Business owners who have gone through the initial steps of building a good online presence for their brands, products or services have undoubtedly heard about SEO or Search Engine Optimization. For many, SEO means having your site ranked at the top three search engines whenever people look for information related to your business. SEO means gaining more exposure to your business, opening its doors to a larger number of targeted customers.
This description of SEO is true in a sense that it describes the goal of having an SEO campaign. But SEO is more than that as it involves a carefully planned and strategized set of techniques and procedures aimed at gaining, and maintaining, maximum exposure and top search engine ranking for your website. The following provides an overview of the basics of setting up a profitable SEO campaign for your business.
Understanding What an SEO Campaign Strategy Is
The success of an SEO campaign could not be achieved overnight. This is one thing business owners should understand in order to develop an effective and profitable strategy. Some may achieve success after only a short period, while others start slow but will eventually gain favorable results after a certain period. Both cases require focus and constant effort if you want to get profitable results from your SEO campaign.
For a profitable SEO campaign does not involve only a single activity that you can simply accomplish then just wait for good results to pour in. From planning, execution, maintenance and monitoring, a profitable SEO campaign involves several interconnected components and activities that if they can be integrated together into one cohesive entity – your business can successfully achieve all its online marketing goals.
Understanding Your Website before Starting an SEO Campaign
Before you launch an SEO campaign, it would be important to get a clear understanding of your website to get the targeted results that you need. You should carefully evaluate the important components and parameters in your website that will give you and insight on how you can better streamline your SEO campaign to attract favorable results. These parameters include:
- The focus niche of your website
- The targeted visitors for your website
- The benefits your website can give your targeted visitors
- The expectations your targeted visitors will have from your website
- The features in your website that can meet these expectations
The success of your SEO campaign relies heavily in attracting targeted visitors who can benefit from your website and have the highest possibilities of availing the products and services that your website has to offer. All your efforts will just be wasted if your campaign manages to attract only visitors who have a totally different expectation and have no particular interest in what your website can offer.
Steps to a Profitable SEO Campaign
The following outlines the important steps and critical core activities that you need to perform in order to get profitable results from your SEO campaign:
1. Look for a Profitable Set of Keywords
The heart and soul of your SEO campaign lies in the set of keywords you have selected. Your success depends on how well you have chosen these keywords and how effective they are in attracting your targeted audiences. Keyword research is not a simple matter of choosing the first obvious words that come up in your mind that you believe is related to your business niche. A good set of keywords involves combinations of phrases that your targeted audiences will most likely use in searching for the products and services you are marketing.
2. Perform a Competitive Analysis of Your Selected Keywords
After you have selected a set of keywords that you can use, you should then perform a competitive analysis to streamline your selection and come up with the best and most effective set. Ideally a keyword phrase should have a high search volume from targeted visitors and a low level of competition from competitors and other Internet marketers. This article discussed some of the more popular keyword research tools that you can use in this regard.
3. Perform On-Site Search Engine Optimization
Search Engine Optimization involves both on-site and off-site strategies in order to get the best results and give more chances for your website to rank in SERPs. Each involve different strategies but are all equally important and would play vital parts in the success of your SEO campaign. The specific activities that you need to perform for On-Site SEO includes:
- Optimize Your Post Title
Attracting targeted visitors should start from optimizing the title of your website posts. Your chosen targeted keyword phrase should be seamlessly integrated into the title. Optimizing your title will not only provide site visitors a glimpse of what your content will be, but it will also get the attention of search engine spiders once they crawled your web pages.
- Optimize Your Meta-description
Like the title tags of your post, the meta-description will also inform crawling search engine spiders about the contents of your website posts and how relevant it can be to a particular set of keywords during searches. While it carries not that big weight compare to the title tag. It still will help you get more clicks for your site in the SERPS. The idea is to make meta description compelling enough so that people will click on your site instead of others.
- Optimize Your Content
Google and other search engines rank your website based on how relevant your content will be in providing value for people searching for information using a particular set of keywords. Content should not only be original but it should also full-fill the expectation of the visitors (this is the first and single most important on-page SEO factor in today’s SEO). Once you done this you can focus on the more technical side of content including: length (number of words), keyword density (how many times a particular set of keywords appear in the content) and the quality of writing – good enough for your targeted audiences to actually read them.
- Optimize Your Post Frequency
The spiders that power a search engine’s network crawls the Internet on a regular basis. These search engine bots and will take note of how regular you update your website with fresh content. Updating your content means adding new articles and other content, or refreshing old ones with updates or new information.
4. Perform Off-Page Search Engine Optimization
The second half of your Search Engine Optimization campaign activities should focus on performing off-page SEO. Creating quality and relevant inbound links is the core activity needed for a successful campaign, you should do:
- Content marketing – Perhaps the most popular white-hat and safest method to do link building these days is via content marketing. We all know that content makes the whole Internet go round. And focusing on creating “quality” content first and get a link as a consolation is one of the best mindset that you need to keep in mind to avoid Google slap in the future.
- Guest Blogging – Guest blogging is a specific type of content marketing to get links. The idea is to provide relevant websites in your niche a quality content in exchange of a link back to your website. This one is a tedious and time-consuming thing to do, but its all well worth it since the links you will be getting are 100% quality and from relevant website.
- Quality Blog Comments – Blog comments is probably the most popular SEO spam in existence. But even though this method is often abused, you can still do white-hat blog comments by leaving meaningful and relevant comments that adds conversation to an article or post that you want to comment on. The idea is look for relevant and interesting article and then leave a meaningful feedback to that post. You spark the conversation in the blog post, and you then get links (usually no-follow) in your site.
- Infographic marketing – An Infographic is the latest type of content that hit the web in recent years. It’s also one of the fastest and most popular ways to get quality and relevant links. The idea is to convert an existing text content into a lovely and visually appealing infographic. You probably see one of those in our infographic posts. After you created this infographic you then show an embed html codes for other website owners to embed and use your infographic in their site with credit link pointing back to your site.
- Video marketing – Video marketing is not a new way to gain backlinks. But it’s still one of the most white-hat and safest ways to gain quality links to your site. You can convert a text tutorial into an actual guide on exactly how to do it via a video.
- Social Sharing – In each and every blog or article you published in your site. Don’t forget to share these links in your social media accounts as well as social bookmarking accounts. Social media links are as powerful as other quality links, so make sure you don’t miss it.
Setting up a Search Engine Optimization campaign is a path many business owners are utilizing to generate more targeted traffic to their business websites. However, without careful planning and consideration of the basics and other vital matters, your SEO campaign efforts will not be able to generate the right kind of traffic that will generate profitable results. Just like a farmer nurturing a plant to a very bountiful harvest, performing the basics carefully and following good SEO practices regularly and patiently will eventually bring you towards your goal of profitable online success.
Jomer B. Gregorio is a well-rounded expert when it comes digital marketing. Jomer is also known as a semantic SEO evangelist and practitioner. Check out our Digital Marketing Services today and let us help you in achieving positive and profitable results for your business.