Businesses today need to be online in order to stay in business. It’s simply a fact of life.
Over 80% of customers are doing a search online before they make a purchase. And 57% of customers have purchased an item online from a foreign country in the last 6 months.
So you know you need to be online. And maybe you’ve done some online marketing before. Maybe you even have an SEO campaign currently running.
But is it working?
If you’re serious about improving your SEO campaign, keep reading. We’re sharing the best strategies for you to improve your online marketing campaign. Read on.
What Are the First Steps to Take in Implementing an Improved SEO Campaign?
Before you can start seeing results, you need to take a look at what you’re currently doing. Then make evaluations. And then ask some questions.
So your first step is to conduct an audit on your currently SEO campaign practices.
Here’s how to do that:
- Get Everyone on Board: Running an SEO campaign is a team effort. And not just for the marketing department. Train every employee you have to know and understand SEO and how it affects their efforts within their own departments. It will help your company deliver a more consistent brand.
- Conduct Site Audits: You should do two audits. One for technical searches and one for organic searches. Use these tools to help you perform your audits: Google Search Console, Ahrefs, SEMrush and Google Analytics.
- Do a Keyword Audit: How is your company finding its keywords? Are you relying only on Google? Are the keywords you’re using working or do you need to adopt using a related, long-tail keyphrases?
- Audit Your Links: Are your internal links useful or useless? Linking for the sake of linking turns off customers. Make sure any internal links are there for a reason.
- Link Building: Are you building links to outside sources? Are they your competition or are the links helping you build up a reputation as the expert source in your market?
Performing an internal audit first will help you and your team understand and develop a better and stronger marketing campaign. It will also help you develop a budget.
What Should a Company Focus on When Building a New SEO Campaign?
Once you have an idea of what needs improving, what should be eliminated, and what needs to be added, it’s easier to figure out where to focus your efforts first.
And while SEO is constantly changing, these next steps are always going to remain a vital part of online marketing:
- Compelling Content: Content will always be king. Continuing to produce interesting, clear, concise information online is always going to help you attract new customers. This is long-form content that focuses on providing value to your customer.
- Using the Right Keywords: Remember that search engines can pick up synonyms and similar terminology. Do a thorough audit to ensure you’re using the best keywords possible to drive more traffic to your site.
- References, Reviews, & Social Links: These all play a key role in how your content will perform in an online search.
Inbound links and a logical sitemap that includes internal linking among pages are also smart first steps to take to improve your SEO rankings.
What Do You Need to Know to Build a Successful SEO Campaign?
Ignorance is not bliss when it comes to running a successful company. Or a successful online marketing campaign.
You need to know who you are. And who your customers are. And then deliver to them what they want in a timely manner.
Here’s how:
- Know Your Audience: Who are they? How do they shop? What are their interests and likes? How do they spend money? When do they spend money? How do they want to be treated? When will they most likely make a purchase from you? How do they need and want to be supported by your company?
- Know Your Own Business: What products and services do you deliver? Who are you making your products for? What pain or struggle does it solve for your customer?
- Know Your Goals: What is your budget? How many new customers do you want to bring in? By what date? What will it take for you to consider your SEO campaign to be successful? How can you measure that success?
Before you can implement anything successfully, you need to know and understand your priorities.
How to Implement SEO Strategies
Let’s go further and break down a few must-do strategies so that it’s easier for you to implement them successfully into your own business.
Here are 4 strategies to focus on.
1. Site Speed: How fast your site loads is actually a lot more important than most business owners think. You lose 11% of potential business for every second more that it takes for your site to load.
- Run periodic tests on your site to ensure it’s running as fast as it possibly can.
- If it’s slow, try optimizing your site. Often images slow down the loading process.
2. Social Shares: Be aware: social sharing is different than social posts. And both Bing and Google are using this data to determine how high to rank your site. Here’s how search engines look at in social sharing to increase your SEO rankings:
- Tweets & Retweets: How many a URL (your website) has will affect your rankings
- Authority of Tweeter: Search engines are impressed with experts just like the rest of us
- Facebook Shares & Likes: As with Twitter, the more links to your URL, the better
- How Many +1’s a URL has: For Google Plus users.
3. Keywords: This has been mentioned before, but keywords are instrumental in improving your businesses’ SEO rankings.
Here’s how to improve your ranking:
- Backlinks
- SEO tools
- Google Keyword Planner
- Keyword Research
- YouTube SEO
- On Page SEO
- Link Building
Another great way to find keywords that will help you improve your rankings?
Spy on Your Competition. Check out what keywords your competition are already using. Then use them, too.
4. User Behavior: Google and other search engines want to feel comfortable that when a customer reaches your site, they’ll find what they’re looking for.
So your bounce rate is something you need to pay attention to. A high bounce rate signifies that a customer came looking for information, didn’t find it, and left quickly. And Google will punish you if your bounce rates are consistently high.
Because it means your content isn’t providing the quality and value they think your customers deserve.
Here’s what your customers and Google want from your site:
- Useful Information: What’s the point in staying on any site if you can’t find the information you need quickly and easily?
- A Sense of Urgency: People are looking for a way to resolve their issue or pain. A sense of urgency tells them they’re not only ready to resolve the issues, they’re ready to deal with it now. That sense of urgency leads them to make their purchase much more quickly.
- The uniqueness of Product or Service: Everyone wants to think that what they’re buying is unique or new. When your company can fill a need or a void in a different, and better way than others, they’ll make that purchase. And then tell their friends.
Why Links Are Vital to the Success of Your SEO Campaign
Linking, both internally and externally, has been mentioned throughout this article. It’s because linking is hugely important to SEO.
Here are five things to know about external linking that will help your SEO rankings:
1. The Quantity of Links: Google judges the number of backlinks your content has received. But the more credible and worthy your content is, the more likely your content will be read and shared.
2. The Quality of Links: While quantity is helpful, you don’t just need SEO to bring more links to your domain, you need it to attract links from credible, authoritative pages that already earned the respect of Google’s rank-bots.
3. Build Internal Links: Internal links are important because they aid in website navigation, define the architecture and hierarchy of the website, and distributes page authority and ranking power throughout the website.
Providing consistent, fresh, new content will also help your internal links get boosted higher in rankings.
4. Build External Links: Here’s what to look for when building successful external links:
- Trustworthiness of External Site: Is this a site known for providing factual content? Are they experts?
- The popularity of External Site: Like in high school, when you link to the cool sites, it will increase your coolness factor.
- Relevancy: Is the content of the site you’re linking to relevant to the content you’re publishing online?
- Anchor Texts: Is the text you’re using to link to another site relevant? Will it entice the reader to visit the external site?
5. Claim Unlinked Mentions: This is when someone is talking about you or your product but they forgot to link back to you. Luckily, you can do something about it:
- Set up a Google Alert: Set up a few alerts using your company’s name and other select keywords. Google will send you an e-mail when someone is talking about you
- Contact the Company: It can’t hurt to send the person or company talking about you an e-mail. Thank them for writing about you and then ask them to add a link.
- Use a Link Reclamation Tool: There are tools for everything, including claiming links.
Don’t forget to fix any broken links you find along the way.
We here at the Hoth love SEO, marketing, and increasing our clients business. It’s who we are and why we get up every morning. We’re here when you need information, guidance, or just have a question on running an effective SEO campaign.