SEO campaign management refers to all the processes and activities involved in planning and implementing a search engine optimization campaign. Proper campaign management can mean the difference between the success or failure of your search engine optimization efforts, so you must have the right strategy and plan in place.
How to plan for a successful search engine optimization campaign
#1 set concise goals
There is more to search engine optimization than ranking on search engine results pages, bounce rates, and visitor engagement. These metrics should come second to your primary campaign objectives. You should understand and define your business and marketing goals first, then let them define your search engine optimization goals.
People who set clear goals are 20% more likely to achieve them than those who do not. So this is something you should take seriously.
if you’re having trouble with this, here are a few considerations to guide you.
Who do you intend to reach?
Your response to this question will determine your target market segment and help you craft accurate buyer personas
Why do you want your target market to visit your website?
Do you want to make sales? Generate leads? Or do something else? define the business goal you want your SEO campaign to help you achieve. Don’t just focus on bounce rate, site traffic, and engagement levels, as these metrics may not improve your bottom line.
How will you evaluate your success?
Measuring progress is crucial to the success of your campaign because it shows you what's working and what isn't. Some of the best metrics to consider are conversion rate, click-through rate, and organic visibility or market share.
Note: Analytics can increase the return on investment for your efforts by up to 20%. It is crucial that you have a proper evaluation system in place, as it will help you achieve better results
#2 Have a proper SEO campaign workflow
A comprehensive workflow will help you ensure you implement all the necessary steps to ensure everything is implemented with consistency.
Most SEO campaigns will involve the following steps ( note while you can use this for your own campaign, you should modify and rearrange it to suit your needs).
- Find keywords
- Check your website’s current search performance
- Identify onsite problems that might affect your SEO and remedy them
- Design landing pages
- Remove dysfunctional links
- Implement an effective internal link strategy
- Monitor search engine rankings
- Fix redirects.
- Check for link errors
- Find opportunities for guest publishing.
Additional tips for your workflow
Track your progress
Your workflow should incorporate regular audits so you can track how everything is going. SEO is a continuous process that requires constant refinement and improvement. Tracking your progress will make your workflow more effective
Create compelling content
Search engine optimization is nothing without compelling content visuals. Over 50% of page views get less than 15 seconds of attention from visitors, which means they likely fail at their intended purpose. You don’t want that for your website, do you?
Start by getting your readers’ attention through attractive design. This should include images, typography, infographics, and so on. Next, make sure your content provides value and is easy to read. The visuals will grab your visitor's attention, and the content will keep them engaged. That way, your pages will avoid high bounce rates and rank higher in search engine results.
Delegate tasks
Set your campaign up for the best possible results by using your team member's unique skills and strengths. You’ll need to identify and delegate the most capable individuals for each task, like technical analysis, on-page optimization, user experience design, and SEO writing. Make these tasks clear and ensure that your team collaborates through proper scheduling and project management.
Task management tools are great for this kind of work. if your team wastes valuable time organizing handwritten notes, searching through emails, and figuring out what tasks to prioritize, these systems will help you work faster and with more efficiency. You’ll have the ability to prioritize duties, set deadlines, monitor time spent on specific tasks. You’ll also get to monitor team performance. Here are a few examples to consider
Basecamp
basecamp lets you monitor and manage multiple projects at the same time. The tool is renowned for making teams more organized and productive.
Notable features
- The tool has an activity view that shows managers everything related to project tasks.
- You can create to-do lists, choose assignees, and set deadlines for tasks.
- You can add events with their respective dates and times.
Asana
Asana is a well-established project management tool that’s popular with remote teams. It provides multiple task views, including a board view, list view, and timeline view.
Notable features
- Prioritizing tasks and deadlines.
- View project status in real-time.
- Evaluate workload on each team member.
Trello
Trello is a free, convenient, and highly visual task management tool with over 10 million users around the world.
notable features.
- You can set notifications and alerts for task activities.
- You can set due dates for tasks and add comments to task cards
- Track your progress.
#3 Consider your website’s technical specifications
If this is your first SEO campaign, and you already have a website, you will need to determine whether it’s good enough to provide satisfactory results in organic search.
For example, if your website loads slowly or isn't optimized for mobile devices, it likely won't win a good ranking. There's a simple reason for this. Over the years, search engines like Google have emphasized the need for websites to offer a good user experience. So, the ones that do are rewarded with higher rankings.
How do you tell your website is technically okay?
There are several tools ( both free and paid) that you can use to evaluate your website’s technical health. Let's discuss a few of them here.
Google's mobile-friendliness test
mobile-friendliness is one of the most important indicators you need to check before launching an SEO campaign. It's important because google (and other search engines) prioritizes mobile-optimized websites over those that aren’t.
If you aren't sure whether your website is mobile-friendly. Google's mobile-friendly test will check it for you. All you have to do is enter the URL into the tool, and it will generate a screenshot of how the page looks on a mobile device, along with a list of any mobile usability issues it may find.
note: you’ll need a professional to fix most mobile responsiveness errors. Some corrections, however, like text that’s too small to read are easy to fix if your website has a user-friendly content management system that supports front-end editing.
Broken link check
Dysfunctional links can reduce your site’s organic performance and frustrate your users. And, unfortunately, these effects can haunt your website long after they’ve been fixed. Nearly 90% of online shoppers say they would not go back to a website after finding broken links.
Tools like brokenlinkcheck.com will help you ensure that all your links are working as they should before you launch your SEO campaign.
Google’s page speed insights
Google page speed insights evaluate website performance. The tool will give your website an overall score out of 100 based on several performance optimization benchmarks like accessibility, performance, progressive web applications, load time, and many others. The results also come with recommendations from Google on how to improve your performance.
Track your campaigns
Whether you’re hiring an agency or freelancer, you need to track your optimization campaigns. It will help you ensure everything is going according to plan.
The google analytics suite is one of the best platforms for SEO campaign monitoring. It offers a broad variety of SEO tools at no cost that will help you optimize your website.
Google analytics
Google Analytics is a great tracking tool for everything that happens after someone has visited a page on your website.
It provides useful information like how much time someone spent on your pages, your bounce rate, exit rate, and much more.
We will not show you how to set up an Analytics account in this article, but it is not hard to do. Besides, google offers a free in-depth course on analytics. It will take you through everything you need to know.
Google search console
google search console is another highly effective tool for monitoring your organic performance. It lets you monitor your website's search performance and traffic, identify usability problems and optimize for specific keywords. The platform tracks SEO performance indicators like which keywords, queries, and specific pages are driving the most traffic to your website.
Google has a course on how to use the Search console as well, so we won’t cover that here. That said, let's have a look at some of the metrics you should measure.
Top pages
this attribute will help you sort your pages according to the number of impressions and clicks they've received. It helps you prioritize which pages need attention when you're doing user experience optimization.
Top queries
This section will help you find the most popular search terms funneling visitors into your website. This metric will help you identify and optimize for any keywords that you may have overlooked.
#5 Consult a professional SEO manager
Like most digital marketing strategies, SEO can be a complex undertaking. Sometimes, you may need professional help to set up and manage your campaign. You can do this by hiring an in-house professional, or consulting with a professional agency.
Hurekatek has a dedicated team of SEO professionals ready to help you out. If you book a free consulting call with us, we’ll go over your goals, timeframes, analytics, and help you set up your campaign for the best possible results.
