5 Easy Steps to Run a Great SEO Campaign (Like an Expert)
SEO campaigns can be a pretty complicated process. If you want to run a successful and effective campaign to improve your website’s SEO rankings, you’ll need to kick it off the right way – through doing detailed and thorough keyword research.
When you’re looking to launch an SEO campaign, the very first thing you need to do is choose the right keywords to target. It determines whether or not you’ll get more clicks to a landing page or a blog post, but more importantly, targeting the right search terms help to attract the target audience that you’re looking for.
Without understanding the potential of a keyword, you may be wasting a significant amount of time, effort and money investing in one that won’t yield a significant ROI. It’s important that you learn how to conduct proper keyword research to narrow down the best ones for your site.
What is an SEO campaign
An SEO campaign is a planned effort of optimizing a page or website to improve its Google SEO rankings. It’s often a long term project that involves many different components, such as keyword research, web audit, SEO analysis, on-page optimization, link building, and many more.
Any type of brand or business can benefit from a well-executed SEO campaign, whether you’re a solo entrepreneur or a digital marketer for a large multinational company.
With that said, here are 5 tips on how to make the most of your SEO campaign by using the right keywords:
1. Focus on long tail keywords
The internet is a vast ocean of websites. Frankly, it can seem downright impossible to compete with mega-corporations as a small company. Therefore, instead of focusing your efforts on trying to make it in an open ocean, you need to focus on being the king of a small pond first. For this reason, it’s better to look for relevant keywords (with three words or more) with low competition, which is why long tail keywords are so important.
For example, if your brand sells sports shoes, you shouldn’t be focusing on keywords such as “sneakers” or “trainers”. Chances are that you will have to be competing against Nike and Adidas. It’s better to focus on keywords such as “training shoes for flat footers Sacramento” instead, as this will single your brand out compared to your competitors.
It’s a process of pre-qualifying the traffic, which means that those who visit your site from these keywords are more likely to convert and generate revenue for you that way. Which also means, long tail keywords have higher conversion potential for your web visitors turn into leads or paying customers.
2. Optimize your keyword placement strategy
Another thing you have to consider is keyword placement, as this is also an integral part of the success of your SEO campaign. Many people simply throw keywords in random places, thinking that it will have the same effect for their rankings. The truth is that search engine algorithm views and analyzes them based on their placements as well. It’s crucial that you place your keywords in:
- The page title
- URLs
- Meta descriptions
- Headings and sub-headings
This is to ensure that the Google algorithm is able to see the terms clearly when they crawl your site. Aside from earning you brownie points with the algorithm, this will help to make the keywords more noticeable for viewers as well.
Make sure that you place your keywords in logical places that improve the quality of your content; otherwise, it can be marked as keyword stuffing, which can actually harm your rankings significantly. Most blog posts usually have around 0.5% to 2.5% keyword density, so make sure you optimize your content around that limit.
3. Narrow down the right keywords
Now that you know what a good keyword looks like, the next thing you will have to consider is how to go about finding one for your business. There are two ways you can do this:
- An organic search of primary keywords, or
- Using a keyword generator like Keyword Tool.
When you conduct organic research, you will be able to see what the people in the community related to the keywords are talking about. This will give an idea about which type of keywords you should be using to attract more traffic. The issue with this method is that it can be time-consuming and laborious.
Keyword Tool, on the other hand, allows you to see the traffic and engagement of each search term, which can help to cut down the time significantly. However, it may not provide the same understanding of the industry and community as organic research does.
We would say that a combination of the two methods is best to ensure the most success.
4. Find the sweet spot between high search volume and low competition
Keywords aren’t as black and white as it seems. Keywords with tonnes of searches tend to be competitive, and will likely take you a long time to rank against the bigger brands and websites that have ranked for those keywords for a long time. Long tail keywords have much lower competition, but also lower search volumes.
Then, there are those special set of keywords that have relatively high search volumes but yet are not highly competitive. These are the type of opportunities that can be a gold mine for your SEO campaign. They are hard to come by, but with proper keyword research aided by the right type of SEO tool, it’ll be much easier to find them.
Let’s say you run a blog that publishes content about running. Since monetizing blogs require you to maximize traffic to your website, you’ll need to create content that can attract the most amount of clicks. Ideally, you’d want to target high volume keywords that are not as competitive as other keywords (that most likely rank for big names like Nike or Adidas).
To find these type of keyword opportunities, key in “running shoes” into the input field on Keyword Tool:
As you can see from the summary of results, there are tonnes of searches for this keyword but the average keyword competition level is also pretty high. Scroll down to see the list of generated keywords:
Not surprisingly, a lot of the top keywords with a lot of searches are dominated by Nike and Adidas. The keyword competition is also very high at 100 (out of a max of 100, based on Keyword Tool’s metrics). This means that although a lot of people search for these keywords, it’ll be very difficult for you to outrank them.
So, the next best solution is to find a sweet spot between high search volume and low competition. To identify these type of keywords with high search volumes, click on the Filter Results box on the left-hand side of the screen, and key in “50” in the “max” field of Competition, and click Go:
After filtering the results, there are now 141 keywords that have a competition level of 50 and below. And as you can see, the average competition of these less competitive keywords are at 23 (Low). Let’s scroll down to see whether we can find these “sweet spot” keywords:
Voila! Based on this new filtered results, there’s 1 keyword with a high search volume of 60,500 yet with a low competition of 23. Other than that, there are also:
- 1 keyword with more than 10,000 average searches that is moderately competitive.
- 2 keywords with more than 3,000 searches with an extremely low competition level of less than 5.
- 7 keywords with at least 1,000 searches with very low competition.
From this list alone, you can craft several articles that target keywords with high search volumes yet low to medium keyword competition levels.
5. Keep track of your KPIs through a thorough SEO analysis
Lastly, it’s essential that you keep track of the performance of each keyword through Google Analytics to see what you need to adjust. If your KPIs aren’t hitting the mark, you will need to make adjustments to your SEO campaign to ensure that your investments pay off.
For example, if your keywords have high traffic but low conversion, the issue may be the call-to-action (CTA), so you will need to fix it according to what the stats show.
If you’re looking for an SEO keyword research tool, take a look at our tool today! We provide an easy way to research and compare the search traffic of different keywords across multiple platforms. It’s a great SEO tool that makes your keyword research effortless yet incredibly effective.