There are several key elements you need to follow when running a successful SEO campaign. Here are 5 BASIC elements you need to follow each and every time when running a campaign.
- Keyword Research
- Analyse Your Competition
- Website Optimization Strategy
- Build Your Links
- Increase Your Sites “In” Ranking and Traffic
One of the most difficult challenges when promoting your company online once you have your marketing campaigns underway, is to maintain steady growth. Stopping or even slowing your efforts down is one of the most self destructive acts anyone can do.
So here are a FIVE vital things you can do to ensure your site continues to get the growth, ranking and traffic you want each and every month.
Step One: Get out your roadmap
We all have heard it before, but I will say it again. If you don’t know where you are going, how do plan to get there? This is the same rule with running your SEO campaign. You need to know like to back of your hand, where you are at, and where you want to be. Setting goals is important in any business practice, especially when it comes to marketing and sales.
Make sure you keep a detailed record of specific keywords that you want to build your links for. You also want to place your competitors, site changes, articles, web 2.0 property and so on, all on a well organized document or spreadsheet. It can seem overwhelming at times, but is well worth the invested time.
Stay on top of your keyword research and keyword mapping documents. Keyword mapping is the process of selecting the appropriate keywords to target in an SEO campaign. You then assign each of these keywords to a specific landing page on a website. Doing so will show you what keywords you have optimized your website for, as well as which keywords don’t work so you don’t waste time (and money) on unfruitful keywords.
Step Two: Use Analytics to Know Where You’ve Been
Knowing what you’ve done and where your at is half the battle. Unfortanely it’s a battle that many just cant be bothered fighting. The trick is knowing what the right amount of time to spend in analytics is so you don’t spend too much time analyzing, but you also don’t want to just look at the unique visitors and leave either.
To PROPERLY identify new keywords with your analytics data, you typically will need two to three months of keyword data to analyze. During this time you will be able to quickly see what keywords are working and driving more traffic to your site and eliminate those that are not working. Once you have compiled a list of new keyword opportunities, your first step will be to review your SEO campaign and see which of the NEW keywords ARE NOT being targeted in your campaign.
Next, create a ranking report with these new keywords to see where you are at, and what specific pages are raking for those keywords. Once you have evaluated all your pages, you will need to decide which is the best pages to optimize using these new keywords. If you don’t have any pages for these keywords, its ok. You will just need to create new content for these new keywords.
Step Three: Watch Those Page Trends
This is one of the fastest and easiest ways to determine if something is going very well or extremely wrong. Again, you need a good sample of data to do this, around 3-4 months is ideal.
To start investigating, you will need to compare the keywords that are driving traffic on your keyword mapping report, then ask yourself the following questions:
- Is this the page I optimized for those keywords? (Refer to your keyword mapping report).
- Did Google or another search engine decide that another page on my site was more relevant than the one I selected? Often referred to as “Site Cannibalization”, you can check which page Google finds most relevant to your keyword by performing a search query in Google.
Type in site:domain name “keyword”.
By asking these two simple questions you will know if you should either modify the current page(s) or create new content to match those new keywords.
Step Four: Watch Those Keyword Trends
Monitoring the keywords themselves is a great way to see an increase (or decrease) in traffic for a particular keyword that you are targeting.
There are several reasons why you may see a decrease in traffic when using a particular keyword. To find out why, you need to ask yourself some questions such as: Could it be you have experienced a decrease in rankings? If so, what do I need to do to move forward? Could the decrease be out of my control such as being seasonal or industry related?
Internal linking is a great trick to boost raking for a page that is in need of some much needed attention. You can even add a new blogpost about the topic and link back to the page that needs the help. It never helps to go back and run a quick review to see if the page was not optimized properly. Both over and under optimization can result in the decrease of rankings.
To find some easy internal linking opportunities within your site, you can run a quick search query in Yahoo. Just enter in the following:
site: yourdomain.com –link:URL “keyword”
Now if you do this right, it will search your entire domain for that keyword. It will then deliver the pages that contain that keyword without a link back to the landing page associated with the keyword you searched. All you have to do is go to those pages, find that keyword, and add the link. It’s that easy!
Step Five: Find The Performers
Analyzing keywords alongside the conversion piece testing is important but most often overlooked. Once you have defined a conversion method on your site, you can easily track the keywords that are coming to your site, and determine which of those are converting the best. Analyze the keywords that are converting the best and check their positions in the search engines.
Most importantly be patient and know doing these things takes time. We want things to happen overnight, but building lasting domination with highly converting keywords is much like the giant redwoods that grow gradually in time to become the tallest and strongest trees in the world.
