too many similarities with other content on the web?
• How is your search traffic?

Again, there are plenty of things you can do to figure out the health of your current SEO. The deeper you go into what you are doing now, the clearer your goals can be.

And speaking of goals...

Always Set Trackable Goals

When you and your team st down to discuss your new SEO campaign, you will want to know how it's working over the next few months, right? That means you need to define goals that can be measured, so you can continue to do what works, and change what doesn't.

This means that you want to keep track of keyword success and inbound traffic, but you always want to keep an eye on what people do once they get to your website.

How long do visitors stay on your site? On each individual page? What content seems to get the most engagement out of visitors?

The best way to track this information is to use a program like Google Analytics. You can drill down into a multitude of different data that can give you great insight into the SEO health of your site.

Get Backlinks

A backlink is a link that leads to your website from somewhere else. When another website links to your site or a page on your site, the search engines will give you a lot of credit because they assume that you are authoritative enough to link to in the first place.

Backlinks are one of the biggest factors that drive search engine rankings, so you want to focus on getting as many as you can.

The easiest way to get backlinks is to approach other websites that you have a good relationship with. It's perfectly normal for several websites to help each other out with links from their sites to others.

Sometimes, you have to get creative, but you should always focus on getting links from other sites.

Content, Content, Content

Search engines love content. The more you have on your site, the more the search engines will see you as an authority. But the content better be original.

If there's one thing search engines hate, it's duplicate content. This can cause your ranking to plummet. So as you add posts, make sure to run them through a plagiarism detector. This will show you where else on the web content similar to your is so you can change it and make it original.

Start Your SEO Campaign

There are always things you can be doing to make your ranking higher. The more effort you put into proper SEO practices, the better. Focus on these tips and you'll start to see results.

For more information, visit our blog on all things SEO and marketing.