How To Launch an SEO Campaign: 6 Steps to Success

If you want to increase your organic trafficOrganic search traffic (sometimes called natural or unpaid search) is the traffic that's driven to a website because of unpaid placement on a search engine results page. and rankings in the search engine results pages (SERPs), then you’ll need a carefully thought-out SEO campaign to achieve this. Sounds simple, right? Not exactly. SEO is always evolving, which means that what made for a strong campaign a few years ago may not be relevant today. On top of this, SEO needs a consistent approach to bear fruit. You need to commit to a regular content schedule to stand a chance of increasing your rankings, visibility, and organic traffic. In other words, you can’t just post a blog once in a blue moon and expect big changes; you need to produce fresh content regularly and look for ways to keep your existing stuff relevant.

At Click Intelligence, we know a thing or two about running successful SEO campaigns, so we’ve put together this helpful step-by-step guide on everything you need to know to get started with yours.

What Is An SEO Campaign?

So, what is an SEO campaign exactly? It is essentially a plan to help improve a website’s visibility in the SERPs and drive organic traffic. A lot goes into the best SEO campaigns, but they rely on both creative and technical elements to be a success. In essence, your SEO campaign should satisfy your target audience’s search intent.

Building an effective SEO campaign involves:

• Keyword researchKeyword research helps websites unearth the best keywords to drive traffic and visibility. This research is supported by a number of powerful web-based tools, the best of which we’ve listed here.
• Creating new helpful content
• Optimizing existing content
• Growing a quality backlink profile
• Running a technical SEO audit

All of this can lead to improved visibility and bring you an uplift in website visitors, in turn increasing your conversions and paying customers.

6 Steps for SEO Campaign Success

Most SEO campaigns take a fairly systematic approach in their planning stages, as missing out on a step could be disastrous and mean that your efforts fall flat when implemented. Here’s how to plan a campaign that will guarantee you search engine success!

1. Carry Out an SEO Audit

An SEO audit takes a look under the bonnet of your website for any technical problems that might be holding it back from ranking in the SERPs. It’s important to carry out an audit as a first step because resolving any issues it throws up will ensure your campaign has maximum effect. Making sure that there are no technical gremlins lurking behind the scenes means Google will have the best chance of crawling and indexing your pages, which is essential if you want to appear in the SERPs.

As a rule of thumb, a technical SEO audit should look at:

• Site structure, which includes your internal linking and URL structure
• Site speed
• Mobile-friendliness
• Crawling and indexing issues
• KeywordKeywords are the words and phrases that potential customers might search for to find your business. optimization
• The length and quality of your content
• Backlink profile
• Your current rankings

If your audit throws up any issues, it’s important to address these before continuing with your SEO campaign. For example, broken linksHyperlinks, also known as links, are the connection points on a webpage that take you to other webpages. and duplicate pages are common issues, but they are important to fix because they can confuse search engines. You can do this by setting up a redirect for the links or deleting or marking your repeated pages with a noindexThe noindex meta tag tells search engines not to index the page and show it in search results. tag, which indicates to Google that you don’t want this page to be indexed.

2. Make On-Page Changes

For your SEO campaign to have full effect, you need to make sure your current website and its content are fully optimized, and this will involve making some tweaks here and there. Some of the most important on-page SEO areas to look at include:

• Title Tags

Title tags are HTML elements. Essentially, they are the name of your web page. It is displayed as the blue clickable hyperlink in search results. It is important that your title tags are relevant to the page they are linking to and that they contain keywords.

• Meta descriptions

A well-written meta descriptionWebsite meta descriptions are used to inform web users on search engines about the content of webpages. can persuade a user to click on your link in the SERPs. It should give them an idea of what to expect from a page, and it’s good practice to include a keyword and not exceed 155 characters (including spaces).

• Header tags

Making sure your content contains useful header tags is essential. Ensure your content is broken up by H1, H2, H3, and H4, for example, and that they involve a keyword. They help make the content easy for users and search engines to read.

• URLs

Ideally, your URLs should follow a consistent naming structure and include keywords.

• Content

Where it makes sense to do so, target keywords should be included naturally throughout your website content, whether that’s landing pages or blog posts. Don’t go overboard, though, as keyword stuffingKeyword stuffing is a technique that attempts to give pages higher rankings in search engine result pages by inserting the same keywords over and over again. is a big no-no for Google.

• Images

Quality images with detailed alt text containing important keywords are great for SEO.

3. Conduct Keyword Research

Keyword research is an important part of any SEO campaign, so it’s vital that you get this bit right. It will help you determine what search terms your target audience is using and what the intent is behind them. It can also help you pinpoint what keywords you should be aiming to rank for and how to get ahead of your competitors.

Keyword research tools like Semrush can help you build out a content strategy that gets you noticed in the SERPs and translates into sales for your brand. Don’t forget to look at key metrics like keyword difficulty and search volume to see where you should focus your efforts.

4. Target ‘Quick-Win’ Keywords To Start With

Your keyword research will have given you a firm idea of where you currently stand in the rankings. This is how you can identify some quick wins where you might be able to see a quick uplift. For this SEO campaign example, there might be some keywords where you are ranking highly for between spots 4 and 30 but may not be high enough to get any benefits from this. All it takes is some simple optimization tweaks to see results:

• Expand on thin content
• Enhance content with images and videos
• Make sure keyword placement is natural
• Build up more quality backlinks to the relevant pages
• Double-check page loading speeds

5. Create and Publish High-Quality Helpful Content

What about the other keywords you’ve identified through your research? Well, you’ll need to think about what sort of content to create that works with these. Set up a consistent and regular content schedule for a range of informative and helpful content that brings value to the audience. This could be a mix of long-form blog posts, infographics, and videos.

Don’t forget to make sure your content fulfills Google’s E-E-A-T criteria and demonstrates experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness.

6. Concentrate On Your Backlink Profile

High-quality backlinks to your pages signal to Google that your content can be trusted and brings value to the people who read it. All of this helps to improve your rankings. If you want to have SEO campaign success, you can’t afford to skip link buildingLink building is a process of acquiring links pointing to your website. These links are obtained by creating content, participating in social media or commenting on other blogs.. Relationship-based outreach is an excellent way to build quality links, but other types of link building, such as guest posting, curated links, link insertions, and resource link building, are fantastic methods that can see you earn some valuable link juice and climb the SERPs.

SEO Success Awaits You

As you can see, a well-planned and executed campaign can make a huge difference in the SERPs. Starting off with the basics, like a technical audit and thorough keyword research, is vital to setting you up for success. You don’t have to go it alone though! Our SEO management service is here for you. Our team’s extensive SEO knowledge and experience can help shape a meaningful campaign that brings you the results you’ve always dreamed of!